Darren New wrote:
> John VanSickle wrote:
>> Who is, as most people know, Cablinasian, that is, a mixture of 
>> Caucasian, black, Native American, and asian.
> 
> Yes, but in America, that makes you black.  Americans wants native 
> american (indian) land, so you had to be mostly indian to lay a claim to 
> it.

Actually, it's the tribes themselves who set the rules on claims to 
anything tribal nowadays.  Now that many reservations have casinos, 
there is actually substantial amounts of money at stake.  Some tribal 
councils, after establishing that profits are to be shared equally among 
all tribal members, have been removing people from the tribal rolls in 
order to reduce the size of the denominator.

Not a big issue, until they start taking dead people off of the rolls, 
which leaves many living members with no leg to stand on when the 
council challenges their own membership.

The moral of the story:  Greed is not genetic.

> On the other hand, Americans wanted black slaves, so if you're even 
> a tiny bit black, you're "black".

Since there were not a few non-whites who owned black slaves in the 
south [1] and since not all blacks in the south were slaves, it was not 
a simple case of black=slave.  The laws are far more likely to be an 
artifact of post-slavery racism.  If being part white qualified you as 
being white, then there's nothing to stop every black on earth from 
claiming that ancestry.

Regards,
John

[1] Several of the Native American tribes owned slaves, of their own 
race and of any other that was for sale (invariably black).  Ironically, 
the first slave to challenge, in an American court, the legality of 
slavery (and thus his master's claim to his servitude), was owned by a 
black man.

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