"Passing" II

My (white) friend Cecilia grew up with the understanding that her (white) mother had been adopted as a baby by a black family back in the 1930s. When she told me this story only a few years ago, I thought about Cecilia's (white) son who had the ability to grow fabulous dreadlocks, the envy of my son and all the other boys in their class. I asked Cecilia if she didn't think it strange that a white parent would want to place her child with a black family back then when being brought up in a black family would be so much more difficult than if the child had been placed in a white family. It hadn't occurred to her, and I wasn't going to press the point.

I met Cecilia's mother several times, a lovely light-skinned woman with straight dark hair and brown eyes. Her adoptive family never came up in our conversations, but I would love to have known what she believed.

So much depends on phenotypes, yet the "one drop" rule seems to carry the day.