(Mis)labeling.

I just changed my profile on this blog to identify myself as an old white guy. The "old" part is a given. The white part is not so clear. It is, after all, just a matter of labeling. Or mislabeling.

Barack Obama is hailed far and wide as the black president. But, while his father (who deserted him before his birth) was certainly a black man, his mother and the grandparents who raised him were most surely white. Still, he is considered black.

Takes me back to the One Drop Rule of the old slavery south. According to Wikipedia, "The one-drop rule is a historical colloquial term in the United States for the social classification as Negro of individuals with any African ancestry; meaning any person with "one drop of Negro blood" was considered black."

Now, I may well have "one drop" of non-white blood in my veins. How could I know? I can trace my ancestry only so far, and have made no attempt to trace the ancestry of all of the wives and husbands along the way.

Then, again, according to Wikipedia, "The principle of "invisible blackness" was an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnicgroups to the group with the lower status." But wait... which is the lower status?

^{By that rule, why isn't Obama considered white? Can't Negro, or African, or Black (pick your label) be considered the higher status? A lot of people think so!}
.

More from Wikipedia: "Despite the strictures of slavery, in the antebellum years, free people of mixed race could have up to one-eighth or one-quarter African ancestry (depending on the state) and be considered legally white."

Okay, My skin color would indicate that I am one-eighth or one-quarter white. So I am an old white guy. What does that make me, other than the product of the breeding choices of all of my ancestors since Noah? (By the way, what was Noah's ethnicity?)

Another example of mislabeling that irks me is the media preference for the label "atheist" when referring to anti-religious people. Most atheists do not consider themselves anti-religious. One close friend who is an atheist complained when it was revealed that young children were taught in school that God made the planets rotate around the sun. Fair enough, but that is simply objecting to the teaching of things other than proven facts.

Yet, every time a group protests a nativity scene on city property, they are immediately identified as atheists. Why not be more accurate and call them what they are: anti-religious groups.