There is of course nothing unusual about Black Americans being of mixed or Caribbean heritage: The Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X, with his red hair and Grenadian-born mother, was both. Chattel slavery, which existed longer on this continent than the United States has existed, was a form of systematized rape in which white men who publicly advertised their deeply Christian piety ran slave-labor camps filled with their own children. As the southern white aristocrat Mary Chesnut wrote in her diary, “God forgive us but ours is a monstrous system and wrong and iniquity … Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children.” Some of the dimmer conservatives on the internet have suggested that being descended from slave owners makes a person not Black; you have to wonder if these people are capable of counting to 10 on their fingers.
Historically in America, white identity has been defined by the completely unscientific concept of racial purity, the most infamous example being the “one-drop rule” that labeled anyone with African ancestry as Black. As a result, Black American identity has long been inclusive and expansive.
“White friends, Black people do not all look alike,” the legendary Black comedian Redd Foxx told the audience at The Flip Wilson Show in 1974. “It is you who all look alike. I’m gonna prove it. White friends, look all around the room. All the whites look at each other. All of y’all are just white. Now look at us, all different colors. Black walnut. Burnt almond. Chocolate. Chocolate mocha. Pecan. Vanilla. Yella, mella, light bright and damn near white!” Foxx was describing the live audience at the show, but he might have been describing many Black family reunions.
If Foxx’s joke is a funny inversion of a racist stereotype, it also gets at the tragic origins of Black American identity. Trump’s attempt to say that a Black woman with a non-Black parent cannot be Black is an imposition of the concept of racial purity on a culture that does not share it.