I have allowed myself to become too focussed on religion, and so I am posting some essays on race and race issues that I wrote for Black History Month in February, 2010. This is part 2 of a 6-part discussion of what I see as significant questions in the discussion of race. This post originally appeared on Facebook on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010.

Now that we have done away with (hopefully to your satisfaction) the idea of blackness, or indeed any racial identity, as being based on skin colour (or other characteristics) or heritage as being the sole explanatory factor for what black means, there’s another idea of black identity that I’d like to discuss. Namely, this is the idea that being black is simply a matter of self-identification – that if you think you’re black, then you are black.

I’ve mentioned the idea of people “self-identifying as black” a number of times, particularly in my previous post. This speaks to the idea that what someone calls him/herself speaks more to her (gender non-specific, I’m just tired of him/her… too cumbersome) “real” racial identity than arbitrary taxonomic classifications based largely on trying to quantify someone’s non-whiteness. But does that mean that what someone calls herself is all it takes? Are we all just whatever we say we are?

We’ve all heard the phrase “wigger” – a white person who appears, by all counts, to self-identify as black. They walk black, talk black, engage in stereotypically black activities, listen to black music, etc. etc. Assuming for just a moment that it is possible in any measurable way to walk, talk, or live “black”, as though black people were some homogeneous group, would a wigger’s self-identification qualify them for “black status”? Is a black person who works as an actuary or the head of the air and space museum or is a worldwide polka champion really just a white person with black skin?

It is fairly clear that the self-identification criterion is, on its own, insufficient to categorize people. It lacks what is known in the sciences as face validity – the extent to which something appears to make logical, rational sense. Some things that lack face validity – quantum physics for example, are saved by the fact that they have real internal validity – that is, they are based on observable scientific phenomena that, despite being hard to fathom, are in fact real descriptions of what is going on. Since racial/ethnic identity is not based on these underlying scientific principles (fun fact, there’s more genetic diversity in people of African descent – black people – than in those of European descent – white people), the lack of face validity is enough to reject this idea out-of-hand.

To summarize the above paragraph: if you don’t look black, you ain’t black.

Tiger Woods is perhaps the best-known example of the self-identification paradigm. Tiger Woods was raised by his Thai father (edit: thanks to Adrian Anantawan for pointing out that his mother is Thai, and his father is black), which is where he got his unusual name. Tiger self-identifies as Thai, and has said so in interviews. Little problem: Tiger Woods is a black guy. His self-identification is not sufficient in this case to be a practical measure of his blackness, whether he likes it or not. I’m coming precipitously close to tipping my hand on my final definition of blackness, which is a topic for my next post, so I’m going to stop here.

I’ve been picking on religion too much with my Monday ‘think-piece’ notes, and neglecting the other part of this blog: discussions of race and race issues. In February, 2010 I participated in my yearly tradition of observing Black History Month by doing something scholarly. I decided to share some of my thoughts and findings, which was part of the impetus for starting this blog. For the next six weeks, my Monday posts will be specifically about race and race issues. I’ll then get back to writing about whatever I feel like.

This post originally appeared on Facebook on Monday, Feb 1st, 2010.

This will be perhaps the most difficult, most contentious, and least comprehensible of my posts on race so far, but it underpins all of the subsequent ones, so I am going to do my level best to present it first.

I want to be clear from the outset that this is, by no means, an authoritative or “official” answer to the question of blackness. Like all of my notes it represents my opinion only. I try to base my opinions on careful thought and consideration and, when I can, reading the opinions of scholars. Black means many things to many people, and each person’s experience of black-ness is individual to them. It’s like trying to define what art is: each person’s experience is different, but it is important to attempt to find some common features among the several definitions.

I will first discuss what black isn’t along some common misconceptions: black as skin colour, and black as social code.

Anyone who asks knows that I consider myself to be “black”; not “mixed” or “half-black”; while those are technically true and I have used them to describe myself in specific circumstances, they are not how I self-identify. It seems rather elementary that if I have one black parent and one white parent, that makes me half-black – fractions don’t lie. I had this said to me, in so many words, by a black guy I worked with at a summer co-op program at UofT medicine back in summer, 2001, who told me that to qualify as “black” one needed to have two black parents. I asked him if he was “pure black” (his words, not mine), a question to which he responded, somewhat irritatedly, that he indeed was. I asked him then why a) we had the same skin colour; and b) why he had freckles. “Black people don’t have freckles,” I told him “that’s a white people thing.” Indeed, it turned out, that some of his relatives were white on his mother’s side.

