Black and British: A Forgotten History
#kind of perpetually surprised that this is surprising #generations and genetics happen? #smaller phenotype populations are mixed into the larger ones #this doesn’t mean they magically disappeared #or were never there
I don’t know about the British perspective, but coming to it as a white USian raised in Southern culture, I think at least some of the reason this isn’t obvious to a lot of people is that we do have that history of blood quantum, of tracking whether someone was one-eighth or one-sixteenth black and refusing them civil rights, of basically forcing the black community to intermarry among themselves, so that they *didn’t* mix out and disappear this way. (Of course, there were also a lot more black folks in USia than there ever were in Britain, I’m not saying that’s the only reason. Just, I think that is a part of the perspective I’m personally coming from. *thinking out loud*)
As a white USian raised in *Northern* culture, I’m not surprised by the intermarriage thing, but I *am* surprised by this clip nonetheless. The surprising thing is that they portray *positively* this guy having an Emotional Connection to His Ancestral Culture because of someone from *five generations back*.
Once you get to smaller fractions than one-quarter or so, having Emotional Connections like that stops being Celebrating Your Heritage and starts being Failing to Stay in Your Lane. The “white person who makes a big deal out of being 1/32 Cherokee” is a *negative* archetype.
As it happens, I too have a black former-slave great-great-great-grandfather (and likewise no black ancestry more recent than that). I don’t have an Emotional Connection about this, but…like, you have no reason to believe me when I say that, because I would say it regardless of whether it were true. You bet your ass I wouldn’t dare openly claim a Connection: it would be seen as cheating, as trying to claim the advantages of being black while skipping out on the disadvantages.
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#reply via reblog #racism cw? #our roads may be golden or broken or lost
Brinens and Things 
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