And it’s not like the Spanish and Italian languages are related, or anything like that.
At various times, Churchhill has claimed to be 1/8th Creek, 1/16th Cherokee, and 1/16th Creek and Cherokee. And his university’s Research Misconduct Committee didn’t deem the claim that he used his ancestry to bolster acceptance of his work “unworthy of investigation”, merely that it was outside the scope of the investigation, which was about research misconduct, but does acknowledge that he received his tenure and promotion to full professor “apparently without going through normal review processes”.
There was a joke on, I think, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, about someone being the person to discover that Mariah Carey was black. At the time, I remember thinking, “wait, there are people who don’t know that?”
(White as white can be, here, FTR)
There wasn’t any “outing” to speak of, but my first husband’s family always kind of assumed there was some black ancestry in his dad’s side of the family based on some prominent features. When his grandmother died, it came out that she had some black ancestry and hid it. It’s interesting to note the difference in attitude between her generation and my ex’s: for her it was something to be ashamed of and hide, for him it was a case of “Really? Cool.”
I’m sorry, but how could he possibly be called “black”?
I think you would be hard-pressed to find any African-Americans these days who don’t have ANY white ancestry at all, at all, especially ones of long-standing American ancestry. There’s been an awful lot of blending from the very beginning. He may be half white, but he is also half black, and since one parent is African and one parent is American, then I don’t see any problem with him calling himself African-American. 
Pretty much by definition.
Yes. On a smilar note, I remember reading somewhere that it was astonishing how much the US population of Native Americans increased immediately after the release of Dances with Wolves. It was suddenly cool for your average American to claim Indian ancestry, whether real or imagined. A generation or so earlier, and few would be flaunting it.
My parents didn’t tell me that my dad is 1/16 Cherokee until I was 28 and about to get married. My response was, “Hey, cool!”
How would you call him white?
Something like what Robardin was asking, at least about passing in one direction, was the activist in the 60s who chemically darkened his skin so he could move in black circles. He wrote a book for whites telling about the experience. Sorry I can’t think of either name.
Black like Me was the book.
It’s funny. I grew up in northern New Jersey, primarily during the sixties and early seventies. In those days in my small town, having Native American ancestry was a real attention grabber in a very positive way - it was exotic (it didn’t hurt that the family of kids best known for this were exceptionally attractive kids). I was very surprised when, at some point in my adult years, I realized that in some parts of the country this was considered a negative.
Similar event in my own family, that I’ve posted here before: while researching one branch of the family tree, I found an 1816 marriage certificate listing one of my great x many grandmothers as “mulatto.” My grandmother was appalled: turns out that she really didn’t want to know quite that much about her father’s side of the family! It was especially funny to me and my brother, because Grandmother had spent our entire lifetimes sniffing at (denigrating?) our obvious black ancestry, which must have come from our father’s side of the family! (And it did, by way of a Seminole grandmother.) The rest of the family is just intrigued by the how and why of a second-generation German-American marrying a half black woman in south Georgia back then.
What sort of “obvious black ancestry” did you see? It would be strange for someone who had only one African ancestor 200 years ago (that’s almost 10 generations) to show any “obvious” evidence of that ancestry. As noted in another thread, it’s quite possible that you would not have inherited a single gene from an ancestor that far back in time.
I believe she was making the highly asinine argument that it’s wrong to consider Obama African-American/Black considering his mother is the whitest white who ever whited.
Moderator Note
MeanOldLady, if you want to take Annie to task for the statement do it in another thread, either in GD or the Pit. Let’s not sidetrack this thread.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
My bad.
So anyway, the Estevez/Sheen family hid their Hispanicness for a while, in case anyone’s been living under a rock and didn’t know that. I’m pretty sure they’re completely white though, but the name Estevez made people nervous.
Martin’s parents were a Spanish father, Irish mother, both first generation Americans.
My Dad has passed for white his entire life, as did his mother. It was only a couple of years ago when his sister looked up their ancestry that it turned out that not only was his mother half-African (I mean black African-African, too) and half-Indian (or possibly Bangladeshi, due to boundary changes - her father was a ‘Lascar’) but he’d always known that.
His mother somehow passed as white despite not being white at all; being born in the last decade of the nineteenth century in London, where there’s always been some mixing but not as much then as now, perhaps people just didn’t know what to look for. I only saw her when I was very young and she was extremely old, fat and ill, and the only race I saw in her was Walrus.
Since the Aunt’s revelation it’s amused me that under the one-drop rule in some regions of the US I would have counted as black.
(I think my Dad’s own ‘passing’ counts for the OP. Not that he was the last, but, y’know, interesting related family anecdote).
That’s hardly an American thing. It’s equally true of black Africans in Africa – it’s not like there’s a river Styx separating North Africa from the rest of the continent.