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Roxie
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Roxie
Post Number: 820
Registered: 06-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, May 22, 2006 - 07:43 pm: | 
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Now that I've got your attention, how's about a look at this interesting article? 
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SINCE WHEN DID BEING
THE DAUGHTER OF A WASP
AND A BLACK-MEXICAN
BECOME COOL?
BY DANZY SENNA | Strange to wake up and realize you're in style. That's what happened to me just the other morning. It was the first day of the new millennium and I woke up to find that mulattos had taken over. Playing golf, running the airwaves, opening their own restaurants, modeling clothes, starring in musicals with names like "Show Me the Miscegenation!" The radio played a steady stream of Lenny Kravitz, Sade, and Mariah Carey. I thought I'd died and gone to Berkeley. But then I realized. According to the racial zodiac, 2000 is the official Year of the Mulatto. Pure breeds (at least the black ones) are out and hybridity is in. America loves us in all of our half-caste glory. The president announced on Friday that beige is to be the official color of the millennium. Major news magazines announce our arrival as if we were proof of extraterrestrial life. They claim we're going to bring about the end of race as we know it.
It has been building for a while, this mulatto fever. But it was this morning that it really reached its peak. I awoke early to a loud ruckus outside -- horns and drums and flutes playing "Kum ba Yah" outside my window. I went to the porch to witness a mass of bedraggled activists making their way down Main Street. They were chanting, not quite in unison, "Mulattos Unite, Take Back the White!" I had a hard time making out the placards through the tangle of dreadlocks and loose Afros. At the front of the crowd, two brown-skinned women in Birkenstocks carried a banner that read FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED JEW BOYS WHEN THE NEGROS AIN'T ENOUGH. A lean yellow girl with her hair in messy Afro-puffs wore a T-shirt with the words JUST HUMAN across the front. What appeared to be a Hasidic Jew walked hand in hand with his girlfriend, a Japanese woman in traditional attire, the two of them wearing huge yellow buttons on their lapels that read MAKE MULATTOS, NOT WAR. I trailed behind the parade for some miles, not quite sure I wanted to join or stay at the heels of this group.
Mulattos may not be new. But the mulatto-pride folks are a new generation. They want their own special category or no categories at all. They're a full-fledged movement, complete with their own share of extremists. As I wandered at the edges of the march this morning, one woman gave me a flyer. It was a treatise on biracial superiority, which began, "Ever wonder why mutts are always smarter than full-breed dogs?" The rest of her treatise was dense and incomprehensible: something about the sun people and the ice people coming together to create the perfectly temperate being. Another man, a militant dressed like Huey P. Newton, came toward me waving a rifle in his hand. He told me that those who refuse to miscegenate should be shot. I steered clear of him, instead burying my head in a newspaper. I opened to the book review section, and at the top of the best-seller list were three memoirs: "Kimchee and Grits," by Kyong Washington, "Gefilte Fish and Ham Hocks," by Schlomo Jackson, and at the top of the list, and for the third week in a row, "Burritos and Borsht," by a cat named Julio Werner. That was it. In a fit of nausea, I took off running for home.
Before all of this radical ambiguity, I was a black girl. I fear even saying this. The political strong arm of the multiracial movement, affectionately known as the Mulatto Nation (just "M.N." for those in the know), decreed just yesterday that those who refuse to comply with orders to embrace their many heritages will be sent on the first plane to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where, the M.N.'s minister of defense said, "they might learn the true meaning of mestizo power."
But, with all due respect to the multiracial movement, I cannot tell a lie. I was a black girl. Not your ordinary black girl, if such a thing exists. But rather, a black girl with a Wasp mother and a black-Mexican father, and a face that harkens to Andalusia, not Africa. I was born in 1970, when "black" described a people bonded not by shared complexion or hair texture but by shared history.
