The “one drop rule” was never made to empower us. It was punishment. It was a weapon created to Brand African ancestry as inferior. So why, in 2021, are we still applying the master’s math to our own people? You cannot liberate your community with the very equations meant to divide it.
Let’s talk about this myth of the “pretty Black.”
No Doubt, white systems of power have always geared toward what’s closer to them. Hollywood, politics, even corporate America reward proximity to whiteness while sidelining those who reflect the deep tones of the continent itself. But that is their doing, not the doing of biracial people born into a world already weighted against all shades of Blackness. You don’t fix colorism by creating a new hierarchy; you dismantle the system that designed it.
Because history already answered this false separation. Every revolution, every march, every risk taken for the dignity of Black people included those of mixed lineage. Frederick Douglass was biracial. Malcolm X carried Scottish blood. Huey Newton’s mother was Creole. If the measure of “Black” were blood purity, half our freedom fighters wouldn’t qualify for the very movement they led.
So when I hear someone say, “Biracial people want the title without the struggle,” I have to pause. Many of them were born into struggle, not because of indecision, but because this world makes them justify their existence to both sides. To be “too Black” for one and “not Black enough” for another is not a privilege; it’s a constant interrogation of belonging.
The truth is, we’re all walking contradictions of survival. Ain’t a single one of us “pure.” You think plantations ran on purity? Every Black lineage in America bears the mark of violation, resistance, and redefinition. We are the living math of survival.
It's OK to call out colorism. Call out the bias that praises biracial features as “safe Black.” But don’t start dividing the descendants of the same struggle by shade and fraction. The moment you start calculating who’s “fully Black,” you become the mathematician the master trained you to be..
And to the parent raising a biracial child: your responsibility isn’t to slice your child into parts. It’s to teach them wholeness. To make sure they never see one half of themselves as an apology for the other. You can’t fight for Black dignity while teaching your own blood that half of him doesn’t count.
In the words of Nina Simone, “You’ve got to learn to leave the table when love’s no longer being served.”
But baby, we built this table — and every shade of us has a seat at it.
So yes, speak on your pain, but don’t confuse pain with permission. You can name the wound without wounding your own.
Because this—this entire argument—isn’t really about blood. It’s about belonging. And the truth is, Blackness was never something you could measure; it’s something you live.
Pain can make you bitter, or it can make you a builder.
And right now, it’s time to start building again.
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