OK, everybody. Ready? Halle Berry just went there.
The Oscar-winning actress, who these days, sadly, is no stranger to scandalous headlines involving her daughter, just ensured herself another day or two in the media glare. Why? Because while chatting with Ebony magazine, she opened up a discussion on racial relations by giving her own historically wrought opinion on what, exactly, constitutes one's race.
Particularly, that of her daughter.
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Because while 2-year-old Nahla counts both Berry and French-Canadian model Gabriel Aubry as parents, the actress doesn't seem all that keen to classify her kin as being of mixed race.
"What I think is that that's something she's going to have to decide," she told the magazine. "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.
"But 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 theory, for those not up on their civil rights history, was used to determine whether people of mixed ancestry could be classified by the government as black or white. If they possessed even "one drop" of African ancestry, as the theory went, they were considered black.
Incidentally, Berry's views wouldn't seem nearly as newsworthy had they not come in the wake of an increasingly nasty custody battle with Aubry, who has been accused of harboring some less-than-inclusive beliefs. Still, direct and intentional affront to her estranged baby daddy or not, Berry didn't waste any time defending her no doubt controversial views.
"If you're of multiple races, you have a different challenge, a unique challenge of embracing all of who you are but still finding a way to identify yourself, and I think that's often hard for us to do," she explained.
"I identify as a Black woman, but I've always had to embrace my mother and the White side of who I am, too. By choosing, I've often [wondered], 'Well, would that make her feel like I'm invalidating her by choosing to identify more with the Black side of myself?'"
Still, whatever her identity, or the identity of her daughter, Berry said that her top priority at the moment is just to be a good parent (not a lightning rod for racial politics, despite her latest sound bite).
"Being a mother is probably the most important thing in my life right now," she told Ebony. "Career is important, but nothing really supersedes my role as a mother. That's the most important thing I'm going to do in this life at this point."