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Black and British: A Forgotten History 

Francis Barber’s descendant Cedric Barber [x] [x]

#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.

That’s interesting; maybe I’ve been primed by the above, but I would not view you having an Emotional Connection to your former-slave ancestor …

… depending on the form of the connection, of course. It would be weird if you literally identified as nonwhite (I think this is the point of the “1/32 Cherokee” thing?)

Well, I *am* Schrodinger’s White†, but that’s not from the one-drop black, it’s from the one-half Ashkenazi.

(But even then I try to avoid doing anything that even *suggests* claiming non-white-ness, partly because I suspect I would lose the ensuing argument over whether I deserve the privileges (so to speak) of that rank (I pretty much always collapse to white, since I’m pretty much always observed by people for whom that’s the lower-status answer), partly because–as someone who has literally never experienced anti-Semitism–playing the Jew card feels dishonest and distasteful, and partly because I think encouraging the idea of Judaism as innate is counterproductive (I want religion exit rights, mostly on general principles but with a side of “if I ever somehow *do* fall into the hands of people who think Judaism is a disease, I want them to think it’s a *curable* disease so I can let them cure me and survive”).)

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“Oh, but it’s a different *form* of connection” reads to me as an excuse from someone who *was* trying for a best-of-two-worlds power-grab and is backpedalling now that they’ve realised they aren’t going to get away with it. Mind you, I *am* fairly paranoid and *do* have a tendency to see power struggles where they may or may not actually exist.

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†When I am observed, the waveform collapses into whichever answer is lower-status by the observer’s standards.

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#*knocks on wood* #reply via reblog #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #racism cw? #anti-semitism cw? #Judaism #inb4 someone blames my hierarchical thinking on my germophobia #(also tbh I don’t *like* talking about Judaism pretty much at all) #(even mentioning it can feel like encouraging people to see it as a Big Deal) #(when really I want it to be at most a Little Deal)