She's as black as Elizabeth Warren is Pocahontas.
And that’s kind of the point of the character.
To show that the One Drop Rule was completely and utterly irrational and absurd.
By any phenotypical metric Mary was a white woman, but by law she would’ve been considered a Black woman because her maternal
grandfather was half Black, just like Hailee Steinfeld is a white woman but by the law of the Jim Crow south she would’ve been considered even less white than Mary on account of her maternal grandfather being half Black and half Filipino.
It’s a plot point in the film that Stack had her move to Arkansas and marry a rich white man there because all it took was moving far away enough that nobody knew her ancestry and voila! Nobody questions she’s a white woman.
As for your complaints about her interaction with the black characters, you must not have been paying attention.
Mary never interacts with them in the store. She only confronts Stack at the train station, and Stack is freaking the fuck out that someone is going to see what in fact if not law, is a white woman talking to a black man, and get him and a bunch of others lynched.
Then later at the Juke Club, it is never explicitly stated, but it’s an ever present undercurrent that Mary is putting
everyone in the place in danger just by being there. Because again, she may have been raised among Black people, she may legally be Black in that time and place, but if anyone saw her there, it could get everyone there killed!
These are plot points in the movie that would not have worked if they’d cast a light-skinned Black woman. How did you miss them!
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