General Discussion

Blackness is an experience, not just an ancestry. If she grew up as a white person with white parents and white grandparents in a society that prizes whiteness, what kind of black experience has she really had?

By way of comparison, I'm half Swedish. My grandma, who passed last year, grew up in a household that was 100% ethnically Swedish, and her baptismal certificate is in Swedish. Her father and her maternal grandparents were from Sweden.

But am I really SWEDISH? Not at all. I don't speak a word of Swedish, I don't cook Swedish food, I don't celebrate any Swedish holidays, and I don't follow any Swedish traditions. My family are all lapsed Lutherans, and that's really about it. Even our Scandinavian genetics are more of a quirk than a heritage.

If I went in search of my "authentic" Swedish roots, I would be as much a tourist as the next person. It wouldn't be something handed down to me, it would be something I invented for myself. That cultural connection is gone.

If she's got an undiscovered black great-grandparent (or whatever), does that make her blackness authentic? Or would it be a return to the one drop rule, where any trace of African blood in a person who is culturally 100% white makes that person irredeemably BLACK?