Halle, No One Believes In The One Drop Rule . . .

Anyone who knows how to add, knows that something, plus something else, doesn't equal something or something else, it equals something and something else . . .  But when it comes to African ancestry, math, as well as reason, goes awry.  Racial designations, not only made a whole African out of 1/32 of one, it also claimed that an African can’t produce a human being since, 3/5 of a person, can never reproduce with enough whole people, to produce a whole person . . .   A ball of confusion, used to perpetrate the idea  that, African blood is a contaminant.

What Halle Berry was probably trying to say is that race is a significant factor in the life of a person of African descent, no matter the degree of black or white.  From that she wants us to conclude that, because she shares this experience with her daughter, it is in the best interest of her daughter, to remain in her custody.  Which is not necessarily the case.

The most important thing for a child, who is of African descent, is to be raised by someone who values them, and who appreciates who they are.  When a parent highly values their child, the child adopts that point of view, so when the world devalues them, they know that the trouble is with the world, and not with them.

Barack Obama’s mother must have done something right.  She raised two children of color, both of whom have significant professional accomplishments, have intact marriages, and are socially well connected, and she was white.  An Oprah show profiled a white woman who had three sons of her own, and adopted  two sons, a *Diasporan, and an Asian, home schooled all of them, and all of them tested off the charts, gaining admission to every Ivy League college they applied to.

Nevertheless, bi-racial children, raised by a white parent, experience a uniquely intense exclusion because, their parent can't share their status with them.  And depending on the child’s appearance, the child can actually diminish their parent's status.  This is a hard and painful pill to swallow; and it takes a sympathetic, and intelligent parent, to guide their child through. 

One man described he angst, when his son said, “dad, I really do believe that I am white.”  Halle describes her racial identity talk from her mother, it involved facing a mirror and being asked, “what do you see when you look in the mirror? You see what everyone else sees. They don’t know who your mother is, and they aren’t going to care.”  Similarly, a brown-skinned woman, whose child appeared white, allowed him to ignore her, while talking with his white friends, during a visit with his father, who is white; but she put him on notice that it would be the last time he would get away with disowning her  . . .


The trauma of racism makes It easy for a person of African descent to confuse their attitude about their race, with their desire to escape abuse. Consequently, a Diasporan may claim they want to be white, when what they really want is respect, fairness, appreciation, inclusion . . .

The comments from Halle’s camp infer that Gabriel Aubry can’t meet this challenge because he denigrates people of African descent, he purportedly called her the n-word, and he insists that their daughter is white.  If true, this could be a problem, because it could signal the child that her father rejects part of who she is.  However, a denying white parent is no more damaging than a hysterical bi-racial parent, claiming racial identity is defined in one drop . . .  Now how confusing is that.

While Halle’s mother described the real race test in America, namely, you will be to people what they see; she left out a significant part of it, namely, what race means to the observer.  Not everyone devalues African ancestry.  She also left out what the subject makes of it, namely, if you have a strong sense of who you are, like Barack Obama, Michael Jordan, Beyonce Knowles, Benjamin Carson,  Oprah, George Washington Carver — you can be yourself, so hard, and so steady, that the reality of who you are, overwhelms the lie . . .

*Diasporan:  A descendant of a survivor of the African Diaspora