The Myth of Native American Blood

Warren, explaining/exaggerating the amount of Native American blood (1/32nd, at best) contained in her bodily fluid.  Enough to qualify as a minority, unless you are George Zimmerman, who, despite having one Hispanic parent and a black great-grandfather, is assuredly 100% "white"...   Read here...    by Francie Latour:

The African-American grandmother of a friend of mine once summed up the laws that govern black identity in this country. "If you ever want to know if someone's black or not," she would say, "go ask their white neighbor."

That succinct, small-town Georgia wisdom essentially outlines the rule of hypodescent, also known as the one-drop rule. The one-drop rule emerged during slavery and hardened in Reconstruction, automatically classifying as black anyone with any trace of African ancestry. It is the reason why, in the 1800s, the extremely light-skinned offspring of white fathers and black mothers were deemed slaves. It's also the reason why, in 2011, the actress Halle Berry, who is biracial but identifies as black, became a lightning rod of controversy for maintaining that her own daughter, with white Canadian actor Gabriel Aubry, is also black.
The fact that Americans with vastly different complexions know they are black by the number of cab drivers who don't stop for them as much as by any internal measure is a dilemma on many levels. But for Kim Tallbear, an enrolled member of South Dakota's Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe and a UC Berkeley professor who studies race, genomics and Native American identity, the tyranny of the one-drop rule poses a specific problem in the ongoing controversy surrounding US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren and her shifting, dubious claims of Native American identity.
Because it is so deeply ingrained in us, Tallbear has argued, the one-drop rule blots out any other way of imagining racial identity. As a result, the vast majority of Americans have never been able to grasp Native American identity. As the political soap opera continues to unfold, Tallbear said, both Warren’s romanticized claims and the cries of fraud it has unleashed  serve as more proof that we still don't grasp it...Read here...