So he and I were left with a fundamental conundrum: his parents were both “black”, and yet he had white ancestry. Mulling this over, we came to the conclusion that blackness was not simply a question of heritage, although that certainly played a role in it. The idea of being “pure” black was summarily dismissed as frankly ridiculous (and indeed, a little insulting) since black people don’t all come from the same place (except insofar as all people come from the same place). We needed to establish a new standard for blackness that went beyond simple arithmetic.

A second illustrative example came from that same co-op program. I met a girl named Aza at this same conference. She is of Somali decent, and is about as dark-skinned as a person gets. She also has long, wavy hair (naturally, not due to relaxer), a small nose and delicate features – in other words she doesn’t “look black”. These were the words she used to characterize the reactions of other black people to her, saying that because she didn’t have an afro, big lips and a big nose, she clearly was some alien species, heretofore unknown on the Earth. Until she came to Canada, in fact, Aza didn’t know she wasn’t black. It took the combined, learned wisdom of a bunch of Caribbean kids to tell her that even though she was from Africa, she wasn’t “black-black” (again, I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried).

Another example: a close friend of mine self-identifies as black. Like me, she is technically “mixed” and I am not sure if she sees her race in the same rigid fashion that I do, but I digress. Her father is a white man from Scotland, and her mother is a black woman. What makes this a particularly fascinating story is that my friend’s mother, for the longest time, did not self-identify as black. The reason for this, as was related to me, is that the mother was adopted and raised by white parents. Doing the best they could in the times in which they lived, my friend’s mother was raised to regard herself as white, despite all physical evidence to the contrary. This was certainly no mean feat, as it creates a strong cognitive dissonance. At the time the phenomenon was known as “passing”, which is a phrase that has dropped from the common lexicon in the past 20 or so years. She (the mother) had children with a(nother) white person, who were, according to the progeny theory, one quarter black (or some fraction thereof).

First of all, being one quarter black means that you are 75% white, which means that unless you are rounding in an extremely conservative manner, you’re ostensibly a white person. However, a cursory glance at either one of the children (both smokin’ hotties, incidentally) shows that clearly these girls aren’t “pure white”, even though mathematically they are. In fact, nobody would mistake them for a “white person”, instead asking every mixed kid’s favourite question “what are you?” My friend struggled with the issue that while she was clearly at least part black, she had two “white” parents. It took many years for her to work out in her own mind what her racial identity was and meant.

The idea of blackness as the colour of one’s skin or one’s parental makeup is insufficient as a definitive criterion for identity. There are many shades of blackness – everyone has probably heard of “light-skinned black” versus “dark-skinned black”. In antiquity, people of mixed heritage were all described as “black” – indeed, all people who were non-white: East-Asian, South-Asian, Native, Polynesian, etc. were all termed “black”. Blackness was, in that time, a departure from the natural state of being for humans, which was (of course) white skin. The discovery that humankind descends from black people was still a couple of centuries away. In the United States, a convoluted taxonomical system was invented to classify people of mixed heritage – Google the word “octoroon” for an example of the thinking at the time. In South Africa in the 1980s under apartheid, the “non-white” definition was especially prevalent, with people being socially ranked according to the lightness of their skin.

So as I explore the idea of what it is to be “black”, the first step has to be to throw out what is the most intuitive definition – that black is measured by the colour of a person’s skin, or by their genetic heritage. According to a definition set down by Mendelian genetics, there’s no such thing as “pure” black, and any attempts to classify “parts” of blackness are therefore absurd. Similarly, we are all happy calling both Will Smith and Eddie Murphy “black”, although they have remarkably different skin colouration. A more comprehensive definition is clearly needed. In next Monday’s post, I will discuss the idea of “blackness” as a purely self-identified phenomenon – that if someone calls him/herself “black”, then he/she is, regardless of the colour of his/her skin.