Not one drop = black

It appears that Chinese is the new "black."

As if racial classification weren't already complex enough, now South Africa has added additional shading to an already colorful issue. (Chromatic reference intentional.)

Throughout the United States of America, people of color and newly arrived immigrants over the years have done everything they can to distinguish themselves from blacks. But the Pretoria high court issued a landmark ruling on June 18 classifying Chinese South Africans as "black." 

According to Chinese Assn. of South Africa, citizens of Chinese descent make up less than 10,000 of the South Africa's 47 million population.

The significance of this ruling is that these citizens will be eligible for protection under the laws designed to redress economic imbalances under apartheid, which ended 14 years ago.

Apparently under apartheid rule, Chinese citizens were considered "coloured," a term describing a person of mixed black and white descent. But following the end of apartheid, that classification no longer applied to South African Chinese. 

In the democratic era, the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act and the Employment Equity Act did not indicate whether Chinese citizens qualified as disadvantaged people. The country's employment equity and empowerment laws distinguish "black people" as a generic term that means Africans, coloureds and Indians.

You can read more about this at AFP, Voice of America, WSJ, AllAfrica, Google News