Race as self-identification
Of course, there's a notion that people of bi-racial backgrounds have to identify with the dark side, because of the racialism of American culture. But is it possible that identifying with one's black side can actually help? When Geraldine Ferraro suggested that, she was branded a racist by Obama's people. But when someone as white as Halle Berry accepts her Oscar on behalf of all the "...nameless, faceless women of color" I had to wonder what really gave her the right... and what the hell she was talking about. Could it be that she's just trading on her blackness to get ahead?
Here's a question: what if what you believe you are is wrong or you just don’t know? You are what you are, despite what you’ve been told or tell yourself, whether you know it or not. Morgan Freeman (incidentally, one of the most vocal critics of Black History Month) thought, as many black Americans do, that he was part Native (Choctaw in his case)… how else to explain his features? High cheekbones, wavy hair... Then his DNA said, “uh-uh" and it turned out he was just part white. As Chris Rock said, “It’s easier to say, ‘We got a little Indian in us’ than, ‘We got raped a few times.’”
What if you really really really want to be something you’re not at all and you know it but refuse to admit it to yourself? Oprah Winfrey’s xenocentric worship of all things Zulu led to her telling a J’Berg audience that she was Zulu, then trotting out her proof: she likes Spur Chips and Nando’s Chicken (I’m not making this up). I wear white jeans and love chile rellenos but that doesn't make me Mexican! As if that wasn't enough, a DNA test had proved Oprah was Zulu... so she said. Poo-pooing historians were quick to point out that Zulus probably weren’t taken by anyone as slaves, and that if they had been, it wasn’t to North America. Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Zulus even said, “I hate to tell Oprah this, but she is sorely mistaken.” Her actual DNA test came later and traced at least one branch of her family tree to the Kpelle people, of (big surprise) West Africa. You could tell she was gutted. But Oprah is, if nothing else, a stubborn survivor and altruist who’s nepotistic in spirit, if not reality. Why else would she keep building schools in KwaZulu-Natal and not the Kpelle homeland? She didn’t even give her people the Ugg boots, iPods or Blackberries that she rewards her relatively wealthy television audience with. Eff them!
What about Wallace Fard Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam? Born Wallace Dodd Ford (according the notoriously smear-happy FBI... take it with a grain...), his heritage was a mix of Polynesian and white. But this is the guy that taught that whites were a race of devils created by the mad scientist Yakub on the isle of Patmos, whereas blacks were divine. Looking at a picture of him, it’s hard to believe that anyone thought of him as black, but it was, as they say, a different time.
George Herriman and Jacko, black when born but subsequently white... I think
Although it's controversial to suggest that being something other than white could ever benefit someone's career in this white supremacist world, some evidence is available that it has been done. Canadian conservationist Grey Owl was born Archibald Belaney in Hastings, England – although he claimed he was Apache because we all know that the red man has, across the racial board, an intrinsic understanding of the land. Iron Eyes Cody (né Espera de Corti) did the same, famously crying at the sight of litter in ubiquitous PSAs that aired in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Russian Yul Brynner (né Юлий Бори́сович Бри́нер) claimed he was born on Sakhalin of Mongolian parents, an exotic background that made it only natural for him to play Egyptian, Thai, Native American and even a robot.
Societal confusion
On top of all this, sometimes society just doesn't know what someone is and the need to ascribe race borders on unhealthy. What race is Rosario Dawson considered to be? I remember someone writing to the Sunday supplement to ask what Paula Abdul's background is. Fair enough, with a name like Abdul she could be Arab! Thankfully, she’s Mizrahi Jewish, which we’re pretty OK with now, so she's OK. Later the same questions arose when Mariah Carey started singing… we needed to know what her background was before we knew whether or not she was authentic and to what degree.
Who’s considered black has changed over time in other ways too. Even in the 19th century, Irish people were considered to be black in England, which says more about English racism than anything else. In other words, when Oscar Wilde moved to England, people locked their carriage doors when they saw him crossing the street. Some Irish still cling to this notion of their being black... will someone please tell Bono to shut up already?
