Stardate 20020327.1001

(On Screen): Much is being made of how Halle Berry is the first "black actress" to win an Academy Award for "Best Actress". Halle Berry is a stunningly beautiful young woman, and by all reports she is also very talented. But is she "black"?

This is a picture of Miss Berry with her mother, Judith. If Miss Berry is "black" because her father is black, why isn't she "white" because her mother is white? (I know the answer, of course.)

Tiger Woods keeps running into this one. When African-American activists try to claim him as a sterling example of African-American achievement, he protests that he's also a Thai-American. (And when he competes in Thailand, the locals always rally to his support as a home-town boy, because they think of him as Thai. Which, indeed, he is.)

I make jokes about being Dutch, but in actuality, like nearly every American who isn't a recent immigrant I'm a mongrel. There's German in here and also English, and probably a whole lot of other things I don't know about. And though Miss Berry is a particularly obvious example, nearly every "African American" can trace at least some ancestry to Europe. (Mostly via rape, sad to say, though as Miss Berry shows it is increasingly through love.)

I dream of a day when those kinds of labels become nothing more than curiosities. I look forward to a time when being a hyphenated-American is seen as an affectation.