Splitting hairs...

     It should not come as a surprise that Michelle Obama's ancestry includes both white and black folk: both slave-owners and slaves. What is surprising is the amount of coverage these kinds of issues continue to receive. Will we ever just accept-- nonchalantly, unremarkably, obviously-- that we all have mixed heritage?! That whatever ancestry you think you have, you most certainly have something that doesn't fit the category into which you fit yourself… 
     Though I'm a bit weirded out by the fact that this counts as front-page news in the New York Times, I suppose that the article states the obvious and this is necessary since not everyone accepts this as the most obvious fact in the world. And I'm fully on board with the comments of the historian, Edward Bell: “We are not separate tribes of Latinos and whites and blacks in America,” Mr. Ball said. “We’ve all mingled, and we have done so for generations.” 
     What I find troublesome is the apparent amazement, the need to remark on the fact that this new "discovery" illuminates "the complicated history of racial intermingling, sometimes born of violence or coercion, that lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans." Hello!! If complicated histories linger in (some) bloodlines, they linger in ALL bloodlines! Clearly there are huge swaths of the American population that live as whites, "pure and simple," but whose ancestry most definitely contains traces of "racial intermingling" and traumatic and complicated histories.  


I realize that this may be splitting hairs, but that's what I do… I split hairs…