Warning: math.
I am transporting a comment I made in a different diary, where I attempt to advance the idea that “unBlack” could, in a funny way, be a more accurate description of what white supremacists apparently envision whiteness to be.
Because that’s what whiteness is: unBlackness.
Black people can be up to 63/64ths white and still be considered Black. That’s a lot of whiteness to not be White. I’m just saying.
From my complexion, anyone can tell I clearly have White ancestors. I’m not non-White. I’m not empty of whiteness, neither by heredity nor by culture. I will not call myself nonwhite again.
Still, strictly speaking, it’s the anti-miscegenists who are the unBlack ones—the ones who say they are completely empty and devoid. Of blackness.
RR3GDAV (thanks for visiting the diary, RR3GDAV!) replied that “the ‘unblack’ don’t lack blackness, they just keep it close to their hearts, and I don’t mean in a loving way.”
I gave a proof.
Their [the anti-miscegenists’] whole point is that they’re “pure”. No, they’re empty.
Let’s say “white” = absence of everything associated with “black” (white ⋂ black — there’s no population with the quality “black” classified in the category “white”).
And let’s say that I, as a Black woman, qualify as both black and white, hereditarily speaking, so I possess qualities of both. Let me represent that as Z. (I’d use X but that’s a bit on the nose for the discussion.) That means that this can be true, at least sometimes: Z = (black)(white).
Substitute variables for the names of the “races”. So let’s use W & B, for simplicity.
If W = W ⋂ B, and Z = BW; that means that
W = Z/B (divide both sides of equation by fixed variable B), which means that, given the transitive property,
W = (Z/B) ⋂ B.
That doesn’t make sense, because it is mathematically impossible. The divisor cannot be eliminated from the set, because by definition it’s what is being divided by.
So, ultimately, I as a Black woman get both strands of lineage (heredity plus culture). Anti-miscegenists, on the other hand, by disavowing any claim to blackness, stand as an empty set. They’re trying to define themselves as what they are not, when what they are trying not to be contains what they think they are. They negate themselves doubly. In terms of identity, they cancel themselves out.
Please check my work.