Passing as white (transracial debate). when do you become white?

[quencher]

As the title states, when do you become white? Or when are you considered white?
By default, anyone with black heritage is considered black. If you look more white than black, do you have to state it every time to make people know you are black. In order to stop people claiming you are passing as white?
How come, it's not ok for black people with black heritage to be white (mixed/biracial).
When do people draw the line that separate black from white and the person becomes white?
Why is it always that the person needs to accepts their black heritage and by not doing so, they are denying their blackness. But it's also, accepted and believed that you are not white if you have any percentage of black?

Funny how Barack Obama was never called as mixed race. He was always black. One of Michelle's ancestor was white. Is she more black than Barack or are they on the same level of blackness?
What would that mean for their children?

I find it disturbing when people claim that black people pass as white. No they don't! 99% of the time they are white too. Why can't they claim their white side? Why should they deny that part of their heritage to appease racist?
Why should it be one sided?
Vin diesel claims to be ambiguous. He uses more of his white side than black (in the beginning of his career to be employed).
The case of wenworth miller. I remember reading it and being fascinated years ago.
Miller said in 2003 that his father is black and his mother is white.[5] His father is of African-American, Jamaican, German, and English ancestry; so why black out of all the races mentioned?
his mother is of Russian, French, Dutch, Syrian, and Lebanese ancestry.[6][7][8]
What makes the mum white and not Asian/Arab?

Please somebody answer at list one of these mind numbing questions.

My great grandmother and her siblings were clearly and visibly mixed race, and that was the last generation where it was straightforward. Going purely on skin tone you can see the heritage in some of my generation of the family who are olive skinned and dark eyed while others are fair haired, blue eyed. I'm one of the fair haired group, but the bone structure is unusual for white European and shows the heritage if you know what you're looking for. But anyone stopped in the street and asked would say without hesitation all of us were white.

Under the one drop law I'm black, but in physical appearance am white British born to white British parents, and it would seem a bit pretentious to lean on a claim to black heritage, not to mention disrespectful as there's the politics involved. Incidentally we haven't been able to establish whether it was my great grandmother's mother or grandmother who was black, or find out anything about her including her name. The information was buried by my grandmother's generation around the 1950s and 60s, and documents and photographs are missing, we think destroyed. Reading between the lines I think there were other reasons too why this happened, but it's hard not to go to the obvious conclusion that there was racial prejudice and a desire to cover up any information about not being fully white that mattered at the time. Grim as from the number of children involved in the visibly mixed race generation and the closeness of them as a family, there was a happy and openly mixed race relationship between their parents.

chavelita, that kind of default anti Irishness is very rare in the UK. I lived and worked there for 15 years and if I ever heard a stupid comment it was more likely to have been borne out of frustration at the IRA than to have been tied up with any old colonial assumption that I was an inferior being.

The Irish being considered non-white was an American ''classification''. of the time. An American once chided me for not knowing this but it's American history imo. It's interesting, how the Irish formed parishes and worked together in America but white is not a class.

There is classism in the uk of course but it's hard for anybody who hasn't had an extremely privileged upbringing to break in and that's not specific to the Irish.

It doesn't matter where you're from now, white is white unless it's not.

Golder, good for you that you never encountered it. I've lived in England since 1997, and I can assure you that anti-Irishness is not, in fact, all that rare in my experience, despite the Good Friday Agreement happening shortly after I arrived and most people knowing astonishingly little about NI. It is from a minority of people, generally white, older and middle-class, but it's there, and yes, does involve the same old drunken/feckless/aggressive/superstitious/poor/priest-ridden ethnic stereotypes. In my experience it is more prevalent in rural England.

I'm not sure what point you are making about the immigrant Irish in 19th c America being classified as 'non white' as 'of its time'. Who is suggesting otherwise? But it was a racial, not a class classification -- definitions of whiteness were malleable and the Irish were for much of the 19th c regarded in the US as 'white negroes' (caricatured as similarly 'ape-like', similarly stereotyped as lazy, stupid, drunk, criminal, good at singing and dancing etc etc).

The only people who were ever anti-irish to me were lower middle class, ie, delusions of class, but no actual class. THAT is my point. Class is different from nationality. If people were anti-Irish to you, you're mixing with the wrong people. I moved to the UK in 1993 weeks after the bomb in the city.

My point about the American classification of Irish is that that is there history. We could announce tomorrow that the Swiss were purple but it doesn't make it so, it doesn't make it a part of their history. It was not racial. It was economic.

This is a facinating subject to me. I am mixed race, my mother white and my father black but he or his family never had any involvement in my life. He left my mum when I was very small and it was a time when men could just do that.

This has been difficult for me and has taken a lot to come to terms with. I look black but I have no black heritage to relate to, so especially when I was younger people saw me as a fraud or imposter, not black or white and this has definately affected how I see myself.

I was very conscious when we had our son that he would have a better sense of self than I do and he is more confident than I was at his age.

I'm sure you're not claiming that your experience means that my different experience of anti-Irishness didn't happen, or that I'm somehow choosing to spend my life in the vicinity of people who make anti-Irish jibes? I don't keep a running list, but from memory, it's included Oxford High Tables, old Etonians, a cabinet backbencher and minor aristocrat, the mayoress of a midlands city, to mention only a few.

