Response to the Washington Post

Racial identification is where a person of one racial demographic decides to associate with a different racial demographic, usually due to appearance. That idea is considered ambiguous to some people because for the people who don't know their entire heritage, the best they can do is to associate with people that look similar to themselves, even if they aren't ethnically made up of said demographic. However, the language of racial identity can play a large part in the thoughts and actions related to race in the present and future.

Racial identity is something that has created loopholes, of sorts, in society's unwritten codes of conduct. One loophole that has occurred due to racial identity is that it has allowed numerous people from a minority demographic to walk amongst a majority demographic. Most cases of "racial passing," as it's called, happen from any given minority group (or a mix of heritages) to a majority such as, white, middle to upper class. One example of this is the case of US civil rights leader Walter Francis White. He was the chief executive of the NAACP from 1929 to 1955 and, under his leadership, set up the Legal Defense Fund to bring segregation infractions to the Supreme Court, one of which was Brown v. Board of Education. Five of his great-great-great-grandparents were black and the other 27 were white. He was black, but passed off as a white man to obtain information about lynchings and hate crimes in the South more freely. Nobody thought about if, when calling this man white, he really was of the ethnicity of which his physical appearance is associated. Granted, he claimed the "white" ethnicity, he still had a small percentage of black heritages in him; a drop of black, if you will.

Another example of someone who claims one ethnicity, when made up of multiple others, is our President-elect, Barack Obama. He was born of an African American father, and a white Kansan mother, and raised by his mother and grandfather, who was also white, in Hawai'i. Even though he addresses himself as an African American, he is not; he is a bicultural, biracial man, who symbolizes more than the personification of African American achievement, as Marie Arana states in her Washington Post article. He symbolizes the change in America in moving from a close-minded culture, to an open and willing culture. When living in Chicago after graduating from Colombia University in New York, he was addressed as a black man, not as a mix of different races and cultures, but again, no one thought about that when addressing him as a black man.

These men are just two examples of how racial identity has affected our society, and how we, as a people, overlook these small facts that people are not necessarily made up of the heritage we convey through our physical appearance. Because of this, we are often confused as to of exactly what heritages we are made up. This can play a large part in the thoughts and actions related to race in the present and future. In the case of the present, we can only improve from how our society was not too long ago during the era of slavery. As for the future, because of our new President-elect, hopefully we'll become a more understanding and tolerant society where racial passing will no longer be needed, and it only takes one to start.