Was Babe Ruth black?
A lot of people think the most celebrated player in baseball history had some black ancestry, given his facial features and dark complexion. Many opponents during his career — Ruth played in the all-white major leagues long before they were integrated — would taunt him with racial slurs, and historians have inconclusively examined the question of Ruth’s heritage. There is, indeed, some gallows humor in thinking that baseball’s owners considered their game to be lily-white while Ruth was making a mockery of it.
Is Tiger Woods African-American?
Woods, the most celebrated golfer of his generation, universally is regarded as black and as a groundbreaking symbol for his race in a traditionally exclusive sport. Yet his mother is a native of Thailand, making him at least half-Asian.
And therein lies the problem. When it comes to race, we are bound and determined to wedge individuals and their millennia of family history into little boxes. Fill out the form and check the box that says either “Caucasian” or “black” or “American Indian” or “Hispanic,” regardless of the fact that reality is far too complex to be so easily defined.
Anyway, I thought about all of this the other day as the story of Rachel Dolezal became national news. Dolezal, 37, is president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane and apparently has become a well-known civil rights activist in Eastern Washington. Her parents, who live in Montana, did a TV interview last week in which her mother, Ruthanne Dolezal, said, “She chose to represent herself as an African-American woman or a biracial person, and that’s simply not true. … She’s our birth daughter, and we’re both of European descent.” Ruthanne Dolezal added that her daughter began to portray herself as African-American eight or nine years ago, after the family adopted four black children.
