A Real Black VS A Mulatto: Y'all Really Can't Tell the Difference?!?!

IllmaticDelta

IllmaticDelta

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Kuwka_Atcha_Ratcha said:
white women like Rachel look black by usa standards though :mjlol:
fooled all you idiots for 20 years
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"Invissible Blackness" case...exactly who the one drop rule was made for not people with obvious afro features



One Drop Rule doesn't apply to people who are of African descent but look mixed but people of African descent who look "white".

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Why did a well known and successful white man pretend to be black in the late 1800s --- only to reveal the truth on his deathbed?


Photograph taken in Washington DC., at the time of the sitting he was 27yrs old.
U.S. Dept of Interior

[1842 - 1901]

Clarence King was a blond blue blood from Newport who distinguished himself at an early age. He traveled West in the 1860s, found work with the California State Geological Survey, helped to map the Sierra and became geologist in charge of the United States Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel in 1867, when he was 25. He then became a familiar luminary in both New York and Washington. But his early years of roaming were just a prelude to what seems to have been a permanently rootless state.

Or so it seemed to his friends, who became used to his unexpected absences and thought of him as a perennial bachelor. What they did not know was that when Clarence was not living in various clubs and hotels, he was married and the father of five children.

He was deeply devoted to his wife, (Ada Copeland), a black woman 19 years his junior. This blue-eyed man, descended from signers of the Magna Carta, had successfully cultivated the impression that he was black, too.

The existence of Ada and their children became publicly known only in 1933, at a trial in which Ada tried to recover the trust fund Clarence had promised her.

He had been dead for more than 30 years, so the shock waves generated by the trial were considerable. Most dramatic, is the way that revisionists demoted Clarence from hero to "tragic hero," not to mention "the most lavishly overpraised man of his time," upon discovering that he had been married to a former slave. This was typical of the sickening headlines surrounding the trial: "Mammy Bares Life as Wife of Scientist."

All of this has long been a matter of record. The fact that King went further than merely marrying Ada and concealing her existence from his friends and family. He also adopted the name James Todd, under which he married Ada, and claimed to be a Pullman Porter, a job held exclusively by black workers. Employment on a train helped explain to Ada why he was so well traveled and so frequently absent from home. (Later he would claim to be a clerk and a steelworker too.)

Clarence's wife Ada came from Georgia, was born pre-Emancipation and traveled to New York City to live as a domestic and children's nursemaid. In other words, she went from one set of strictures to another, and only with King did she achieve some kind of autonomy in a middle-class household.

Todd family members were variously designated "white," "negro" or "mulatto," based not on evidence but on context. Ada and Clarence's sons were deemed black when seen with their dark-skinned mother. But their two daughters married white men and effectively turned themselves into white women.

"Civilization so narrows the gamut!" King once wrote to Hay. "Respectability lets the human pendulum swing over such a pitiful little arc." But in rebelling against that notion, King created an arc wider than anything he might have imagined and lived a more profound lie than dissemblers about race or gender usually can.

The book 'Passing Strange' by Martha A. Sandweiss offers a fine, mesmerizing account of how one extremely secretive man, "acting from a complicated mix of loyalty and self-interest, reckless desire and social conservatism," could encapsulate his country's shifting ideas about race in the course of one family's anything but black-and-white history.

*Dying of tuberculosis he would eventually reveal his secret to his wife and children. His wife (Ada Copeland) assumed her husband to be a 'mulatto.' *

"PASSING STRANGE"
A Gilded Age Tale
of Love and Deception
Across the Color Line
By Martha A. Sandweiss
Penguin Press
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The bolded part is very important


Sandweiss unearths a compelling tale of secret racial identity

For three decades, history professor Martha Sandweiss had wondered about a little-noticed detail in the life of Clarence King, a well-known figure in the history of the American West. King, a 19th-century geologist and author, was a leading surveyor who mapped the West after the Civil War.

Back in graduate school, Sandweiss had read a 500-page biography of King that devoted just five pages to a secret, 13-year relationship that King, who was white, had with a black woman.

"Thirteen years, five pages? It just didn't seem right to me," said Sandweiss, a historian of the American West who joined the Princeton faculty last year.

A few years ago, Sandweiss decided it was time to investigate. Poring through census documents that were available online, she was able to discover in a matter of minutes that King, who was blond and blue eyed, had been leading a double life as a white man passing as a black man.

"Once I uncovered that, I knew I had to try to unravel the story," she said.

The result is "Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line," published earlier this year by The Penguin Press.

