The one-droppers claim that "black" is mixed. Why then doesn't the identity reflect the reality? They say it is ninety-five percent mixed. If so, then the mixed race carry the day; that is only logical and democratic. If they do not, then it is a dictatorship of five percent, and a deluded five percent at that. Logic does not discriminate. This was the charge brought against the Afrikaners of South Africa. It is now brought against the one-droppers.

The gross disparity which they insist on maintaining between name and reality leaves them defenseless against the charge of hypocrisy. It is self-deceiving of blacks to want to fit their ancestral identity to such alien racial types as are designated black in America. And hypocritical of the wider community to keep urging the racial unity of this population when this only serves their own program of ethnic cleansing of mulattos, the so-called one-drop or hypodescent rule.

Biologically, mulattos are equally white as black. Even the one-droppers do not deny this. Hence for the mulatto these can only be ideological identities. Despite what the one-droppers say, black racial identity is an ideology; but since mixed race is the overwhelmingly greater reality, it is a deluded choice. It is the occult religion of some mulattos.

But no religion or ideology, racial or otherwise, holds a monopoly on morality. Despite what the one-droppers say, their identity is not the only one or even the most valid one from which evil can be resisted. The dissension to the one-drop rule is a moral choice, and in taking this option one does not thereby give up the fight against injustice.

The one-droppers, on the other hand, have forfeited any claims to morality by seeking to deny the free will of others. They have chosen to set themselves up as society's racial police, the fierce defenders of the State's racial property even as they themselves are stripped of their own. But they are only accomplices to ethnic cleansing.

They scream in derision "As we are, so are you!" But for these who use themselves as a curse what can one feel but pity? The one-droppers refuse to get it into their thick skulls that "one man's medicine is another man's poison." If their black honor is so precious to them, why do they hand it out with such abandon? Precious things are always rare. Precious things are hoarded. They alone give their jewels where it cannot be appreciated. But this only proves that it is not a racial identity that they are pushing down the throats of others -- this is always conserved -- but an ideology seeking converts.

They impose their "black" identity on the mixed race, refusing to allow dissension. But when they were imposed upon as colored and negro they claimed God as a witness to their right to dissent. But they were only playing at dissension then, exchanging one racial identity for another. The true dissension is to reject the one-drop rule, that first principle of racial stigma. This the mixed race do and lay claim to all the world's heritage, but especially its white European lineage. And why? Because this is the taboo defended most vehemently by the sacred cow of the one-drop rule. And because this is the identity with the greatest amount of social freedoms; this is the identity to which the society ascribes a universal, nonracial character.

The one-droppers scream at the top of their voices "But black people are mixed with every race imaginable!" So much pride in every other race but their own! Yet as eagerly as they acknowledge others, so do others disown them. You would think that with such black pride as they assert, they would retaliate in kind and disown the blood of those who disown them; that they could care less where mixed breeds go. But they feed upon insult; they need it even as the earth needs the rain.

The one-droppers say they are as mixed as anyone else but that their reality is clearly black. What they mean of course is that their mixed-race ancestry is quite remote while their most recent ancestry is overwhelmingly black. Using the same logic others arrive at a white reality for themselves! For many mulattos their black ancestry is quite remote while their most recent ancestry is overwhelmingly white. The one-droppers say that black ancestry is the exception to the rule. It can never be mere ancestry like all others but must always be heritage, celebrated and the basis of identity wherever it is present. But what is this difference that they claim for black ancestry? One-drop logic stops here. For the only thing different about black ancestry is the stigma of inferiority which the wider society has placed on it and which the one-droppers have inculcated in their hearts.

There is no need for a mixed-race identity, the one-droppers say, because black is in reality mixed race. Absolutely right: all things "black" are indeed mixed race: all its accomplishments, its claims to history, its ideal of beauty. The one-droppers are so dead set against the mixed race dissenting because then their own black identity would be shown up for the sham it is and their allegiance will also be seen for the hypocrisy that it too is. Their greatest fear is to be left alone with what is truly black and the distortions that they have made of it. It is because all things "black" are indeed mixed race that they are so determined to make the reverse of this also true: that the mixed race be black.

The one-droppers argue that a mixed-race identity would create a buffer community between whites and blacks, thus further marginalizing blacks. Yet the truth is that such a buffer community already exists but goes undetected because it is a wolf in sheep's clothing, hiding behind a facade of blackness, diverting all concessions for its own enrichment. If anything, a legally recognized mixed-race identity would strangle this hypocritical elite and force unmixed whites to negotiate directly with a black reality.

They say dissenters to the one-drop rule are running after those who once terrorized them. Yet they themselves cry long tears over the very ancestry which sold and bartered them into slavery. If they were not so bent on self-deception they would understand that who one is does not need the permission of any other. If it did, there would be no honor in it.

The one-droppers claim to honor their forefathers. Yet they fall over themselves in their eager rush to destroy the racial type they profess to love.

