TRANSCRIPT:
ONE DROP OF LOVE: What’s your name?
KELLY MADISON: Kelly Madison.
ODOL: What race did you choose on the 2010 census?
KM: Black.
ODOL: What do you know about the one-drop rule?
KM: My mom and dad were married in 1957. My dad’s African American from Kentucky, and my mom is Irish-English – born and raised in England, but my grandparents are from Ireland. So, before I was born I knew about the one-drop rule. My dad was in the Air Force and we lived in a lot of different places and, although I was born in California I subsequently lived in the Philippines, in Norway and didn’t come back to America till I was nine and in Norway there was no one-drop rule. There was no reason for them to institutionalize white supremacy so, the fact that my dad was dark and my mom was light didn’t have any meaning. In fact, it was nothing but delightful, apparently, to most people. We were always met with smiles and people were happy to see us because we were different but it had…there was no racism attached to it. So it was quite a shock when I came to the United States and suddenly, my mom being light and my dad being dark had some kind of meaning – some kind of negative meaning, and I had actually been introduced to that when I was about in the third grade…
…At Oslo American School. An American girl asked me, while we were getting ready for swim practice, what color I was. And I looked at her like, “What do you mean what color am I?” She’s like, “What color are you?” and I’m like, “Can’t you see? Is there something wrong with your eyes? I’m THIS color.” And I went home and I told my family at dinner. I said, “This weird thing happened – this girl asked me what color I was. I don’t know what was wrong with her.” And everybody started laughing and I have two older brothers and they started teasing me, “Kelly doesn’t know what color she is.” So I spent a week trying to figure out what color exactly this is. And I looked through all my toys and everything and all week long I was like, “Am I sand colored?” I had a little camel figurine, “Am I camel colored?” And my brothers just thought it was hilarious. And then at the dinner table finally one of my brothers said, “You’re Black.” And I looked at him and I couldn’t have been more puzzled and I could feel the sort of melancholy vibe around the table like, “Kelly is now being introduced to the craziness.” And I thought I’d spent all week long searching for exactly what color this is, and the joke is that I’m stupid because I don’t know that I’m Black. And I could tell by the look on their faces there was something really wrong behind this. I mean obviously it’s irrational, but there was also some pain, some bad history or something. And when I came to the United States and suddenly it meant something to people that my mom was light and my dad was dark – and I knew that I wanted to find out why. What was wrong with people in America?
And that’s what I ended up studying and becoming a professor in.
ODOL: What can we do about racism?
KM: Well, one thing we can do is try to look into it and understand, what are scholars saying about race? Most people don’t know that the concept of race has been thrown out by the American Anthropological Association all the way back in the mid 90’s. People think that race is something that’s real still – so you could learn about why scientists would say that race isn’t real – it seems real – when you’re looking at people, but it’s really just a schema that we’re placing upon this great diversity of human beings – outer diversity in terms of physical appearance.
And you can tell that by this particular show, the one-drop rule. Why did they have the one drop rule if you’re one drop Black, you’re Black? It could have been if you’re one drop white, you’re white, right? Wouldn’t that make sense? White supremacy? One drop of the ‘master’ blood, and you’re white? But it wouldn’t have served the slave owner’s interests in terms of social control, and keeping their property. Right?
The other thing I think people can do is a fine balance between trying to look at things in an ‘unracial’ way and acknowledging racism. I don’t think that we’re going to get anywhere without acknowledging racism, white supremacy in this society and trying to root that out of ourselves. A lot of people will think and a lot of people do say, “Let’s just stop talking about race and, you know, let’s stop counting things that have to do with race.” I actually think that that’s a mistake until we’ve gotten rid of racism because that just means that we’re not able to see what’s going on with racism if we stopped counting things that have to do with race.
I think people need to acknowledge the extent to which we live still in an institutionally racist society. Even if we got rid of all the racist attitudes, we wouldn’t get rid of the racial wealth gap – which is the source of the real differences that we see in access to resources – which we think of as being racial differences – but they’re not. They’re differences that have been created by racism in the way that it’s been institutionalized in our society.
So I think if people want to get rid of racism, then they need to look at those institutional sources of racism and make sure that every child growing up and every person has the same access to resources. And we need to do something consciously – which is what affirmative action is about – to even the playing field. The playing field is completely not even and, in fact, the racial wealth gap, which is the greatest measure of institutionalized racism, has widened did deeply since 2008. Doubled or tripled since 2008. So it is not good enough to just say, “I’m going to stop being racist in my attitudes,” if that institutionalized racism is still there, those attitudes will come back because when you look around and say, “Why do these people who are darker over here live in this neighborhood?” “And these people over here who are lighter live in this other neighborhood.” “How come these people who are lighter seem to be more educated, have more stability in their finances and in their families and everything and these darker people don’t?”
Well, there’s a reason why and it has nothing to do with the actual color of their skin – just the way that the color of their skin has been made to matter politically and in terms of personal practices of people in the United States. THAT’S what we need to address.
ODOL: What did you think about One Drop of Love?
KM: I thought it was brave. Really brave. Really insightful. Fascinating. Very emotional for me – I could so relate to everything that Fanshen was talking about. I haven’t seen a lot of shows that deal with racism at this level of the personal experience of the one-drop rule. I think it was fascinating. It was funny. It was heart-wrenching. It was just all that and I really enjoyed it. It was wonderful.
