Actually, I didn’t say I was half black. I said “for simplicity, let’s just say my mom’s black and my dad’s white.” My mom’s half black as her father was white (it’s actually more complex than that, but this is not a thread about genealogy), but she identifies as black. I’m 1/4 black; it’s just easier to consider myself biracial going by how my parents identify. So, I have to say, again, you’re really not correct in this. I don’t mean to debate this, admittedly, silly point, but I think it’s important to be accurate here because of what I contend are false suppositions.
Onomatopoeia beat me to the punch. Darn slow typing!
To get at the point the two of us are making, why should skin and hair “give” anything away? Shouldn’t all features be rated the same? Obama’s got curly hair and brown skin. OK. But he’s got a long face and an aquiline nose–typical Euro features. Also, his skin is more “tan”, as a famous head of state made note of, than black. So if we’re just going just on the number of features, he’s evenly split. In fact, one could make the case that he’s more Euro than African.
That we place more emphasis on skin and hair is not rational. Why do we do this then? Because it’s a rare thing to find a black person with naturally straight hair, but very common to find one with curly/kinky hair. And whiteness, by definition, requires pale skin. These features are also the easiest to see. But they are no more significant than eye shape, cranium shape, or lip size. It’s all an illusion, you see.
In an alternate universe, there are people arguing about how white Obama looks and how the racists keep calling him “cracker” and “honky”. And they would be just as correct and incorrect as we are here.
Should they? I don’t know. Are they? They’re the most obvious features of someone. You might not be able to identify someone’s facial features from a long distance, but the hair and skin color are the most visible. Obama has a pretty even mixture of black and European facial features, but his hair is very “black” looking.
Vin Diesel, for instance, is biracial. But because he is bald, his ancestry is much more ambiguous. I don’t think Diesel looks distinctively black or white. But if he had the typical tight, kinky black hair of Africans, I would definitely think of Vin Diesel as “black.”
I’ll go a little further and clearly summarize what my link says: The way social status shapes our racial identity is that, people of higher social status are more likely to be perceived as white and those of lower social status are more likely to be perceived as black. Racial categorization is simply an illogical, pernicious and bizarrely fluid thing. So, not only does one drop of black blood seem to “contaminate,” but in special cases one drop of white blood seems to “purify.”
To call Obama half-white, I think is “white-washing him;” if Obama was just some guy walking down the street (not POTUSA) he would universally be perceived as just another black guy.
That’s just how most multi-racial blacks are perceived in America.
So it’s not a “one drop rule” but a “one curl rule”. That makes just as much sense as the “one drop rule”, but whatever floats your boat.
(And I disagree that Obama’s hair is “very” anything. His hair is pretty much like mine. My hair happens to be similar to an Ashkenazi woman I know, as well as her two daughters. Black folks do not hold a monopoly on kinky hair.)
I’m not going to deny that “racial” characteristics can be fluid and vary widely among populations. I always thought, for instance, that Karl Marx looked black, even though he wasn’t, and a lot of people seem to feel that way. Shel Silverstein is another who looked very black to me.
But what I’m talking about is the idea that “white America” considers someone to be black even if they only have a tiny proportion of black ancestry. I don’t think it’s true. I think it is true that if someone is biracial and has noticeable non-European features, he or she might be considered non-white. But not necessarily black specifically, which is, I take it, your position.
If someone had only one black great-grandparent, and looked for all intents and purposes European, you really think America would consider that person to be black?
This guy, for instance. Maybe in his day, he would have been considered black. But today, if a guy who looked like that was walking down the street, you really think people would think of him as black?
Even back in the slave days, you didn’t have to have just a teeny weeny bit of “blackness” to be black. The cut-off, if I’m not mistaken, was 1/16th. So even back then, there was an “escape hatch”.
Do I think an average American would view a white-looking person with recent African descent as being anything other than white? Well, it depends. If this person self-identified as black, spoke with a “blaccent”, was married to a black person, and had visibly black children, then I would think those things would overshadow their “whiteness”. Sure do! And if this person did not do those things, then they probably would be given a “white” card. So Mariah Carey was white when she was with Tommy Motolla, but became black when she divorced him and started doing hip hop. 
Actually, I’ve got great examples of this from my own family, on my dad’s side. One of his sisters was married to a white guy and had a very “white-looking” daughter. Blonde-with-blue-eyes white girl, I’m talking about. Perhaps it’s because her father was never in her life and she and my aunt lived around black people explains why she turned out “black”, socially. Married a black guy, has visibly black children, etc. She still looks like your average white girl, but in my eyes, she’s black.
Another sister married a white guy as well. They had a ton of boys and they also came out looking very “white.” Perhaps it’s because their father was very present in their lives and they were a military family, always traveling and trying to fit in, but they all turned out “white”, socially. All dated and married white women, have visibly white children, dress and speak in “white” ways, etc. I can see parts of my father’s visage in all of them, but in my eyes, they’re white.
This was a few years ago, but when one of my cousins joined a fraternity and his “brothers” found out about his background, he was mysteriously kicked out of the club. Despite his looks. Hmm hmm. How typical his experience is, I know not. But that, my friend, is the one-drop rule being brutally applied. Last time I checked, we were not in Jim Crow or slavery times.
So I don’t know the answer to your question, Argent, except to say the very unsatisfying “It depends”.
All that said, the point you seem to be making seems irrelevant. We aren’t talking about people passing as white. We’re talking about biracial people, folks who are indeed “half-white” but treated as “black.” I agree that we allow white-looking people to pass as white nowadays (“white-looking” being a social construction that can shift quite easily), but I also believe that we still follow the one-drop rule. The rule has not been abolished; it is merely not as strictly applied. I think your “one curl rule” speaks to this.
The only point I’ve been arguing in this thread is that Susanann’s exclamation about Obama’s “half-whiteness” is stupid, since we’re talking about suspected racists, and the last time I checked, racists do not care or even recognize “half-whiteness”. They only see black. And most Americans are really the same way, except with less hatred. If we did not know Obama’s mother was white, we would not be having this discussion even though he could have the same genetic make-up.