Halle Berry Clarifies Daughter’s Race, “I feel like she’s black.”

In a recent interview with Ebony Magazine, Halle Berrry clarifies what race that she identifies her daughter as. She tells Ebony, “What I think is that that’s something she’s going to have to decide. I’m not going to put a label on it. I had to decide for myself and that’s what she’s going to have to decide – how she identifies herself in the world. And I think, largely, that will be based on how the world identifies her. That’s how I identified myself.”

Halle continues, “I feel like she’s black. I’m black and I’m her mother and I believe in the one-drop theory.” The one-drop rule is a historical colloquial term in the United States for the social classification as black of individuals with any African ancestry. It’s labeled as an automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status.^[1] The one-drop rule was put into law in the twentieth century, for instance in Virginia under the Racial Integrity Act of 1924.

Halle has a two-year-old daughter, Nahla, with her ex-boyfriend Gabriel Aubry. Aubry is a French Canadian model and the two (Halle and Aubry) are in an intense custody battle over their daughter. Recently, rumors have circulated that Aubry is a “border-line” racist. He’s also been accused of calling Halle the “N-word.”