Friday, January 22, 2016

"America’s ‘Postracial’ Fantasy"

"While 76 percent of all mixed-­race Americans claim that their backgrounds have made ‘‘no difference’’ in their lives, the data and anecdotes included in the study nevertheless underscore how, for a fair number of us, words like ‘‘multiracial’’ and ‘‘biracial’’ are awkward and inadequate, denoting identities that are fluid for some and fixed for others.

 This is especially true, I think, for the progeny of mixed-­race black-white relationships: As the daughter of an African-­American father and a white mother, born with olive skin, light eyes and thick, curly hair, I have been aware of a tension between the way the outside world sees me, the way the government sees me (I was already 27 when the census changed its options so Americans could check off two or more races) and the ways in which I see myself. Sometimes identifying as black feels like a choice; other times, it is a choice made for me...

I was a curiosity, and a comfort: a black girl who was just white enough to seem familiar, not foreign, someone who could serve as an emissary or a bridge between blackness and whiteness. It’s true that I can move about the world in ways that many other black people cannot; for one thing, I am rarely racially profiled. My choice, if you can call it that, to identify as black is much different from that of, say, my father or even my own sister, whose skin is at least three shades darker than mine. The eagerness with which people gravitate toward me is not shown to many of the other black people I know. These ex­peri­ences led me to suspect that the breathless ‘‘post­racial’’ commentary that attached itself to our current president had as much to do with the fact that he is ­biracial as with the fact that he is black."
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/magazine/americas-postracial-fantasy.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0&referrer=



There was a brief period of time (like a month) where I was playing with calling myself multiracial. I'm the descendent of generations of multiracial people, most of whom would probably be considered Black if they lived in today's America. But there is this thing where my skin color vascillates over the course of the year, and I get really pale around February and apparently racially ambiguous? Because that's when people start getting curious about my racial background and I remember again how confusing brown people can be in the privileged, mostly-white spaces that I spend most of my time in. Our stories and histories are barely told in this country, so the circumstances that led to the combination of my skin tone and hair type remain mysterious.

(and also, most black people who are not African are part white because of the harsh sexual realities of centuries of slavery - and then most white people at various times would have been considered multiracial because only some people were considered white) (what would the world look like if we all thought of ourselves in checkboxes?)

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