Historical revisionism of blackness
Further back, in Elizabethan times, anyone darker than snow was pretty much “black” in Europe. That’s why Othello remains pretty much the only chance for white actors to still don blackface and not get in trouble. Or, for the more p.c. aware, it's a chance to employ black actors in Shakespearian drama.
Nowadays, because of this nonsense, token black sidekicks in films set in the distant past are often explained as being the white hero’s Moorish bro. But are Moors black to modern society or are we still, for the most part, so ignorant and unexposed to actual Moors that we just are willing to assume they are, kind of like how Sacha Baron Cohen was able to convince so many people that, as Borat, he was Kazak, despite looking strangley Jewish and speaking broken English peppered with Yiddish and Czech? For the record, Moors are a Berber people who live in North Africa, especially Morocco (hence its name). The name “Moor” comes from the Maure Kingdom, a Numidian kingdom located in present day Tunisia and Algeria. DNA analysis has shown that their ancestors come from expectedly diverse backgrounds, but most Moors don’t consider themselves black. Only one or two years before Othello was written, the Moorish ambassador to the King of Barbary stayed in London. So Shakespeare probably knew what Moors looked like first hand, and when referring to Othello as black was just being English.
Transracialism, pigmentocracy and "reverse" colorism
While people tend to talk about colorism as an historical preference for lighter skin (brown bag parties, blue vein societies, skin-lightening creams, &c), there’s no way to deny that others aren't just as prejudiced in the opposite direction. The programmers at PAFF (L.A.’s Pan-African Film Festival) often choose to show Oceanic films, quantifying African-ness with skin tone and facial features – not shared heritage, history, culture or context. In doing so, the mere reality of being dark-skinned is what's most important, not a shared, broad African cultural history. (Personally, I don't think that all these people "look African" just because they're dark.) By this transracialism, Australo-Melanisians (including the Negritos of Southeast Asia, the Melanesians and Australia’s indigenous peoples) are presumably, as dark-skinned people, more African (and black) than light-skinned, actually African-descended people like Sinbad, Colin Powell, Quincy Jones, Ice-T, Alexander Dumas, Malcolm X and certainly black albinos, right? By this sort of shoddy logic, because dolphins look superficially like sharks, they must be fish.
Acting white, acting black and... I'm not sureI remember The Cosby Show being subjected to considerable criticism for daring to depict successful, rich black people. Perhaps the most surprising thing was that most of the criticism came from black critics, who felt that one man portraying a well-off black father in a functional family absolved white people of guilt whilst simulatenously failing to address persistant racial inequality by its portrayal of one well-to-do family. I see the point, but TV has a long history of portraying dysfunctional, buffoonish, impoverished black people and being enraged at the Cos's suggestion that black people could succeed is colonial mentality at work, if you ask me. Since then, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Bernie Mac Show and Baldwin Hills have failed to raise eyebrows with their focus on rich black Americans in functioning, loving families, which suggests that times are changing.
The blasian question
It's black, it's white, it's tough for you
Then there are those ethnicities that exist in the blurred boundaries between widely accepted racial distinctions. None of these groups have much presence in the US, so why bring them up? Because their existence further problematizes the construction of race.
Humankind didn't evolve in racial bubbles with clear dileneations between Asians, blacks and whites. Long before the transatlantic slave trade, black Africans were interacting and mixing with non-black cultures in other parts of the world. East Africans traded extensively with Arabs, Persians and Indians and many trace their ancestry to these distant corners of the planet. Other Africans were forced into slavery and sent primarily throughout Arab lands but also as far as China. Still other black Africans mixed and melded with non-black neighbors, resulting in ethnicities that have characteristics of both blacks and whites, such as the Rashaida and Hadhramis, who have throughout history lived on both the African and Asian shores of the Red Sea. Other groups, like the Eritreans, Beja, Berbers, Taureg, Somalis and Nubians (and many others) developed from a mixture of black and white peoples.
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Black History Month (104), Dvds (37), Race (8), Vhs (12), West Africa (6), Africa (11)Recent Posts From Eric Brightwell
Comments
Some claim the Tuaregs aren't Arabs because they didn't originate from the Middle East.
Tiger, You have a beauiful family..... Why would you risk this?