The "black" identity which they assert is a sham. It need not even possess any trait of that ancestor in whose name it is invoked. As loudly as they claim it, as quickly do they run away from it. It is everything, they say; it is nothing. It is black; it is white. They are the masters of illogic, the most willful destroyers of their children's pride and sanity. They stain the very ancestry they honor. They reject the very heritage they embrace. They bury the very lineage they resurrect.

They are their own worst enemy.

They teach their children that white is black; then when their children hate themselves, they turn around and blame others.

They teach their children that things exist for which there is no evidence. Then decry others for pointing out that these children cannot follow simple logic.

They claim to be the moral compass of the nation because of their suffering. A witchdoctor's logic. Would that virtue were so easily won! We would all be saints then for the suffering we have known at the hands of others.

Come back! come back! to our hypocrisy they plead; come back to our dictatorship.

The one-droppers say they only have open arms for the mixed race, so what crime could there be in love? But like everything else, desire is a double-edged sword, and can be as offensive and oppressive as outright hatred. The one-droppers demand, in exchange for their friendship, that mulattos submit to a black identity. But love is not love which seeks to pervert its object.

The one-droppers confuse control with love. There say the mixed race will never leave their midst. Then let them prepare to be undermined from the inside out.

But the one-droppers have no logic. They crave integration but define the first product of this -- the mixed race -- in the most uncompromising way. An unholy alliance do they make: their spouses, always disinherited, disowning themselves in their own children. This is not the marriage of equals. This is the suicide of one and the drawing of the victim's blood.

They have no honor. They pledge their virtue to a single race then turn around and court the blood of every other. They justly fall victim to the most damning of criticisms: faithless; enshrining their own pollution; welcoming their own degradation; treasuring the refuse of all others. And still they want to know, why this turning away?

What they should know is that this is not about race at all. This is about a principled life. Dissension to the one-drop rule rescues one from a life of hypocrisy and self-deception; protects one from deceiving innocent children, from destroying their innate self-image by telling them they are other than what they are.

The one-droppers are offended by mulattos who have a self-image that is either mixed race or white. Mulattos are equally offended by the logic which says that their self-image, acquired in the same uncontrived manner as any other, is somehow immoral. That they should deny the obvious and place their self-image in an atman or soul, a spiritual essence which in reality would reflect the self-image of others rather than themselves; and which contradicts them at every turn, in thought and deed. This would be the same logic necessary to have a Japanese or unmixed white person submit to a "black" identity.

On just such a principle, though, do the one-droppers lay claim to mulattos and upon it is based their moral invective against those who reject their claim. Yet this one-drop rule enshrines the stigma of all things African in the New World. It is the underlying cause of the self-loathing of blacks. For if every time one came in contact with another it invariably meant that that other was despoiled and promptly disowned every bit of himself that was subject to contact, no matter how remote and immeasurable this was -- then two things must follow: one would have no choice but to know oneself as an agent of contamination; and one could not but have reinforced in oneself the notion of that other's purity and hence prestige. The one-droppers' say that white "blood" is simply weak and cannot retain its character in the face of blackness. But even in this view there is the a priori assumption that whiteness is more valuable than blackness, for otherwise why would one embrace a black identity that has lost all properties of itself?

The one-drop rule preserves intact the psychological environment of slavery -- the mastery of unmixed whites and the degradation of everyone else. By defining black identity as a deep essence which exists without any physical or mental evidence, it allows blacks to claim (through the mulatto) all things Caucasian. It also allows many mulattos to placate blacks with a hollow assertion. One cannot but be amazed at this mass self-deception and gullibility of blacks, for a better program of enfeeblement was never so cleverly devised by anyone or so zealously embraced by its target population.

The one-droppers say "There are only two races of people, White and Other." By whose definition? Slaves alone have no power to define themselves and are content with allowing others to dictate what is real and what is not. The one-droppers are eager to invoke the dictates of unmixed whites as the final reality when this supports the disinheritance of mulattos. But when they were disinherited from their ancestral homeland with negro and colored identities, they were more than eager to disclaim the authority of these same unmixed whites.

Blacks simply refuse to give any credence to the fact that the one-drop rule is a humiliation to mulattos because it turns them out of their heritage, denies them access to their own bodies, makes them aliens in their very persons and denies them a legitimate claim to their parents, their ancestries and their acculturation. The fundamental conflict cannot be avoided: what is honor for the blacks is humiliation for the mulatto; this is the one-drop rule in which blacks so shamelessly base their identity. But as long as they continue to identify themselves with this principle of disinheritance, they must inevitably feel the scorn and rejection that this ignominy rightfully deserves.

The one-droppers say the mixed race are being used to "Divide and conquer." But where was there ever unity? Did the population come from Africa with such color disparities? Despite what they say, there was never any unity in this population; not even in Africa. Like the Hebrews who forged their Jewish identity out of their oppression in ancient Egypt, so do these today fashion their "black" identity out of their oppression in America. But Hebrews and Arabs belong to the same Semitic race. Yet Arabs are not Jews. The experience of one segment of a population is not necessarily relevant to another segment. Arabs defined themselves as Muslims from their own peculiar social experience as much as 2000 years after the Jews. The mixed race similarly reserve the right to define their own reaction to their oppression, to define themselves according to their own peculiar social experience, and in opposition to the one-drop legacy of slavery.

