My house was a very popular place in my old neighborhood. Kids used to hang out there. Kids of all descriptions liked the abundance of videogames and good snack food. There was a little girl, about five, who lived a few blocks away, and she was a lovely child. She had beautiful dark ebony skin, doe eyes, a sweet disposition and a mischievous smile. One day she commandeered me to color in a coloring book with her. She was coloring in people, giving them names of people she knew. I pointed out that she had colored in about every person we knew but not one representing herself. She said she wouldn't do that because she was "black and ugly." She started to cry, and I told her she was very beautiful, that I didn't feel ugly, and I was "black, too." She looked at me like I was crazy and said "But you're light color." I rightly felt obtuse and insensitive. I persisted that she should see how beautiful she really was, and we talked and started to cheer up and laugh, but I know deep down the remnants of those feelings held onto her little heart. She was only five years old, but she already knew she couldn't identify with me. I can imagine that over time people will continue to tell her that she and mixed people are the same and she may grow to be either more self-loathing or to hate mixed people instead. Neither is a very healthy option. After being told all her life that she and people who are actually mixed-race are the same, genetically, she can't help growing up thinking there is something wrong with somebody.

This is not an exclusively "black" issue either. Misidentification abounds in our race-obsessed society. Groups that have distinct phenotypic differences seek a single prized social classification, "white." Some are phenotypic blends as well, in other words are very mixed. Some are not. Take the example of a dark featured woman of North African extraction I used to know. In order to satisfy her Northern European classification, she dyed her black hair light blonde, leaving it the consistency of cotton candy while trying various unnatural looking contact lens colors to lighten her eye color. Christie Brinkley was her idol. The damage to her psyche was much deeper than the damage to her hair and always evident. Somewhere down the line society implied that she and Christie Brinkley are in the same ethnic ("white") pool. So she tried to live "up" to it. Yes, I am aware there are people of North African heritage who have blonde hair and blue eyes. There are also Sub Saharan Africans who are of Semitic blood. She was neither, and she was oblivious to other similarly endowed women who wore their dark good looks with style . Once, she even criticized my purchase of a dark featured doll for Toys for Tots because it had brown hair, brown eyes and olive skin. It floored her that I had not chosen a "white," blonde doll. "Why would anyone not want a blonde doll?" She was bigoted against her own heredity.

People who perpetuate the idea that individuals are full members of ethnic groups they don't fit into are being, perhaps through unintentional thoughtlessness, cruel. They choose to ignore the damage their personal agendas can inflict upon the sense of self and family circumstances of others. While it is painfully obvious that such monoracial preaching purists have no respect for the turmoil of the multiracial individual, they also ignore the harm done to the identity of the single-race, or ethnic person. Advocates of "one drop" (one drop of black, or Asian or whatever "blood" makes you only that) have only personal interest at heart in the imposition of false identities. We can divide these reasons into political and/or social ones. What it boils down to is that they are getting something from enforcing monoracial doctrine. These ideas have hurt more people than they have ever helped, and there are those who don't wish to see the world ever take steps to move beyond them. Their interests are not served if the concept of "race", which stands on dubious scientific footing at best, is eliminated. Clinging to these outmoded racial distinctions maintains the evil associated with their imposition. Whether it's avoiding the disapproval of older family members who hold on to the "one drop theory" of racial identity due to past (bad) experience, getting a congressional district apportioned as you please, or gaining a social distinction from being the 'lightest" people in the room, it is imposing lies, misery and a low self image on countless others.

You don't have to be exactly the same as somebody else to love them. None of us is exactly the same as any other person, and most of us are blends of different ethnic groups, truth be told. Accepting this reality is the only way to prevent the imposition of the ideas of arbitrary, desirable "racial" characteristics upon even the youngest children. Categorizing people into hypothetical "races" and then trying to squeeze people who are products of the intermingling of two or more of these bogus identifiers into the molds, underscores the weirdness of the whole idea of racial constructs. Perhaps worst of all, it instills a sense of "I SHOULD look a certain way" in children, and then it makes it worse by including people in the child's "racial" grouping who have only some (or even none) of the external characteristics of that grouping. It makes beautiful children believe they should be something they can never be, because other people in their "race" are those things. If we can't understand this and understand each other, we, as a society, have no future worth aspiring to.

Also by Eleanora Hill:

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