Race is a funny thing.

I was watching Dancing with the Stars (I finally got around to last week’s episode last night) and the show played up that the grandmothers of Disney actor Roshon Fegan. On is African-American and the other Filipina, but both were of the age where features were less distinct and had grandma-colored skin, that light tan hue that seems to be the color that so many ethnicities, pale to dark, eventually settle on.

We place so much importance on race. But here were two women – one Black, one Asian – and I had no idea what their race was and clearly it didn’t much matter to them that night either.

All I could think was that one of the grandmas looked like she belonged in my family and I kept trying to figure out who she reminds me of. I’ve kinda settled on my great-grandmother, but she died when I was very young and I only have one picture of her so that seems to be a stretch.

But in America, culturally, we have had a tradition of the “one drop rule.” If you’re at all “black,” then you’re black. Blackness taints your whiteness. Obama in particular “looks black,” and therefore it was probably inescapable that he be identified as such by society, even if he is biracial. Look at Tiger Woods; his Thai mother is standing *right there* but he still gets called “black” all the time, in spite of his protestations that he’s multiracial.

Or to put it another way, race is a stupid thing Western society made up and don’t apply in a reasonable fashion.

Yikes. But it makes sense now.

The lovely Ms. Morrison is, shall I put it mildly, somewhat detached from reality. Okay, a long what detached. (I happened to know details and behind the scenes about a little social drama in which she lost her groove. Not a nice woman. Not a sane woman.)

By the way, shouldn’t there be an ad, if even a comical one, featuring Romney saying “marriage has always been between a man and a woman…and a woman…and a woman…and a woman…”