Our 9th Vice President had an enslaved wife

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My husband raped me and used the Bible to justify it. It doesn’t make it okay or any less hurtful even though I was an ignorant believer at the time and didn’t know that my experiences even counted.

He was (and is) a psychopath. People often use their holy books to justify their actions rather than inform them. Normal people wouldn’t want to behave this way, not even in Johnson’s day. It was just easier to get away with it.

Sorry about your experiences. Psychopaths are evil, and are all over the place.

!	Cornflake wrote:
	Several posts making personal attacks have been removed. Additionally, an off topic sequence has also been removed. If a post upsets or causes concern it should be reported - the poster must not be attacked for making the post.

If you look at Table 10 in here

https://www2.census.gov/library/publica ... _v1-13.pdf

The 1890 Census had "Persons of Negro Descent" divided into Negroes, Mulattoes, Quadroons and Octoroons.

About 15% of the people classified as "Negro" had 50% or more "White" ancestry.

Most of them were probably descended from slave women who had been raped (if we're going with the concept that the consent of an enslaved person doesn't count).

Also;


This got me thinking about how people understand their ethnic identity, vs. what their ancestry is.

It seems like when there's a significant mixed community, often an identity will emerge for that community (like the Lumbee or Cherokee Freedmen). It seems like when there isn't, mixed individuals end up assimilating into another group.

From that premise, there's likely a lot of white, native and black people with more mixed ancestry than they realize. Anti-miscegenation laws would impact how some minority communities assimilated (making native and black, and Asian and black marriages more common).

Appearance and ethnicity seems like a difficult topic to untangle though. Epicanthic folds (for example) are common in peoples of East Asian descent, but also Amerinds, some Africans, some Central and South Asians, some Europeans, etc. Someone who has them may or may not have gotten them from where someone else guesses.

I'd assume people who are imposing some other identity on you are wishfully projecting because they see a trait they associate with themselves and the group they identify with. That said, if you do have either Amerind or Polynesian ancestry, they might just (literally) be recognizing it.

That cringing from finding out the truth or being heartbroken upon discovery reactions are really disturbing. Imagine getting upset over your ancestor being from one background vs. another. I'm not even sure it should impact how one identifies going forward, although it should probably serve as a reflection point if someone views their ancestor's group as lessers.

Maybe your appearance resembles Nina Mae McKinney



I'm watching the movie Sanders of the River. Paul Robeson absolutely outclasses everyone else in the movie--even dressed in a loincloth.

Nina Mae McKinney, especially compared to the other "Black" actors, with her fair skin and non-kinky hair, looked "White" to me. They both seemed out of place in a movie about colonial Nigeria. I suppose that's just part of the movie's charm.

The daughter of friends of my parents told of stepping out of an elevator and being stopped by a young man who said one thing:

"Dont tell me! Comanche. Right?"

The guy then explained that he was a Native American of a plains tribe( like the Dakota).He was confident that he could not only recognize other Native Americans and could even peg their specific tribe (kinda like how White Americans like me will type other White Americans as "looking Irish", or "looking Italian..Swedish...Jewish ...et al". ).

She had to explain to him that "no, I am half Japanese, and half White American". She was the daughter of a White American Service man stationed in post WWII Japan with a VERY English last name, and a local Japanese lady.

But in all fairness native Americans often do look like a mix of Caucasian and East Asian.

Here is a movie relevant to the subject: "Band of Angels"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070354/

Given laws in the US that banned/forbid interracial intimacy, the 20-25% European genes in the average African American suggest that nearly every single female slave was subject to rape.

Romantic notions of presidents falling in love with their servants (a narrative pushed on the US public) unfortunately does not sugar coat the fact that these man of high social standing were basically indulging in rape and pedophilia.

It's no wonder there is an active attempt for this topic to be erased from US schools.