I have probably given the one-droppers more credit than they deserve by comparing their identity to those of Jewish and Muslim. But the truth cannot be avoided. Black identity, like the slavery in which it was born, is a social construct. And as far as races go, the most tyrannical of social constructs. It retains its entire character in the smallest possible part. And depends for its survival on birth that is replicated over and over again. Its victims are imprisoned upon an endless cycle of births -- what the Hindus and Buddhists call samsara.

It is upon this wheel of births that the one-droppers, themselves trapped, seek to lure the mixed race. But being one-droppers they turn around and plead with their oppressors not to judge them by this same birth with which they define themselves, but by the content of their characters. But what is this content of their characters? Certainly not virtue. There is no way to deny it: there is no way to preserve the endless cycle of births but through carnal compulsion, through the compulsion to preserve some, and through the compulsion to destroy some.

Identity may be located in the color of one's skin. This failing, one is forced to locate it in the less concrete realm of thought and behavior. But even cultural conditioning may fail, and thus it becomes necessary to believe in the fiction of an absolute identity. One-drop puppets and puppeteers alike are quite adamant that it is at this immaterial level that black identity most truly exists. But to such a metaphysical realm the only evidence that can be brought to bear is morality. But morality is the last thing that anyone can monopolize.

The one-drop rule for black identity (which solely governs mulattos) is fundamentally immoral. For the mixed-race person who has not been socialized under this myth, there is nothing in his or her childhood, and nothing in adult life except self-hate, in which to anchor a black identity. Like the atman to the Buddha, it can only be a source of tremendous angst. It is an imposition fully intended to undermine the formative environment of one's life and discredit the sovereignty of one's parents.

The mixed race have no objections to a black identity that is based in free will. But the black identity that is based in the one-drop rule, by definition denying freedom of choice, will never be tolerated. This tyranny, which one-droppers of every stripe have long promoted as eternal law, must be exposed for the sham that it is. The mixed race will make certain that the world knows this delusion for the canker that it is. One-droppers can continue to deceive themselves with the fantasy of an absolute identity, but between themselves and the mixed race there exists a gulf more profound than any racial divide that has ever existed among different people. One race will tolerate another, but truth will never tolerate delusion. One race may well embrace another, but free will could never embrace coercion. The one-droppers have merely succeeded in putting the final seal on their own alienation.

The mixed race have no choice but to reject the tyranny of births which the one-droppers hunger after. Here lies their liberation. This was also the Buddha's liberation. The mixed race can take heart from the historical precedent of Buddhism. Like us, the Buddha was oppressed by caste identity. His rejection of this, his redefinition of the most prestigious caste identity from one of birthright to one based on choice or karma, his support of the freedom of a child of inter-caste marriage in choosing either parent's caste identity -- these were all aspects of his original message.

Buddhism thus provides the mixed race with a very real legal tool to challenge, on the basis of freedom of religion, the constitutionality of the one-drop rule and its atman of identity, for the belief in either of these is incompatible with its practice. Existing for more than 2000 years before the Constitution itself, and practiced by countless millions across the globe, there can be no more legitimate religion than Buddhism. If it is not legitimate, then no religion is.

But the one-drop rule also denies to the mixed race that legendary freedom so touted as the cornerstone of American society, for they alone cannot employ their native tongue to accurately denote themselves. They alone are denied that most fundamental use of language and free speech, the affirmation of oneself.

The mixed race distinguish between people and identity. It is identity that they reject, that illusion, preserve of ancestral form and character which is supposed to lurk in oneself, unknown to the mixed race, but known to every stranger. What a presumption! The mixed race declares themselves to be the only experts on who and what they are. They refuse to validate the vision of one-droppers, whoever they are, wherever they may be. What the one-droppers claim to see does not exist, but is a product of faulty vision. It is of the nature of delusion.

Following the Buddha the mixed race see the human form as consisting of five aggregates: bodily form, feeling, perception, mental activities and consciousness. Like the Buddha, they declare the reflection of these in a transgenerational identity to be their anathema, a fiction motivated by ignorance and motivating only immorality. Like the Buddha they celebrate anatta, the rejection of transgenerational identity, as the greatest virtue and truth.

The mixed race look to the Buddha's dharma as their historical and philosophical validation. And challenge the world to find the irrationality and immorality that it says lie in the rejection of the one-drop rule and its tyranny of names.

If you do not give yourself a name, the world will assign you one. But if you cannot look the world in the eye, it will not be an honorable name that you are assigned. This is a world of history. It is because mulattos refuse to make the connection to the historical that allows everyone else to slight their predicament. But with Buddhism the mixed race have the opportunity of carving out for themselves what has protected other populations with mixed-race members -- Semitic, Asian, Hispanic -- from the humiliations of the one-drop rule: a historical sense of self.

Abstract of an unpublished essay
The Modern Context of Dharma.

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