28. Whether the Assertion that Queen Charlotte Was of Mixed Race is True or False Depends on How Small a Trace of Black Ancestry is Necessary to Make Somebody Black or Mixed Race
Queen Charlotte’s distant ancestress Madragana is described in the earliest sources as having been Moorish or Mozarab, not black African. However, even if Madragana had been 100% black African, the fact that she was 15 generations removed from Charlotte would render the queen’s black ancestry insignificant. Assuming no intermarriage among their descendants, the number of our ancestors doubles with each generation, and each ancestor’s share in our makeup is halved. Applying that to Charlotte, a black ancestress 15 generations in her past would make the British queen 1 part in 32,768 parts black.
Set aside the racist premise that a small trace of black ancestry makes somebody black as if blackness is a defect or disease that irrevocably negates other ancestry. Even by that assumption, 1 part black in 32,768 parts could not make Charlotte black. Even the notoriously racist “One Drop Rule”, which deemed mixed-race people with small traces of black ancestry as black, only stopped at 1 part black in 32. To consider Queen Charlotte to have been black, one would have to take the One Drop Rule’s racist formula, and multiply it by – literally – 1000.
