By Ryan Michaels
Halle Berry is in a war of words with her ex-partner, Gabriel Aubry, over the racial identity of their daughter, said the Bong Girl herself.
Berry herself was born to a white mother, who was a psychiatric nurse, and a black father, who was a hospital attendant in the same ward. Meanwhile, Aubry is French-Canadian and white. The former couple is in the middle of a bitter custody battle over their 2-year-old daughter, Nahla.
In an interview with Ebony magazine, Berry said, “I feel she’s black. I’m black and I’m her mother, and I believe in the one-drop theory.” The “one-drop” rule refers to Jim Crow laws passed in the South in the 20th century to further disenfranchise African Americans. Though the law varied from state to state, but usually if a person had “one drop” of black blood, they were forbidden to be passed as white.
“I’m not going to put a label on it. I had to decide for myself and that’s what she’s going to have to decide- how she identifies herself in the world,” Berry told Ebony. “What I think is that that’s something she's going to have to decide. And I think, largely, that will be based on how the world identifies her. That’s how I identified myself,” she said. “But I feel like she’s black.”
The remarks of the 44-year-old actress have yet again highlighted an ongoing debate about racial identity in a country that is becoming multi-ethnic with the times. According to data from 2008 and 2009 that was analyzed by the Pew Research Center, one in seven new marriages is between spouses of different races or ethnicities.
