What if your skin is light, but your curls reveal your Blackness. It only takes one drop. Being half Black and half white means one cannot easily check off one box or another. The number of people identifying as multiracial in the United States has surged in recent years.

And what if you are too Black to be white and too white to be Black.

And often the term “mulatto,” is used. it is an offensive, archaic term to describe a person with white and Black parents. Derived from the Spanish word for mule, or “mulo,” it was used during slavery to liken biracial people to the hybrid animal and to justify their legal and social oppression. If this is used to describe you, you may feel mocked, sexualized and dehumanized.

For somebody to use it today, it really is an especially derogatory use, because it’s really going back to the era of slavery in the U.S.

Racism has pervaded the United States since before its founding, and this kind of dehumanizing language is not unusual.

In the current political moment, we are really seeing a turning back of the clock, a return to sort of these past, older ideas about race, and especially about racial superiority and inferiority,”

Also, there is a long history of racial fetishization, tracing back to when European colonizers viewed Black people as possessions and Black women were hyper sexualized, in order to justify the violence that the colonizers inflicted upon them. Enslaved women were sexually abused all the time.

“Mulatto” used to be a racial category on the census, along with “octoroon,” meaning one-eighth African blood, and “quadroon,” meaning one-fourth African blood. The 1870 census defined “mulatto” as including “all persons having any perceptible trace of African blood,” according to the Pew Research Center.

Scientists included these categories on the census because they were trying to prove that biracial people were not fertile and a “doomed class of people, which was a pseudoscientific justification to prevent interracial mixing.

Our society’s ideas about race are constantly fluctuating. Racial categories have changed on nearly every census since the first in 1790. The 2030 census will include new “Hispanic or Latino” and “Middle Eastern or North African” boxes to check.

Race is a political and social classification system, which humans invented to divide people into different “categories of worth.”

The deepest divide in this country is not perhaps one between Democrats and Republicans or conservatives and liberals. It is one from which racism takes root: how we choose to treat each other. Do we respond to our differences with hate and a desire to control, or with empathy and love? This is what defines our society.

Racism isn’t always about hate. It can also stem from patterns we inherited or habits we’ve never questioned. That kind of thinking doesn’t just fade with time. Racism is taught and exists in all of us. It is embedded in the systems that structure our lives.

The only way to overcome it is to have a burning passion to disintegrate it, within ourselves and our communities.

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