Okay, this story is mostly worth commenting on because the picture is so damn adorable -- all four of these girls are just so lovely -- but also because it uncovers lingering racial attitudes that beg for examination. English interracial couple Dean Durrant and Alison Spooner have just welcomed their second set of twin girls, and for the second time, one is noticeably light-skinned while the other is darker-complected. The media loves this story, using expressions like "two-toned miracle" and proclaiming one girl "black" and the other "white" -- it's pretty much the same kind of coverage they would give, for instance, a mother cat who nurses an orphaned litter of puppies. Aw, so sweet, they're the same but they're diferent!
But hold up. Dogs and cats are different species, cannot mate, and are (if Tom and Jerry cartoons are to be believed) mortal enemies. But black people and white people are obviously all humans, can and do mate, and can and do love one another, as they do in this family. And the children those couples give birth to aren't forced to hew to one side or other of the color line, except of course by American (and other) cultural legacies of the so-called "one-drop rule," designed to keep all folks with black heritage in a position of subordination. (It also inspired a mass of light-skinned black people to leave their race, history, and families and pass for white.)
As things have improved in this country with regard to race, the situation has gotten more confusing for white people (who make up most of the mainstream media, as they always have). If Halle Berry has a black father and a white mother, is she black? Can she ever be white? Or will we just call her biracial, and claim her half-whiteness with pride when she's playing non-humans in movies like X-Men (but not when playing a crackhead in movies like Losing Isaiah)? The black community has never been confused about this sort of thing -- Barack Obama is black and biracial, as is Rashida Jones, and as for ancestors like Walter F. White, the pale-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed general secretary of the NAACP in the 1920s, well, he was black too (even though he looked so white he could sneak into lynchings and observe them with the white spectators while doing research).
So to call one of these babies "white" and the other "black" is just as naive and foolhardy as calling Rashida Jones white and Halle Berry black -- it's neither necessary nor sufficient. If "race" itself is a social construct, as it surely is, then demarking the line where one race begins and the other one ends will always be a dangerous game -- just as dangerous as pretending the social construct itself doesn't exist. Colorblindness is just as crazy a response to "race" as thinking it's all about skin color (a strange misreading we had to hear a lot about during the Obama campaign). The Durrant-Spooner family has four gorgeous daughters, all of them biracial, all of them (in this country, anyway) welcomed as members of the black community. And all of them simply lovely.
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