One Drop Nonsense

Here's something from the Grauniad which caught my eye just now, and which I think says a great deal about how tenacious a certain pattern of racist thinking remains in the United States.

A Long Island couple are suing a fertility clinic for mixing up sperm samples after their baby girl was born with darker skin than either parent.

Thomas and Nancy Andrews claim that the New York clinic, Medical Services for Reproductive Medicine, was negligent and used the sperm of another man. When they noticed the baby's skin was darker than their own they were told by the doctor involved that the in vitro fertilisation had been done properly and the condition was normal. The doctor assured them, according to court papers, that the child would "get lighter over time".

In a ruling released on Wednesday allowing the case to proceed, a judge said that the error had forced the couple to raise a child who is "not even the same race, nationality, colour...as they are."(emphasis added)

Now, when you read carefully through the entire article, you realize that the egg from which the child originated was in fact the mother's, while the article also notes that

Jessica Andrews was born in October 2004 to a Hispanic mother and Caucasian father, the couple's second child.

Seeing as "Hispanic" isn't even a "race" under any meaningful interpretation but more of a catchall word for referring to Spanish-speaking immigrants from south of the Rio Grande - a great many of whom are at least as black as Colin Powell and Harold Ford - and in light of the fact that Mrs Andrews is in fact the child's biological mother, the quote only makes sense if one considers being partially "of African or African-American descent" as something which irredeemably taints Jessica Andrews as no longer being of the "same race" as her "Hispanic" [sic] mother: in other words, what we see here is nothing but ye olde "One Drop Rule" thinking at work, with African ancestry being regarded as a taint. The irony in this case is that unless Mrs. Andrews ancestors landed in Argentina within the last 100 years, the probability of her having recent African ancestors is almost 100%.

But leaving aside questions of genetics, there is also something else which is ridiculous about the judge's statement, to wit the claim that this child isn't even of the same "nationality" as the Andrews. Last I heard, children born in the United States are automatically entitled to US citizenship, as are those with American mothers, which means Jessica Andrews is an American by right in at least two ways, even ignoring the fact that her father is nearly certainly American as well, so what the hell does this idiot of a judge mean by claiming she doesn't share their nationality? Additionally, what is so terrible about raising a child who is "not even the same race, nationality, colour" as oneself anyway? Innumerable couples all around the world go out of their way to undertake just such a course of action, in that obscure process called "international adoption", and these poor souls even manage to take some measure of joy in fostering those children who share neither their race, nor their nationality, nor their skin color ...

To the extent that there is anything sympathetic about the plight of Thomas and Nancy Andrews, it is more than nullified in my eyes by the ugly assumptions behind both their lawsuit and the ruling which has kept it from being extinguished. The "Medical Services for Reproductive Medicine" clinic is no doubt guilty of negligence, but the only individual really deserving of sympathy in this case is Jessica Andrews, who will have to grow up with the awareness that the racist scum who are her unwilling "parents" found being seen with her in public so embarrassing that they were driven to file a lawsuit claiming damages for her coming into existence: as the story makes clear, they wouldn't have been at all as bothered about the clinic's screw-up if only the father had been white.

PS: I'm not the only one sickened by this lawsuit, nor am I in the least surprised that the mother is actually from the Dominican Republic, one of those Latin American countries where everyone is obsessed with the subtleties of classification by skin tone precisely because they're all aware there's an African or two hiding in the family tree.

PPS: Someone else who gets it.