Second-class citizenship and the case to be recognized as white

SHREVEPORT, La. ( KTAL/KMSS ) – “Race” is America’s four-letter word that everyone knows but would rather ignore – until it is time for demographic grouping, but who or what determines what is considered “Black.”

Frequently, people in the media and newsmakers feel compelled to question a person’s “Blackness.” Whether it is former President Donald Trump questioning when VP Kamala Harris “turned Black” or the overloaded – “Is {Black person} Black enough,”

Most Black professionals will tell you that at some point in their academic or professional journey, they were told by a non-Black colleague or classmate, “You’re Black, but not Black, Black” – whatever that means.

Entertainers, elite athletes, business leaders, and rising politicians who are also Black frequently have their connections to other Black people questioned. The questions are typically posed by journalists, pundits, and culture commentators with little or no connection to the Black community themselves. So the question is, who gets to decide who is Black?

The answer to that question lies in the creation of a racial caste system that made darker skin an automatic ticket to second-class citizenship in the natio n and abroad, Wiley University history professor Dana Fergins explained.

“A caste system, in laymen’s terms, is putting people in a particular box or system to say based on your race or the color of your skin that you’re inferior,” explained Fergins.

Fergins said that since the inception of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, European colonists, under the authority of the Catholic Church, maintained a racial caste system to support the enslavement and oppression of Africans and other Indigenous people.

In Louisiana, the Tignon law required Creole women of color, free or enslaved, to cover their heads with a scarf or wrap. This made it easier to determine who was in society at a glance since lighter skin or untextured hair could cause them to be mistaken for white.

Many Black people who found the skin color burden overwhelming chose to get in where their physical features could help them fit in and chose to pass for white .

“First of all, white-passing is a very dangerous game, depending on what year and where you’re at. White passing entails that you are of such light color descent and you blend well; your hair texture is not what they deem African American.”

While the act of passing for white meant living a life where you were free to move as you please and create the life you wanted, it also meant living in fear that somehow the lie you were living would be exposed. However, passing for white was a non-starter for countless others with fair skin, light eyes, and smoother textured hair.

“In our great state of Louisiana, you can go down to Grand Cane, and you can’t decipher who’s Black and who’s white, but that’s just what our culture is. But many were able to escape and go to New York, go to California, and get those jobs that others could not have gotten based on what they looked like,” Fegins said.

A Louisiana law passed in 1970 set a legal definition for what the state considered Black and was the only one of its kind in the nation. It declared that anyone with one thirty-second of “Negro blood” was Black. Before that, Louisiana said “a trace” of Negro ancestry to consider someone Black. That is until a woman in South Louisiana challenged the law to change her birth certificate to reflect how she identified instead of how the state identified her.

When 48-year-old Susie Guillory Phipps requested her birth certificate through the Bureau of Vital Statistics, she was gobsmacked to learn that she was Black – according to the State of Louisiana, and her birth certificate.

Phipps lived as a white woman her entire life and was twice married to white men. She had no idea that her fourth great-grandmother was an enslaved woman named Margarita – but thanks to the state’s meticulous birth record keeping and race requirement on birth certificates, Phipps was forced to confront her ancestry.

More than 60 terms, including mulato, octaroon, and quadroon, have evolved throughout the state’s history to describe mixed-race people and to sort out the classes of free and enslaved people of color. Phipps wanted nothing to do with any of them and went about the business of suing the State of Louisiana to be declared white.

Gregory Jaynes, a contributing writer from New Orleans, published a September 1982 article about Phipps’ plight in the New York Times . In it, Jaynes recalled interviews with Phipps in which she produced photos of blue-eyed family members and said, “When I found out about the slave, it was last March. We went to court on March 2, and when Jack told me about this Margarita person, I was so sick. I was so sick,” Phipps said.

She was sick because even though it was the early 1980s, being Black was not easy, particularly in parts of the South that were still holding on to segregation. In the case of Phipps, who was born during segregation, an ugly time in our nation’s history, when to be Black meant to be less than, to have a more challenging walk with fewer available resources, and to be denied dignity.

Deny her dignity is exactly what Louisiana did as they paraded in family members and experts in an attempt to refute her claim of whiteness.

Attorneys for the state called Phipps’s aunt and uncle, who identified as Black, to testify to Phipps’s relation to them. The state’s attorney called the bayou where Phipps was born a “free-person-of-color community.” However, a Black sociologist and professor in New Orleans said he applauded Phipps and hoped her case would expose the “foolishness” of race and the caste system in Louisiana and the nation.

Phipps spent a significant amount of money to have the state acknowledge that her white skin was a no-brainer to have her declared a white woman on paper. Louisiana’s one-thirty second of Negro blood was upheld by a magistrate judge.

Louisiana repealed the law in 1983, not long after Phipps’s request to have her whiteness on paper as it is in person was denied in court.

It is easy to judge people like Susie Phipps for seemingly abandoning her family lineage for a “better life” as a white person. However, we should reserve judgment for them and place it squarely on a designed system that often goes out of its way to maintain a built-in second-class citizenry.

Susie Phipps and others who chose to blend with the white mainstream were attempting to “transcend their race” long before it was used to describe Black people who have seemingly bypassed racism as they ascended to the highest levels of their areas of expertise.

So the question remains: What determines whether someone is deemed “Black in America?” Does it matter, and to whom is it most important?

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