Not only was I black (and here I go out on a limb), but I was an enemy of the people. The mulatto people, that is. I sneered at those byproducts of miscegenation who chose to identify as mixed, not black. I thought it wishy-washy, an act of flagrant assimilation, treason, passing even.
It was my parents who made me this way. In Boston circa 1975, mixed wasn't really an option. The words "A fight, a fight, a nigga and a white!" could be heard echoing from schoolyards during recess. You were either white or black. No checking "Other." No halvsies. No in-between. Black people, being the bottom of the social totem pole in Boston, were inevitably the most accepting of difference; they were the only race to come in all colors, and so there I found myself. Sure, I found myself. Sure, I received some strange reactions from all quarters when I called myself black. But black people usually got over their initial surprise and welcomed me into the ranks. It was white folks who grew the most uncomfortable with the dissonance between the face they saw and the race they didn't. Upon learning who I was, they grew paralyzed with fear that they might have "slipped up" in my presence, that is, said something racist, not knowing there was a negro in their midst. Often, they had.
Let it be clear -- my parents' decision to raise us as black wasn't based on any one-drop rule from the days of slavery, and it certainly wasn't based on our appearance, that crude reasoning many black-identified mixed people use: if the world sees me as black, I must be black. If it had been based on appearance, my sister would have been black, my brother Mexican, and me Jewish. Instead, my parents' decision arose out of the rising black power movement, which made identifying as black not a pseudoscientific rule but a conscious choice. You told us all along that we had to call ourselves black because of this so-called one drop. Now that we don't have to anymore, we choose to. Because black is beautiful. Because black is not a burden, but a privilege.
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Bonus points for this quote:
"Pure breeds (at least the black ones) are out and hybridity is in."
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Moonsigns
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Moonsigns
Post Number: 1152
Registered: 07-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, May 22, 2006 - 08:11 pm: |
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I think she's the whitest black woman I've ever seen! |
Nels
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Nels
Post Number: 364
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: 
Votes: 2 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, May 22, 2006 - 09:45 pm: |
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Yark Yark! And the world flooded for forty days and forty nights, and Noah took with him two of every kind. Oops, but he left one of the black ones behind.
Multi-racial is here to stay. It's not how you look, its how you play.
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Yukio
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 1245
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - 12:29 am: |
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interesting . . . good, smart piece by danny senna. |
Ngo
Newbie Poster
Username: Ngo
Post Number: 10
Registered: 05-2006
Rating: 
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - 02:48 am: |
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Multiracialists are a small thorn. They want everyone to screw until everyone is brown. But isn't that what happened in Mexico and Central America? Everyone there is brown yet they all want to flee their poverty for the United States which is a majority white country. Ironic? |
Savant
Newbie Poster
Username: Savant
Post Number: 13
Registered: 09-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - 03:19 am: |
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as usual, danzy nails it. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 4429
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - 10:03 am: |
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Ms Senna need not take too many bows for condescending to be black while enjoying how this decision makes white folks uncomfortable, and black folks grateful. There have always been "voluntary negoes", dating way back to the 1900s, people who could pass for white, but who chose to be black, presumably because they were more about indulging their souls rather than their bodies. |
Schakspir
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Schakspir
Post Number: 290
Registered: 12-2005
Rating:
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - 11:27 am: |
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Mixing up everybody won't solve America's racial problems. Just look at any Latin American country....like, for example, Brazil. Very mixed, very happy, very sexy, very violent and very, very racist. |
Mony
Newbie Poster
Username: Mony
Post Number: 12
Registered: 02-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - 07:01 pm: |
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Schakspir, if I recall correctly from some of your earlier posts, you have travelled extensively in some of these 'Latin countries'. I have read that the societies have a racial hierarchy in place. However, reading and actually going to these countries are two different things. What were some of your observations? |
Yukio
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 1249
Registered: 01-2004
Rating:
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - 08:53 pm: |
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reading and experience go hand in hand, i think. With book knowledge, you learn how to look at something differently, so that you can understand what you see, instead of looking at something with your own limited, subjective understanding of life.
