Being mixed myself I basically understand where Halle is coming from. I mean nobody thinks that baby is white. I understand where personal identification comes in, I identify as mixed, but you can’t just will your ancestry away*-- I mean, I’m chinese, black, and white, but it’d be disingenous to present myself as a chinese male because that’s just not how race works socially.
I guess it’s also kind of interesting because here in the USA, historically you had to prove that you WERE indian. You had to be practically full blooded, as if it was an exclusive club-- yet schizophrenically it was basically impossible to prove that you WEREN’T black. Shit’s whack yo.
What I mean by that is you can’t just say you’re X race simply because you want to be.
They also have a box for veterans status. When you are going for government contracts priority is often given to minority or veteran owned businesses, and diversity points can help you as well. This has a rather large impact on hiring policies. Then once you are inside the company you may or may not also get points for diversity, so it looks better if you stack the top with women and African Americans.
We have a diversity department, it was created specifically to given an AA female a senior VP job, which raised the amount of minority VP’s we had to help us compete. All the department does is pretty much yell at the least diverse departments, and give bonus points which convert into a financial incentive for any director who stacks the staff with minorities, and then talk when we go up for contracts about how wonderful and diverse we are.
It also means when you go to sack someone because a project/budget shrunk, you need to pay foremost attention to how it will impact the makeup of your staff.
The boxes are stupid, but if you get a chance to claim any sort of minority or protected class do it. It’s a massive feather in your bosses cap to hire you and depending where you work you’ll shoot to the front of the line.
My old DOD contracting job won a ton of bids because we were both minority and veteran owned.
Lmao, Chiblite. That sounds like a fkkkn pokemon, get out of here with that, lol.
edit: I think the only real ‘‘racial’’ peeve I have is white guys that try to represent themselves as irish or scottish or something even though they’ve never been to the country and nobody in that country even knows they exist. It just seems so fucking hollow. I’m not trying to take away your ancestry*, but if you’re honestly trying to tell me you identify as Irish I’m just going to roll my eyes.
*even then though, considering the way humans tends to move around, maps get redrawn, etc it’s extremely unlike anyone (Especially in the south of the us) is 100% anything. You just can’t tell. You great grandfather married who from what village, who moved there from where, etc etc. I mean, even the Queen of England is ancestrally German. It’s just how shit happens.
You and Thurst need to stop being retarded. Classifying your child as a particular race based on the ONE DROP RULE, a rule that was used to deny civil liberties to blacks for YEARS, is incredibly racist. It’s got nothing to do with white people being up in arms. Stop being fucking stupid.
the one drop rule isn’t a “label” hence why i was confused, but whatever. and “completely black” is a meaningless expression and not relevant to what halle said at all. on to your question, if some black people were bitching about some white chick (who was estranged from her allegedly racist black baby’s daddy) feeling that her kid “was white, but that it was ultimately up to the kid to decide how she would identify” then yeah i would say black people need to get over themselves since at the end of the day, it’s none of their fucking business and there’s nothing wrong with a parent having a neutral opinion on their child.
I find it funny that most blck people here feel that Black and biracial (half black) people are viewed the same way. You all know thats not true. Secondly, whether a mixed person identifies with being black or not has absolutely no bearing on how they’ll be treated by the general public because people treat you based on how you look and not what you are.
99% of black people can tell if someones biracial or not so how can someone be black and biracial at the same time?
I think most people mixed with black will tell you that they’re treated like a black. The only variation has been with black people, who have coincidentally given me the most shit during my life. Never mind me trying to explain to them that whities don’t give me high fives just for having straightísh hair. I know who my people are, it’s just an island in the middle of the ocean with me, tiger woods, and hines ward. Sometimes Keanu Reeves comes by.
I don’ agree with the “One Drop Rule”, but I do acknowledge that people still use it even when they’ve never even heard of the term. Some people are “programed” that way.
But the point was why would this group of people be offended when a person said, in an hypothetical manner, that if she had to choose she would classify her child to be Black because she knows that other people who would see her child will assume that she is indeed Black in their opinion. The rule implies it already. She’s just going against her own grain, and not theirs.
Maybe she should have said, “fuck you! my child is mine and that’s all that matters regardless of her racial background, and what people might perceive her to be”. Maybe she should have, but she didn’t. Maybe she’s oppressed. We don’t know for sure.
Now people are ripping her for the comment? An innocent comment about a child that you or anyone else on this forum is not even related to?! Those “white people” are the one’s making this more than it is. Maybe they see her as white since what she did in that movie she got a Grammy for. When i first saw her in Boomerang as a kid, I thought she was an Island girl… Meh.
If that’s “being fucking stupid” then I apologize for you being mislead into thinking that I actually agreed with that bullshit “One Drop Rule”. I don’t defend the rule. I defend her saying what she said. I made that post about my father’s side of the family as an example and how it affected my father and his siblings growing up. My point was that stupidity and ignorance like that will always be around. It’s no different than all the people (similar to Mel Gibson) who would say, “I support gay marriage” but since they’re rich they wont say what they really feel about the subject unless they can be that person who does not give a fuck about what other people feel about their feelings/opinions/beliefs. Like a fucking double standard.
Even if you’re right about something, that still doesn’t guarantee that it will change a person’s perception of “what is” and “what isn’t”.