"Faces of America:" More Reasons Why the Idea of "Any Known Blood" Is Ridiculous

As I begin the wrap up on the manuscript of Making Waves: The Portuguese Adventure, I've delved back again into the complicated vision of race. One of the things that is most striking is the difference between the attutide toward racial mixing in Brazil and in North America, particularly in the United States. While discrimination on colour lines exists in Brazil, what doesn't exist is the idea that "any known blood" makes someone Black, or a person of colour or Afro-whatever.

Nowhere does that show up more strikingly than in a comparison of Elizabeth Alexander, the distinguished African-American scholar who was invited to read a poem at Barak Obama's inaugaration, and former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

There is no doubt that Alexander would be considered an African-American, even though it turns out that she has more white ancestors than black and that's she's a descendant of King John of England (1167 – 1216) who sealed the Magna Charta. Cardoso, on the other hand, was considered by 70 per cent of Brazilians to be white even though he called himself a "mulatino" with "one foot in the kitchen."

It would help a lot if we recognized that we are mixtures, that there is no such thing as "racial purity," and that skin colour is merely an adaptation that has developed in many forms in many places with little relation to any other trait.