I'll take this one. I am half black and half white. I'm about 5 years younger than the president. Growing up in was always referred to as black. It's just how it is.
Several years ago on a Sunday morning, I had to take my daughter to the airport for one of her gigs at the HardRock Resort in Cancun but coming back I was listening to a program on NPR and they were interviewing a scientist with the Human Genome Project and they discussed the concept of race at the genetic level. It was so fascinating that I drove around for an extra hour just to listen to the whole program.
In all the 1000's and 1000's of humans they had tested their DNA, none and I mean none were of any ideal pure racial stock. Most European or American of European ancestry tested for example were found with some level of African DNA and in Africa, many were found with some level of European DNA. The scientist being interviewed, he was from England, traced his own genealogy back near a 1000 years to all European ancestry and yet 12% of his DNA was African. Now obviously the levels of DNA would differ depending on family ancestry but the fact is, we all share common DNA in our genome.
We judge race by skin type but in anthropology, race is judged by language. To the anthropologist, the people of Iran and India and the peoples of Europe are common kin to one another as a result of their language root sources and not as a matter of skin color. If one would follow the historical migratory travels of the Europeans before they populated Europe, one can trace these peoples back through the Caucasus mountains, hence the term Caucasians, and from there back into the region we know today as Iran and to the east of what many call the fertile crescent that was ancient Sumer and the region where known organized civilization began. Look up the terms Indo European and Proto Indo European.
Going back further still, these Indo peoples can trace their linage back to the first migrants out of Africa that traveled east and began to settle in the regions in the shadows of the Himalayan and Karakoram Mountain ranges. I speculate myself that between the mountains and possible ice as result of the most previous Ice Age presented a barrier that was not breeched until sometime later but that is my speculation and not so much a scientific conclusion, at least that I know of. This "Out of Africa" migration would seem on one level to explain the spread of common DNA across such a wide swarth of the planet. But this is all just a tip of the iceberg but to me, it is a fascinating subject.
I might call myself white because externally this is what I resemble the closest but inside, I'm likely a whole lot of mixture of everything and as to claim to be exclusively white, that seems to me would not be true. In fact, when someone ask me my race, I always answer Heinz 57 and after sharing a brief laugh with the questioner and an occasional replay of "me too", I'm forced to pick from one of the accepted boxes which I know is no longer valid. Friend of mine who shares a similar makeup as yourself refers to himself as Mocha which we all laugh but on some level we might all be mocha too.
IMO, Race built on external appearances is a false construct from old scientific assumptions now proven wrong, or at the least brought into serious question, by the Human Genome Project.
If we all had our own DNA tested, I suspect none of us would leave the room without a bit of a shock. Not unlike Jay's story among many.