For example, everyone in Central American and Mexico is not Brown, although such a conclusion makes sense if you presume the Mexicans you see in many major cities actually represent the phenotype of Mexicans and Central and South Americans.
Many of them are blond haired and blue -eyed. Also, there country is poor because of the U.S. and NAFTA. Many of them, indeed, have very little indigenous Southwest American blood. They have attempted to maintain their pure Spanish blood. And there is a racial hierarchy, as others have stated, so that there are people who continue to speak there indigneous tongue and very little spanish . . . and those who are fluent in both; these are usually traders! They are what some Mestizos derogitorily call "Indians"!
One could easily miss this on their vacation, where they tend to exoticize people and see them only as the help!
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Nels
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Nels
Post Number: 369
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, May 23, 2006 - 11:50 pm: |
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Yukio --
"you see in many major cities actually represent the phenotype of Mexicans and Central and South Americans"
Though phenotype is factual, in many instances it is quite difficult to interpret, and often times it is wholly misleading by visual observation alone.
"With book knowledge, you learn how to look at something differently, so that you can understand what you see, instead of looking at something with your own limited, subjective understanding of life."
Your statement is a very accurate one, and it's validated quite well. |
Femrenoir
Newbie Poster
Username: Femrenoir
Post Number: 6
Registered: 05-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - 12:08 am: |
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The Central American dynamic is quite a bit different from what we're facing in the U.S.
It is obvious that we are breeding a large new generation who resists being defined as black or white. Unlike in the past when mixing was dangerous, controversial, and in some cases illegal; their bloodlines will be fluid.
Do you think the mixed breeds in the U.S. will take the time to define/consider themselves as a 'separate' race? - Like the coloreds in Africa or the Mestizos in Central America?
Do you think the whites will (have) adopt(ed) a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy?
At the same time the numbers of blacks in this country are pretty much fixed as we don't have high numbers of black immigrants. Do you think this increase in mixed race blacks will contribute to the oppression of the black underclass or will becoming a smaller minority diffuse the fear and alleviate discrimination?
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Yukio
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 1250
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - 08:36 am: |
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Interesting questions . . . not all folk who claim a biracial identity want to place themselves in "new" racial category . . . there socalled mixed heritage is just a matter of fact.
The others, as Senna and various websites that cater to these folk explain, desire a new "race" identity. Also, black folk have not always resisted claiming their blackness . . . there have always been those who were adamant about explaining their socalled mixed heritage.
The problem is . . . history is messy on the ground!
There are lots of black immigrants in this country . . . Africans and West Indians, Brasilians, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, etc . . . we often forget that many people from the Spanish Caribbean are dark skinned kinky or tightly curled if you prefer headed people. |
Nels
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Nels
Post Number: 374
Registered: 07-2005
Rating:
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - 01:11 pm: |
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Femrenoir --
"It is obvious that we are breeding a large new generation who resists being defined as black or white."
Is resistance really the issue, or is it the consequence of identifying with the extremes that are associated with being black or white?
"Do you think the mixed breeds in the U.S. will take the time to define/consider themselves as a 'separate' race? - Like the coloreds in Africa or the Mestizos in Central America?"