You are misunderstanding the US issue. Racial categories are a social construct , not some biological reality, and the immigrant Irish did not initially count as 'white' in 19th America. There's a fair bit of research on it, with links to, for instance, pseudo-ethnographic studies with images of 'Negroid features', 'Anglo-Saxon features' and 'Irish features', and pointing out the 'ape-like' similarities between Irish and black features.

I do find the ways in which race and in particular "whiteness" are defined and policed fascinating.

My father is white and from an ancient English family. My mother is Middle Eastern and Jewish. I look exactly like my dad, which is to say 100% white, but my dad and my paternal family are vocal in insisting I am not white. I am completely aware of my white privilege but that's pretty dislocating; more so people not believing your mum is your mum and witnessing your mum suffering racial abuse that you are protected from via a freak of genetics.

And the whole Jewish/whiteness thing is so complex, no less so due to the racial hierarchies within Judaism itself. The rise of the alt white and the shocking amount of antisemitism within that has forcibly reminded us that our "whiteness" is fragile and on sufferance.

The alt right certainly wouldn't consider me white, but how do we have a discussion about whiteness-policing without marginalising the experiences of black people for whom white privilege/white passing will never be an option? And even the concept of white passing is worthy of much debate - does "passing privilege" exist or does passing come at too high a cost of identity dislocation to be considered a form of privilege?

Those upper class people consider everybody else an outsider though. It is not aimed at you just because you are irish. That us the crucial bit you're missing.

Two people in my class went to Cambridgre so it's not as though Irish people can't get in to these academic circles. It is hard. For everybody.

Look at kate middleton. She is considered low class by the really smart types!!

What an interesting question.

When I had a Ghanaian bf, he told me that our kids would be classified as white in Ghana, and he was genuinely puzzled why they would be seen as black in UK

My SIL and brother went to live in Barbados, where her family are from. There you are classified by skin tone, and there is some quite serious underlying racism going on. The irony is that SIL and dd1 would have been considered black, and dd2 and dd3 were praised for 'passing for white'

Same as furry, my dc2 is mixed race but has no input from the black side of his family so is being raised by white parents with white siblings. Yet he will always be seen as black.
What annoys me most is that on the forms we tick white/black Caribbean even though his "father" is British born and bred. When we he just be British. I'm not fully British, my ancestors are all over yet they don't matter, only his Caribbean roots. It's strange.
One day we will all be so mixed it hopefully won't ever matter and we will simply be Human.

catastrophe - you have reminded me, when i was teaching in East End of London, every year there was a survey. I have no idea what it was called, but it was a government requirement.

We had to basically fill in a form listing all the non white kids in the class. There was some link between this and the amount of funding available for ESL support.

So the form arrived on my desk, with list of children recorded last year and I had to up date it. It really seriously pissed my off.
I had one child on the list who was 1/4 black, being raised by the white east end part of her family, a black grandfather she had never even met.

But in my class I also had one child who was half German, bilingual, he didn't appear on the list at all, and I wasn;t allowed to add him, because he was white.

I ponder this myself too sometimes, I know two (unrelated) little boys with 1 Asian grandparent who are both pale, blonde and blue eyed. I think of them both as white. One's older sister is much darker and more Asian looking.

DS is mixed race, half Italian and half Filipino. In Italy no one notices as most Italians are fairly olive skinned with brown eyes. In England everyone asks 'where's his dad from' as I'm mousy haired with blue eyes, thinking DSs looks are just from DH when actually he is more similar in skin colour to my olive skinned DM and DBro.

It's really interesting stuff genetics/inhereted characteristics. I'd love to get one of those DNA tests done as apparently I look 'typically swedish' according to an ethnographer I once knew.

The replies have been amazing and made it even more of a complex issue. Some people think it's a clear cut answer to what it is but based on experience and place it shows that we can view things differently to what the world dictates.

In Regards to the Irish argument, I think before mass slavery to the Americas from Africa. Most of the people that worked the plantations where Irish. They were treated badly and paid peanuts compared to other white counterparts.
Most lost their jobs when slavery become a popular means to crops growing. I don't know what happened after that. I rarely come across what happened to the Irish populations.

What I find annoying is that it's impossible to read about the Irish people pre-slavery without ending up on a white supremacy site. It's always used as an argument against racism and slavery. The argument always is, if white people can treat other white people the way they treated the Irish, then it's not racism and black people should stop complaining.

No dog, no Irish and no blacks and this was a recent event. I have come a cross people who say negative jokes about the Irish. When you pull them up on it, they usually will claim, they can't be racist against someone of the similar skin colour. All have been English and Scottish. Never a non brit.

At the OP's request, we're going to be moving this one over to multicultural families in a mo.

Steppe mum, do schools get some sort of extra funding for non white kids?
I did wonder this. My dc are mixed race and non white. They do not tick any of the boxes on the forms due to their fairly unusual ethnic mix, so I always tick 'mixed other'.
Every year or so the school sends a copy of the information they hold for each child home incase it needs updating. On one occasion my dc were listed as white/Asian which I corrected and the next year it was white/black African. The headteacher was very reluctant to tick the 'mixed other' box.

Pinkmagic. ..There is no funding associated with ticking an ethnic background box.
I'm not sure the one drop rule has ever existed in the uk has it? People just declare what they want, and other people just base their prejudices on what you look like.