The Study of Racialism

Per many of the conversations of this board I have never heard of so many tags used to identify people. I am sincerely interested in the color "issue", and appreciate any feed back to my question.

I am what some consider light skinned.
My great maternal grandmother was French (maybe with something else), born in Louisiana, and her mother was French born in Breast France.
My maternal great grandmother had children by a man that was mixed. That is all we know about him, also from Louisiana.
All children which included my grandmother were white with straight hair to a light tan color.
My Maternal grandmother married a black man who had "white" features which produced my mother who looks like the woman who played Clair Huxtables mother on the Cosby Show.
My father is light skinned with straight hair. His mother (my paternal grandmother was white) paternal grandfather is mixed and a very light tan color. All were from Louisiana.
Now, I have three sisters. I am the lightest. I grew up feeling bad about my color and tried to use products to darken my skin. I was called "yellow & orange" by the other kids who were mostly darker than I.
Someone on this board said that there is no such thing as a light skinned black person, and I don't understand that as we have people from the whitest white with green/blue eyes, and blond hair to the darkest chocolate with kinky hair!
I do not look ethnic. In fact, no one in my family has the standard "ethnic" features, however we have always been black, and have never identified with any other race.

Any input would be appreciated

Ancestrally you are probably more European, but you were raised ethnically Black. What you have to decide is if that identity is whay you feel comfortable with because you fully identify withit or do you feel like it is imposed by a rone drop racial concept. Either way what you choose is valid.

Hi,

Genetics is not directly related with ethnicity. The first is something chemical carried by the DNA from one generations to the other, the second is the culture of your people.

Because of your looks you can easily be considered to be European, Arab or Latin American, but that is not what matter in this case. You are asking about an "IDENTITY" and not an aspect.

Your identy is given by your family. Your identity is the culture you received from your ancestors at home. For the people that you consider closer. And also from the group you CHOOSE to identify with.

Identity, group, values and culture are ethnic matters that are not necesarily associated to our own physical aspect. Would you tell a Jew or a Gypsie if you see it in the street wearing casual clothes? Can you separate Chineses from Japaneses by looking at them? Have you seen those Cherokee natives that look like people from sweeden?

When people in this list say there is not such a thing like a light-skinned Black person they are talking about phenotype, complexion and aspect. Of course, if a person looks white IS white. No doubt about it, at least in genetic terms. Or better, the person IS white at least in those genes that are related to the way people classify races. If that same person that "looks white" marry another white person is almost certain he/she is going to have white looking kids. That's genetics, not ethnicity.

Culture is another matter. If you observe with another eyes, you should realize there are white persons in the Black community as well. They are whites that have a Black American background. That background is not in the DNA but is their IDENTITY, CULTURE and ETHNICITY. Genes does not determine what we are; what does is culture and what we want to be. Or do you believe that a religion, a tradition or a languaje comes in the genetics? They don't. They are learned like our own identity.

In the case of the Black American peoples, you have a subculture of the general culture. In one sense your culture is unique in the world and really exists as such. Jazz, Soul, Blues, Spirituals and lot of other musical styles are a testimony of the creativity of your people. So it is something that exist and it is important. However, if we look the U.S. from the outside, by a foreigner eye like myself, we don't see a clear cut difference between "white" and "black" American culture, but a mozaic of mutual influences. From the outsider point of view we have notice since a long time ago that in the U.S. there are many "white" people that look Black and many "black" people that look white. Specially in the Bill Cosby show.

Finally. It is curious the use of the term "ethnic" by Americans. Like if ethnic mean "foreigners". Actually, white-america is also an ethnic group that play country music, eat hamburgers, drink light beer, and sings your national anthem in beisbol games Ethnicity is the culture we carry.

In short, a person can be white by genetic and black by culture, and also the other way around. There is not contradiction at all.

Regards,

Omar Vega,
Chilean, Latino

First and foremost, we stand by Sapphire's and everyone's liberty to self-identify. As a historical note, that liberty is a recent civil rights triumph. Especially, it came with the U.S. Supreme Court deciding Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
http://www.multiracial.com/government/loving.html
History books say Loving overturned "anti-miscegenation" laws making a felony crime of "white" exogamy (i.e., "white" people marrying interracially with anyone "non-white"). This is very true. But in applying the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment constitutional rights guarantees overturning compulsory "white" endogamy, the High Court necessarily overturned the state scheme of "blood drop"-defining "different" human "races" (so called) -- their companion felony penal enforcement, too. Consequently, today we are free to choose our own "race" without fear of any possible prosecution -- for identifying "white."

However (a further note), EEOC and Affirmative Action enforcement still prosecute fair-skinned people similar to Sapphire, calling themselves "non-white" for minority entitlement. Moreover, informal social pressures still dissuade many people from identifying "white" even though they clearly should be described as "white" by any unbiased bystander.