They already are. Just follow Californian Ward Connerly's recent trek to Capitol Hill. He's pushing very hard for a new category of racial and ethnic classification for the next U.S. census. Even if he succeeds, the outcome still won't change America's perception of race. |
Mony
Newbie Poster
Username: Mony
Post Number: 13
Registered: 02-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - 05:59 pm: |
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Right you are Yukio and Nels. You are correct Yukio when you say that reading about something before experiencing it for yourself will, hopefully, give one a more broad prospective. However, one can also get a better overall view from people's experiences also. That's not to say that one would take a person's take on a situation as the gospel truth, but,when one garners information from different sources, they may be better informed. Of course one would have to speak with many people to adduce information but hopefully there will be a common thread throught-out. Of course one would have to take into account differences of opinion. Regards. |
Yukio
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 1251
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - 06:15 pm: |
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hmmmm . . . personal experiences and oral histories are important, but they can also be so anecdotal; also, since they are often so embedded in personal experience, which is itself implicitly limited, that they can be ignorant of what goes on in their own society . . . many Brasilians still claim that Brasil is a racially democratic; african americans, africans, and west indians each believe they know what blackness mean . . . hahaha! |
Ngo
Newbie Poster
Username: Ngo
Post Number: 15
Registered: 05-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - 06:26 pm: |
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QUOTE
Femrenoir --
"It is obvious that we are breeding a large new generation who resists being defined as black or white."
Is resistance really the issue, or is it the consequence of identifying with the extremes that are associated with being black or white?
END QUOTE
Yeah, uhh, I'm pretty sure immigrants are certainly not loath to accept a white identity if that is an option. In fact, the US government classifies North Africans, many Mexicans and Latinos as "white." That is really not a revelation. Material issues for Blacks arrise when we talk about a "black" identity. This new generation will gladly accept all the perks that come with being classified as white while lambasting anything to do with "blackness." We, Blacks or African Descendants or African-(your country here), should be fully aware of this.
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Schakspir
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Schakspir
Post Number: 291
Registered: 12-2005
Rating:
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 - 10:41 pm: |
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Brazil has a insidious system of divide-and-control according to color, hair, features and of course money. The divisions are almost infinite. If you are part-black you can be a white man if you wish, especially if you have money and don't really look all that black. But if you are poor and black, forget it. Brazil pretends to be a racial democracy by saying that it's just a class problem(as if that's okay), and not race. Until, of course, you see just who it is in Brazil who has all the money and who it is that fills up the jails and favelas--respectively, of course, they are WHITE and BLACK. |
Nels
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Nels
Post Number: 377
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 25, 2006 - 03:51 am: |
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Ngo --
"We, Blacks or African Descendants"
That's the tough nut that's hard to crack. Qualifying who's really "black" and measuring the ever declining importance of African Descent in "American" society are two of the biggest hurdles that have to be overcome before so-called American blacks will accept the fact that they are truly "different" in every sense of the word. In today's "black" America, (we) doesn't hold much weight by itself, and it's only significant when coupled with power, arrogance and achievement. |
Nels
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Nels
Post Number: 378
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 25, 2006 - 03:58 am: |
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Yukio --
Black America is gradually diverging along many lines ranging from heritage, culture, color, economics, politics and much more. A (real) defragmentation in the making. Since that divergence can't be controlled, how is its residual negative impact on the "black" community best mitigated? |
Yukio
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 1252
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 25, 2006 - 05:21 pm: |
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Nels:
Who knows? I think folk need to distinguish racism, from class exploitation, and other categories, such as cultural group, etc . . .
With this, the socalled black community can argue that it is discriminated against or neglected as a political group (of course when this is the case) without getting caught up in questions of identification (what one calls herself or himself).
Thus, we can get away from the B.S. that black people can not be racist against other blacks, or that a black person is necessarily concerned with issues that affect the "black community"; or that African Americans can represent African immigrants; or that the economic and educational success of Africans and West Indians proves that racism doesn't exist!
Thus, in many ways this defragmentation is healthy, because it forces people to deconstruction their limited notions of black community and blackness and refine their social and political proscriptions.
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Nels
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Nels
Post Number: 381
Registered: 07-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 25, 2006 - 10:58 pm: |
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Yukio --
"Thus, in many ways this defragmentation is healthy, because it forces people to..."
I've previously professed that "deconstruction" was the key element, but never coined it in those terms because the "choir" would get real rowdy whenever their flawed perception of blackness was challenged. Great point you made, and a good perception and observation too. |
Yukio
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 1256
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, May 27, 2006 - 04:19 am: |
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we shall see . . . |
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