Christa Fagerberg Quotes
This form is only an application for a marriage license and yet it asks for my color. I looked at my arm and wrote “pink”, Your assistant then said that I have to pick from White, Brown, Black, Yellow or Red. The form says I answer under penalty of perjury, so I want to tell the truth, but the city of New York must explain to me how I tell what color I am. I am a trained artist and I can assure you that my skin color is not a white. My ancestors came from Germany and the yellow Mongols and Huns raped and pillaged there, not to mention the blacks from North Africa. So what is the test a citizen should use to determine color if not pigment?
The chief clerk was only complying with the NYC laws which were preoccupied with identifying racial intermarriage which was not common and frowned upon even in liberal New York City. However, the clerk had wanted to get rid of the questions and used this case and a few months later New York City no longer asked for color on their marriage license. No one could find a legal definition or a scientific definition of color or race that could guide a citizen who did not know.
Christa Fagerberg, Artist, Question of the Chief Clerk of New York City, November, 1959
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The population was an amalgam of Spaniards, Englishmen and other Europeans, Blacks originally brought over as slaves from Africa, and indigenous people from many different tribes.
In 1885 Canada defined a legal person:
Many Irish use the term “race” in a cultural sense. To them, the Irish are a different race from the English or the Italians.
There was a huge amount of racial interbreeding during the early slavery times of America. Some was consensual as people will be people, but much was the rape of Black slaves my white masters—a concept that was never considered rape by law as one cannot commit a crime against one’s own property. The result after time was every possible combination of white/black mixture. There were names for many of the combinations: Quadroons were one fourth Negro. Octaroons, one-eighth. During and after reconstruction, for purposes of discriminatory law, who was a Negro? The Louisiana “one drop rule” said that if there was ANY trace of Negro ancestry, that person was a Negro and would be discriminated against. Of course, what would happen was that many mixed race children were light skinned and looked white and many were black and all shades in between. It was relatively easy for the lighter skinned “one drop” Negroes to pass as white especially if the left the state. But if anyone accused them of being Negro, they would have been guilty of committing crimes. Some in modern times have little comprehension of how the white plantation slave owners and other whitrd could condemn their own children to a second class life of vicious discrimination, but that is exactly what they did. The great irony here lies with the modern KKK, Nazi, and other White Supremacy Groups. They still hold to the “one drip rule for their viciousness. However, under the one drop rule, almost all of them would be Negroes if they went back far enough, and ALL ARE BLACK under the one drop rule as with modern DNA and genetic analysis, we now know that every human alive today emanated from a Black woman in Africa.
Later, Italy was totally subservient to Germany later and Mussolini accepted German racist policies. Actually, there is only one human race and all members of it have the same original common ancestor, and African female.
Lame was not opposed to civil rights as some who read this quotation sometimes conclude. He did think that much of the lack of success of minorities in America could be ameliorated by many self-improvement and individual efforts. His reference to destroying America, was an interesting rhetorical technique of assuming that what you advocate is not implemented and showing that it leads to disaster. Phrased this way, it gets and focuses the attention of an audience.
Mother of NOAAA Assistant Director of Sea Grant programs, Jonathan Eigen and first wife of Dr. Lewis Eigen.
