I fucking hate this because it creates ambiguity, usually at times when things need to happen very quickly. It always seems to happen at busy intersections when I’ve got mere seconds to get through, usually a left hand turn. I’m waiting because I need to make the turn, there’s a person across from me going straight who will have the right of way and I can’t go til they go, but I’m looking back and forth waiting for an opening for when that person will go (and then me). The opening comes… and I wait… and they wait, and then I see this fucking person is looking at me like a jackass like they were doing me a favor. The favor would’ve been them following the goddamn right of way, then we both could’ve gone to where we needed to go, now I have to wait again.

Yes, but I was responding the original posts claim that Johnny Cash came out and said his wife was black, which was the exact opposite of what happened. His wife being 1/16 African helps the claim that she had maybe a darker complexion I guess, it’s hard to tell with most photos of her being in black & white or potentially colorized. I’m also 1/16 Native American and I really wouldn’t claim that I’m actually Native American based off of that (though maybe some scholarships exist that say otherwise).

Her being 1/2 Sicilian may have had a bigger impact on skin-tone, but maybe the African great-great-grandmother was a well-known secret in her family and they tried to hide it as much as possible, I don’t know. It’s probably more important to ask, “Did she consider herself to be black?” Everyone has their own definition of it, but I’ve not seen anything that says that she actually considered herself as black, but it’s also possible she tried to hide it early on given the racial climate at the time. Is the “One-Drop Rule” still valid here?

Well aktually, Johnny Cash issued a statement to the KKK telling them his first wife wasn’t black and appeared to have some racist attitudes in his youth, though he did come around later on and I wouldn’t say he was racist. Her heritage is described:

“In the image, Vivian, whose father was of Sicilian heritage and whose mother was said to be of German and Irish descent, appeared to be Black.”

Though in other images in the same article she doesn’t appear black at all, so I’m not sure. There seemed to be different attitudes about what was considered “black” in that time.

“The stress was almost unbearable. I wanted to die,” she [Vivian] wrote in her memoir. “And it didn’t help that Johnny issued a statement to the KKK informing them I wasn’t Black.” She did not think the campaign should have been dignified with a response.

So she may have been more upset that he responded at all, not necessarily being upset that he said she wasn’t black.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/05/16/johnny-cash-first-wife-vivian-black/