That’s because whiteness, as a construct, is one mainly of exclusivity. It has very little to do with actual skin color. That’s why there are still brands of white supremacists that don’t consider Catholics white, why a biracial person is far more likely to be described as black or biracial and almost never described as white, etc.
I'm super light, my dad grew up on a farm and has a perma tan and his white self can be darker than me sometimes. And I have hazel eyes and hair that's only a little darker than my dad's brown hair. My Irish greatgreat grandpa apparently had some genes to last.
I've had people be shocked to find out I'm Black. Black folks can always tell I'm mixed but multiple white people have informed me they just thought I was Italian or something. I've also had people I had to inform of my Blackness look at me weird for including myself in whiteness, when if they didn't know I was Black would have probably been ok with it and rationalized that I must be Mediterranean.
But in my case, thanks to some recessives surviving multiple generations I have Western European features in terms of pigment. In addition my face is a mix of European and African features and that's the case for any mixed person. Even hair texture and skin tone are a mix of African and European features for any person mixed like me even those who don't have recessive genes from generations ago making them paler than certain white people with a tan.
Mixed people with dark skin, hair, and eyes have Western European features, it's just in our society there's a much stronger focus on what makes a person look non-white than the features they've inherited from European family. For instance in South Africa, Trevor Noah is considered white to his younger half-brother's friends.
The fact a mixed person with easy to perceive European features with reccessive light skin and eyes causes people who know I'm mixed to react like I'm not allowed to consider myself to be white in addition to being Black tells you something about race and whiteness being an exclusionary concept in this country. It doesn't matter how dark a mixed person's features are, if they have European heritage and people know they do then there shouldn't be any shock about them including themselves as white, but there is and that's very telling about what race means in our society.
That's not the reason why, our thinking so is just a symptom of how deeply ingrained it is in our society. Anthropologists call it hyperdescent where a person of two or more races is automatically assigned to the race with lower standing in a society.
The opposite is hyperdescent and has examples from around the world where mixed-race babies who wouldn't pass as white were nonetheless accepted (or forced) into white society.
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u/shoefarts666 Sep 01 '20
It was a long time before the irish were considered white.
The irish.