7-year-old girl killed after white man pulls alongside black family's car and opens fire

[Igel]

61. Collect data.

There's a fairly clear pattern to "black," "biracial", and derogatory terms like "passing".. Look at how easily the person slips from culture to culture, how people want to identify with the person (and the person wants others to identify with him/her), and how the person self-identifies. Note that there's a difference between when the person is minority/majority biracial and minority/minority biracial. It's complicated by application of the one-drop rule, which is still very present on both right and left for slightly different reasons. The media use the terms a bit differently from, say, how undergrads that are black-Asian or Asian-white use it--for some it's virtually a pretension, "Look at me, I have two cultures, unlike you, with (n)one."

Also look early in Obama's campaign, where things like O'Bama weren't unusual. Early on, his biracial/multicultural background was highlighted, but that faded as he became more and more "authentically African-American".

The data are there, but it's sort of a nuisance to remember it all and to step out of one's own skin, so to speak, to stop imposing one's own judgments on it and see how a range of people actually use the words and in what contexts. It's a social thing, so there are a lot of contrasts to account for all the data. It could be a short monograph. The first step is IDing the oppositions, the contrasts, and see how they pattern.