Caveat: Black or White or What?

In a recent article that appeared in The Atlantic magazine (January 2009) by Hua Hsu, "The End of White America?" the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson asks "Why is it that in the United States, a white woman can have black children but a black woman cannot have white children?"   This has always bothered me.  And it makes glaringly obvious the arbitrary nature of "race."

True post-racialism necessarily must lead to the elimination of such facile and artificial categories as black and white.  Ethnic difference will, of course, persist.  But that's not the same thing at all.

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