I say to you White Americans, “You are not as white as you think!”
One of the reasons I consider myself Black, despite my white skin, is that, as a result of the One Drop policy which ruled this country for hundreds of years, so-called “African Americans” are actually a people of extremely mixed heritage: African, European and Native American. It may be essentially racist, but our culture is steeped in it. We are the Hispanics of the USA.
Most have heard (a lot) about the old trope of the White slave master who would go down into the field to spend time with the slave mistress. And sure, that happened. And that has something to do with the mixing in the African community here. But, I like to remind people what I would have done a hundred or two hundred years ago. I would certainly have moved to a big city somewhere up North and claimed to be some kind of White Mediterranean type, or possibly Jewish. And I’m sure lots of Black folk did exactly that. And they took that secret to their grave. That means that, if you’re White, and if you’re family has been here more than three generations or so, than there’s a pretty fair chance that you’ve got a more colorful ancestry than you might assume. I think that these injections of African ancestry into the European community here happened at least as often as the other way around. We’re all a lot more mixed up than we like to believe.