The book uncovers a secret double life -- King, a well-regarded explorer from a prominent Newport, R.I., family, also lived as James Todd, who professed to be a Pullman porter and steelworker. At gentleman's clubs and elite residential hotels in New York City, he was the witty white scientist and author who was called "the best and brightest of his generation" by Secretary of State John Hay. At 48 N. Prince St. in Flushing, Queens, he was the black common-law husband of Ada Copeland, who had been born into slavery in Georgia during the Civil War, and the father of their five children.

Why did King live this way? The only logical explanation, according to Sandweiss, is that he was in love.

"He could have had a mistress, and he didn't," Sandweiss said. "He gave this woman and these children his name -- OK, it wasn't his real name -- but he provided for them. He hired piano teachers and tutors for the children, he found them homes, and it came at a tremendous personal cost." King was deeply in debt for years, and at one point he suffered a nervous breakdown.

Sandweiss pieced together King's secret life with extensive research, following the few clues that were available. After unearthing the census documents -- in which Ada falsely reported that her husband, whom she knew as James Todd, had been born in the West Indies -- Sandweiss studied birth and medical records, old streetcar routes, maps of Brooklyn and letters King sent to his wife.


Untangling a hidden life

The New York Times' book critic Janet Maslin named "Passing Strange" one of the top 10 books of the year, calling it "a fine, mesmerizing account of how one extremely secretive man … could encapsulate his country's shifting ideas about race." The film rights to the book have been optioned by HBO.

Born in 1842, Clarence King was raised in Newport by parents of old American stock and was educated at Yale University. He became famous in his 20s as the leader of the U.S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, which mapped the West. Later he was the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, a close friend of historian Henry Adams and a much-admired dinner guest at society parties in New York.

At the age of 46, King married Ada Copeland, who was then working in New York as a children's nursemaid, in a religious ceremony at her aunt's house. (Since there was no civil ceremony, it is considered a common-law marriage.) Ada, 19 years his junior, lived with their children in Brooklyn and later Queens, attributing her husband's long absences to his job as a Pullman porter, a position held exclusively by black men. King kept his secret well hidden. Sandweiss never found a photo of the couple together or any photos of King with his children.

King's ability to conceal a black wife and children who lived in the same city was only possible because of New York's unique attributes, Sandweiss said.

"New York had segregated neighborhoods and excellent public transportation," she pointed out. King lived as a bachelor in all-white gentleman's clubs in Manhattan, and hopped on the streetcar when he wanted to visit his family in another borough.

But the most amazing part of King's story is that someone with fair hair and blue eyes was accepted as a black man. He managed it, Sandweiss said, because of the so-called "one-drop" laws passed in the South during Reconstruction, which declared that someone with one black great-grandparent was considered legally black.

"The laws were meant to make it very difficult to move from one racial category to the other," Sandweiss said. "Ironically, they made it very possible to do that, because you could claim an ancestry -- or more often hide an ancestry -- that was invisible in the color of your skin."


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AT LEFT: This 1879 photo of Clarence King was taken while he served as director of the United States Geological Survey. (Photo: Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library) AT RIGHT Ada Copeland King, pictured in 1933, is accompanied by her son, Wallace, whose father was Clarence King. (Photo: Courtesy of the New York Daily News)

King finally confessed to his wife and family by letter in 1901 from Arizona, where he died of tuberculosis. Ada, who died in 1964 at the age of 103, was one of the last living former slaves in the United States.

Sandweiss' research led her to a living relative of Ada's who had known her well -- her great-granddaughter, Patricia Chacon, who shared memories and photos of Ada.

Anxiety about race continued to play a significant role in the lives of the couple's descendants. Their two daughters married as white, each vouching for the other's racial identity at city hall, "which meant they had to leave their mother at home, because she was dark-complected," Sandweiss said. Their granddaughter, Thelma, whom Ada raised, married a white man who, according to Sandweiss' book, "hinted that her mixed racial heritage should remain a secret. ... Anxious about what her own children might look like, Thelma adopted two white infants in the 1950s."

"The vexing problem of race stalked this family for many years," Sandweiss said.
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Princeton University - Sandweiss unearths a compelling tale of secret racial identity

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Clarence King (shown on far right)

Clarence King: Man of Maps, Mines, and Mystery
 
DabbinSauce

DabbinSauce

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Knuckles Red said:
The bottom line is that we shouldn't claim mulattos because they're detrimental to the black race.
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How does one claim another? Isn't claiming something a person should do with one of their significant others(oh yeah im fukkin that bytch or hell naw i aint fukk her<---that's what claiming is)

I can't claim a race for another person, they have to claim what they want to be for themselves. I can't follow a bi-racial person when they go to fill out applications and force them to check black so i dont understand that angle.

By mulatto are you referring to people with a non-black parent or blacks with admixture? Why do you deny that blacks with admixture can overlap with people who have a non-black parent?
 
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