Frank Borelli
Editor In Chief
New American Truth
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I came to the realization the other day that many folks in the United States claim minority protections or status based on the minority portion of their genetic heritage. The realization slapped me in the face when I further realized that President Obama may be the most popular person to ever do this.

Think about it: Using Affirmative Action as the example, legal protections were created to insure that those of minority status weren’t treated unfairly in hiring. That, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. While it’s a shame that simple personal morals should prevent hiring based on racial, sexual, religious or other prejudices, and because of unfair treatment of minorities in the past, Affirmative Action was enacted to help prevent such prejudicial hiring in the future. Now, here’s where it gets sticky: who qualifies as a minority?

Anyone can claim minority status – they just might not be able to prove it and therefore not be able to gain that benefit. Using myself as an example, I have two family heritages to choose from (I was an adopted child). My birth family is a mix of German, Native America (Indian), Dutch and other European “races”. In my adopted family I would be able to claim Italian, Native American, Dutch, Welsh, British and other European “races”. Looking at either, if I could document the Native American heritage then I could claim that minority status. How much do I have to prove? What percentage of my heritage has to be Native Ameriacn for me to qualify as that “minority”?

It’s an unfortunate and shameful reality that American history documents something known as the “one-drop rule”. The one-drop rule essentially said that if you had one drop of blood from any given race then you were a minority – a member of that minority race. Between 1910 and 1931 several states actually passed laws / statutes declaring such. Other states passed laws specifying a percentage of your heritage that would have to be of a minority race for you to claim that minority status (1/16th or 1/32nd depending on which state you were in). THAT legislated reality is what was causing my conundrum. Why do we label a person’s race based on the smallest documentable amount of their heritage?

Such a practice grew out of racist legislation. Between 1890-1910, the laws were being developed to maintain segregation of races. The white-dominated legislatures enacted many “Jim Crow” laws that separated blacks from whites in virtually all public areas. To define who was black and who was white, a determination had to be made based on percentage of heritage – hence the “one drop” law and other percentage clarifications. By enacting them, and obviously unaware of the long term consequences, the legislaters at that time defined people’s racial status as minority based on the minority of their actual heritage.

Now, let’s come back to the present: President Obama’s race was a huge factor in his campaign and has proven to be somewhat contentious even after he was elected. Although he readily identifies himself as, and takes great pride in being, a “black” man, I have to ask: is he really? His mother was white. His father was a “black” Kenyan. At the most that makes him half-”black”. What about the “white” half? Other reports indicate that his father was actually a Kenyan of primarily Arabic decent (3 Arab grandparents and one Kenyan grandparent) which would make our President 1/8th “black” Kenyan, 3/8 Arabic and 1/2 “White”. When broken down that way, doesn’t it seem that our Preisdent enjoys a heritage that is majority white?

Let’s look at another “man of color” who was in the news not that long ago based almost entirely on his racial identification: Professor Henry Lous Gates, Jr. This Harvard professor claimed he was arrested by Sgt. Crowley of the Cambridge PD. Not to relive that news blowout, it was later revealed – by Professor Gates himself – that his DNA mapping shows him to be at least half IRISH. So how and why would he identify himself as a “black” man? The simple answer COULD be because there are no minority protections or benefits for someone of Irish decent.

And therein lies our biggest challenge in racial equality in America today: the laws have been developed to correct past mistakes. That’s not a bad thing. BUT, in the development and passage of those laws, America has gone a bit past the balance point and has ended up protecting very few “racial” minorities and is doing so based on the minority of any individual’s racial heritage. The simple solution is to change things so that Americans are racially defined in one of two ways:

1) We can all claim “mixed race” status – which the large majority of us are (just like me), OR

2) We can identify a person’s race based on the MAJORITY of their racial heritage.

For those rare folks who are actually an even 50%-50% split between two races, then identifying them as “mixed race” woudl be the only option.

By exercising such a change though we’d also need to recognize that “mixed race” folks ARE NOT a minority group. Such a change would force we Americans to realize that AMERICAN is the best “race” we can claim.

Never in my life have I identified myself as “Italian-American” or “German-American”. I’m not a hyphenated anything. I’m an American, plain and simple.

If our country is going to heal the racial divide that our President campaigned so much on, we need to stop nit-picking heritage based on minimal fractions. We need to stop LOOKING for reasons to give anyone special protections. We need to stop granting special privileges for “one drop” of blood. We need to stop granting special privileges and protections only to those minority groups who have been wronged in past centuries. If minority protections are good for one minority group, then those same protections must be good for ALL minority groups. Otherwise we have simply created another racist situation where someone is treated different based on race.

We need to stop being anything but American.

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