For some reason when I’m talking to an American from the North East and the fact that I’m mixed comes up they always say they aren’t white they’re actually native because his grandpa once mentioned something about a Cherokee ancestor.
It’s always Cherokee, no other tribe but that one. And it’s always the whitest looking person ever, straight up 6ft tall blue eyed and blond guy.
I get it, I’m mostly white too, Spanish and Slavic. But even tho I’m not mostly native American I still look native enough that people think I’m Asian.
But when your ancestry has been so diluted over the generations… You’re not native. It’s not just that you don’t look native, it’s also that you don’t even participate in the culture.
Dude you’re just a farm boy from Philadelphia you’re probably more Amish than Cherokee, if that supposed ancestor is even real at all and not just some random claim by some of your ancestors to have a “right over these lands”.
Also let’s not talk about white families using the “Cherokee ancestor” excuse to hide a black ancestor as a part to justify darker features. I’ve seen this happen as well.
This is a huge part of it.
For my family it was the native kids that were forced into adoption with white families to force them to assimilate. We have photos of my dutch pilgrim family with daughters who are plainly native and in their photos as adults they often really lighten their skin on the face but don’t do the hands… it’s really bizarre to see
In Australia, it’s the opposite. My family has a story of an Afghani ancestor that was used to hide indigenous Australian heritage.
Though maybe that’s the same, because it’s hiding black ancestry behind pretend non black ancestry…
I just discovered Native Australians are considered black. I thought they were considered a distinct race since they’re genetically not Sub-Saharan African but South Asians
Yeah it blew my mind when a few times I was called black in Australia when I am of Indian heritage. One even made a joke about my penis being larger!
In Britain, Asian means someone from Indian/Pakistani part of area of Asia, whereas in North America and Australia it means Chinese/Japanese parts of Asia.
Blackness/Whiteness is an interesting concept - it’s remarkably fluid, especially with changes in time and place. Race isn’t the same as ethnicity or genetics, or a direct result of it, although racists often try to claim it is - a stark example of this in Western societies like the US and Australia would be how they categorize Italian and Greek peoples, Slavic peoples, or ethnically-Jewish peoples - the idea of whether or not each of these is White has largely shifted over time, often as a group stops being the current biggest immigration demographic. The USA even had a concept of “Black Irish”, which originally meant a post-Famine Irish refugee. Human races are ultimately just social classes, not a biological concept.
Another aspect, related to this thread, is hypodescent. In some societies (it’s not a universal thing!), if a child has a Black parent and a White parent, is the child Black or White, or another label entirely? As mentioned in that article, some US states used to legally define someone as Black even if only 1 of their 16 great-great-grandparents were Black.
Different heritage, but very much considered black. Australia has a whole racist history that marginalises indigenous Australians explicitly on their blackness…