Again, first and foremost, we stand by Sapphire's and everyone's liberty to self-identify. But that said, some among us urge Sapphire and others identifying as "white blacks" (etc.) to freely choose to exercise their right of self-identification in a way that will help us deconstruct the chimerical "different races" inequality notion. We believe it will help -- will help to undermine the hypnotic delusion of "colors" as "difference" in this quasi-scientific animal breeding sense of "people-subspecies." We remind Sapphire that in the U.S.A. (only) the "one drop of Black blood" "rule" -- in spite the Loving v. Virginia Court in 1967 giving it and hypodescent the ax -- the ODR still hangs on in the insistent beliefs and actions of many many people. As Sapphire may already know: the ODR posits that she should be "black" and only "black," regardless how racially "white" she may be or what she wishes, simply for her having "black" ancestry. ODR-enforcers (soul patrol; e.g., Henry Gates "outing" Anatole Broyard) care not how little "black" is in Sapphire, or how remote historically, or how she might have been brought up.

Again, first and foremost, we stand by Sapphire's and everyone's liberty to self-identify. But that said, we point out that "white black" people, such as Sapphire (her self-description), are predominantly European as told on by their complexion. "White black" identity constitutes a self-contradicting oxymoron. Moreover, it sells out a birthright by its promoting the ODR's hypodescent stigma -- its nasty implying that "black blood" is so ruinous, so tainted, that even someone "white" as Sapphire is unfit to eat at the table of her primarily "white" kin. Of course Sapphire's parents identifying "black," and all, may sway her feeling towards endogamous group loyalty. ("Black" subculture? Ethnicity?) I don't know if Sapphire knows names and details of all her evidently many "white" ancestors. Somehow her ancestors went "passing for black." Sapphire has power now to reconcile seeing with believing.

Again, first and foremost, we stand by Sapphire's and everyone's liberty to self-identify. But that said, we -- some of us -- think that Sapphire choosing to exercise her right, and identifying multiracial instead of ODR-"black," would help to break up racism. That, by helping break up "the races" idea of "pure white" and Borg-like ODR/hypodescent-"black" -- as endogamous castes -- as if mutually exclusive "races" -- as if separate animal "subspecies" -- as if realization of Dr. M. L. King's dream of racial integration would be an abomination. (Or alternatively, be "disloyalty" to something the Soul Patrol would like to organize.) We think Sapphire's renouncing the ODR would help us in our fight to achieve Dr. King's dream of integration.
George

I recommend self-identifying however you feel most comfortable, with three exceptions. On St. Paddy's day be Irish, on Cinco de Mayo be Mexican, on Columbus day be Italian; you get invited to more parties that way. <grin>

I think it would be best to ask Sapphire what she means by black. Many people begin with the premise that race doesn't exist and then assume that everyone believes this to be so. Consequently, we are left with black being simply an ethnic term when it’s possible that black may mean much more to the person using the term. The prevalence of the use of African American today also complicates matters.

I believe girlfromthenc in response to another poster in another forum wrote something to the effect that the concept of black in this country is multi-faceted. To many people it is an ethnic, cultural, often political and racial identity.

Race may not exist, but I personally know people who believe that a person who looks Chinese or Italian can be racially black.

Sapphire:



Sapphire's family sounds as if many of its members have Creole heritage. How comfortable does she feel around "real blacks"? Her family sounds like what I have been calling "Mulatto Elite." They traditionally submitted to the racist laws that forced them into the same category with blacks (a people with which they had little in common), but privately cherished their European heritage (at least in terms of physical features and a life style closer to middle class whites than that of the black descendants of field hands. If she had to choose between living in a white, middle class neighborhood and a working-class black neighborhood, where would she feel more comfortable? Being told that your culture is "black" doesn't make it so. Mulatto Elite culture is different. Also, if blacks were the "rainbow race" of many colors that many members of the black intelligentisia weakly maintain (and somebody apparently forgot to tell most of the "real" blacks this myth), Sapphire and many others would not have been tormented by blacks for looking so unlike them.

I agree AD. I can't tell you how many folks I know who are black identified in public, but privately see themselves different.

When the standard of beauty is set with brown or lighter skin colour, and less African phenotype, what does this tell the people who look traditionally Sub Saharan African, perhaps from poorer neighborhoods in larger cities?? When they see a Halle Berry, do they really think that this is someone who looks like them, therefore, they will have the same opportunities as she?? These are the intellectually honest questions to be asking, but no one dares go there. So we are left with false images that are given to us by the media and some segments of society. These are some issues that I have been talking about since I was a little boy. Nobody ever told me anything about race, but I could see the differences just from own observations, and I asked questions, I didn't take it because I was told that this is just the way it is.

Sapphire, I also think that you identify how you feel the most comfortable......in addition I would not recommend taking the advice of the multiracial activists on this board that have the agenda of seperating those they regard as "multi-racial" from "real blacks"....





^^^ i'm at a loss of words from reading these comments.

I feel you. Some peopel try to claim all mixed ancestry people were FORCED to identify as Black.