What race is he?

Question:My grandson is mixed, B/W. When my daughter fills out forms and they ask about race, she fills in that he is mixed. I do not know if this is true or not, but i have always heard that just one drop of different blood, makes you that color. True or not???

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: My grandson is mixed, B/W. When my daughter fills out forms and they ask about race, she fills in that he is mixed. I do not know if this is true or not, but i have always heard that just one drop of different blood, makes you that color. True or not???

He is half white and half black. Race is very often political. I worked for a hospital and the race had to be put down on admissions. Registrars were told to go by the majority race. I guess by appearance.

The first responder was probably giving you a Hispanic definition. In the South, the only state I knew that defined a white person was Louisiana. I don't know if any of the others did or not. Texas didn't. The Catholic Church requested it of the Louisiana Legislature since Louisiana like other southern states passed laws forbidding marriage between black and white after the Civil War. Churches want to abide by civil laws regarding marriage because of the laws of descent and distribution.

At first it was proposed that a white man was someone with no more 1/152 of 1/156 African blood. However, one legislator from Orleans parish objected. He was either 1/76 or 1/78 black. You can understand that since the white man had privileges that the black man didn't he wanted to make sure he was considered a white an when they got through making the law. So they decided someone with no more than 1/76 of 1/78 black blood was a white man. I read a response someone made to a question about a week ago that under the Jim Crow law as long as you were 9/10 white you were considered white.
Howevere, that had to be in that person's state. We often have people on this board making specific answers to questions when
the law of the state are automonous in some matters.

He is your grandson. Don't get invovlved in trying to explain to someone what his race is. Even if they ask at school. Don't let them pen you down. It is none of their business. They just want to get some additional federal money. He is a member of the human race and that is all that is important.

This is how that works. Race is categorized by the father. My children are half white and half mexican (hispanic), and the hospital told me that they're race would be white because they go by the dad. And i'm not sure what you mean by one drop of different blood. It just depends on whether a gene is dominant or not.

Why does it matter to you? He's your grandson .. You should LOVE him for who he is!

I consider him "mixed", but it doesn't matter.

He is of the human race.
That old "one drop" thing is left-over from the Old South.
BTW the more they learn about DNA, the more they learn that there is no such thing as race.

I have never heard of a hospital that categorized race according to the father. I suppose it could be according to the state that you live in (I'm in Colorado). I have many bi-racial relatives, and on every form that they fill out that asks for race they just put what they feel like putting. Most of the time they check two boxes. Sometimes they write it in -- and sometimes they leave it blank.

As for the "one drop rule" that's an old law that applied to Black people during slavery -- but I don't think anybody goes by it today.

This question cannot be answered because it doesn't exist a 'human race' or 'human races', only ONE human SPECIES.

All humans are classified as belonging to the SPECIES 'Homo sapiens sapiens'.