I’m kind of glad that the story of the Saddam capture drowned out the story of the late Senator Strom Thurmond’s illegitimate half-black daughter and kept it from becoming the latest media circus (as if the daughter of the late senator was the first progeny ever to be gotten between a white man and a black woman; and, boy, does she look like him). It’s estimated that 85% of black Americans have some white heritage, whether they look like me or look like the Tennessee politicians Harold Fords (both Senior and Junior). There are indeed millions of people just like Thurmond’s putative daughter; some who identify themselves as black and others who don’t, depending on how black they look. Those of you white people who have untraceable curly hair or full lips, you may have your answer.
My maternal grandmother looks like a white woman: white skin, straight brown (gray) hair, gray-blue eyes, thin lips. Both of her parents were of black and white (and Indian) heritage. Wonder how that happened? /sarcasm
Some of the looks we get when explaining our relationship to each other are comical. You can see the questions in the eyes: adopted or related by marriage? No, by blood. Those Kenyan Luo genes of mine from the other side are just, well, dominant.
It strains common sense for people to look at black Americans like Colin Powell or Julian Bond and to not assume that they have some white heritage. What? Do you think that some black people just whitened up over the three hundred or so years that persons of black African heritage have been in the western hemisphere?
This fact is something that most black Americans just shrug this off as something that is, rather than something for which a great to-do is made (the Jefferson-Hemings yawner being an exception). Hot news flash: men and women will have sex and the women will get pregnant, cultural, social and political mores be damned.
This country is a melting pot, but only partially. Most of the pot melted into black America.
