Age Not Race

As I was reading about the gifted young Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahones today I came across a story calling him a black player. That got my dander up. Why does someone want to call him black to the exclusion of everything else? In Mahones's case, it is not an either-or thing. He is clearly biracial. One can clearly see his black heritage in his hair. Not so much in his nose and lips. And hardly at all in his skin color. Jimmy Garappolo, the Italian-American Forty-Niners quarterback is if anything darker than Mahones. But no one calls him Italian.

Years ago I once asked someone why Barack Obama was the first "black" president. He had a white mother and a black father, so why didn't we call him the first biracial president? He responded by saying it was the old drop-of-blood rule. If you had a single drop of black blood you were considered black. 

Well cripes. It is pretty stupid to let a racist rule from the days of slavery or Jim Crow govern how we do things today. If it is absolutely imperative to know a person's racial background, why don't we at least do it scientifically?

A couple of years ago my older son gave me a 23andMe DNA test for Christmas. I had mostly identified as Italian growing up, even though my mom was English (maiden name Franklin). Part of the reason was my Italian surname. But an even greater reason I think was that my uncle married a 100% Italian girl. She was such a great cook that it was natural for me to identify with the Italian side of the family. But when I got the 23andMe test results back it showed that I was only 11% Italian. The rest was mostly European. 

Well, that wasn't hard to figure out. The Ciotti family came from the area up by Lake Como where people may be culturally Italian but genetically are more likely to be Austrian or German. And my mother's English ancestors (Franklin) probably originally came from France where their name was Fraunclein. If one wanted to be accurate about my background one could say I was a genetic European with a cultural affinity for  Italy.  

Actually, the most interesting thing about the upcoming Superbowl isn't the race of the quarterbacks but the fact that Patrick Mahones is 25 and Tom Brady is 43.  I think Mahones is the better quarterback at this point but I'm rooting for the geriatric Brady to pull it off. It would imply, however faintly, that old guys like me haven't yet completely lost everything.