Good Luck to you all i hope you can keep you family together.
to the above poster: i believe the point being made isn't that Halle Berry should not dare to do so. Rather that, in the article writer's opinion, it is strange for her to dedicate honors to a group of people she identifies by skin color, especially when her relationship to them is a product of social construction; (by DNA, she is actually just as white, if not more white, than black). Keanu is half Hawaiian. So what? If Keanu Reeves by some miracle won an Oscar, it would be similar to him coming out and saying "Thank you. I accept this on behalf of all Hawaiian people." That would be strange in my opinion.
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IMPORTANT FACTS TO REMEMBER:
#1) There is NO SUCH THING as a
so-called "Light Skin Black" person
http://www.ourfilmspace.com/forum/topics/2045657:Topic:42413?page=5&commentId=2045657:Comment:246022&x=1#2045657Comment246022
#2) The ALLEGED ‘Light-Skinned Favored’
SLAVE-HIERARCHY is a PROVEN MYTH
(at least on the ‘continental’ United States)
http://www.ourfilmspace.com/forum/topics/2045657:Topic:42413?page=5&commentId=2045657:Comment:245713&x=1#2045657Comment245713
#3) The ALLEGED prevalence of Colorism-inspired
"FEATURES TESTS" ARE also proven MYTHS
(at least on the ‘continental’ United States)
http://boards.mulatto.org/post/show_single_post?pid=34070414&postcount;=14
-- AP (soaptalk@hotmail.com)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Generation-Mixed
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MGM-Mixed
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FGM-Mixed
.
FORWARD
I have studied the African and so-called white. African with Euro-Asian Y
chromosome, even though you maybe surprised, because they all looked African.
They could be classified as mixed race, but they weren't, because result came out of perception they didn't look any different from other Africans.
With the introduction of Y chromosome into the African population, after many generations, they all would look like Africans which is the dominant. If an African woman with Euro-Asian mtDNA has children with a African man with a Euro-Asian Y chromosome, they are white by classification, but only to someone who thinks halpogroups define race. To some so-called whites they are still African.
To put it another way... The so-called white can deny his or her *African DNA
some 15,000 to 20,000 thousand years ago, even thou it's evident today.
The basic tribal concept, we are all still Africans, weather we are lack of color or have color. We are still hard-wired to tribes and use facial identity to foster that belief. Becoming so-called white has nothing to do with biology, but instead a
political category of people we like and people we dislike for various reasons.
Either a race is to be defined based on genetic information or race is a social construct that doesn't exist. The motivating factor, promoting the idea that race is nothing more than a political classification. The word "Mixed-race" is moot.
It's a word that do not have any real meaning. What do you compare it to.
"White is not a race", and race is not pure...never was and never will be.
The racist puerile are using fuzzy logic trying to put a square peg into a round hole.
The word "Cauc-Asian" is a name of location or a place of origin, not skin color.
The word "Aryan" people of the Indo-Iranian languages (Indo-Euro-Asian).
It was idealized by un-scientic racist beliefs. DNA can prove a different concept,
that we all are the same with small variations. There are people who prefer to be
more of tradition than genetics to be classified as so-called white. Catering to a
desire to be like a tribe or extended family, by using an age old facial and language identification. (also skulls classification).
MUHAMMAD
E1b1a / Loa (Afri-Euro-Asian-Ashkenazi- American)
Mexico also have people of black decedent, which are call mestizos.
I remember someone writing to the Sunday supplement to ask what Paula Abdul's background is. Fair enough, with a name like Abdul she could be Arab! Thankfully, she’s Mizrahi Jewish, which we’re pretty OK with now, so she's OK.
"I remember someone writing to the Sunday supplement to ask what Paula Abdul's background is. Fair enough, with a name like Abdul she could be Arab! Thankfully, she’s Mizrahi Jewish, which we’re pretty OK with now, so she's OK." She's OK because she's not Arab? or because she's Mizrahi Jewish? -- so what if she were an Arab? RIIIIIGHT - you lost the point of your politically correct article on that one.
To Thankfully, sorry if my point wasn't clear. I was attempting to speak for, and address, American culture's bias against Muslims and Arabs. I think that a lot of the public who were so preoccupied with her background were secretly worried that she might but Muslim or Arab. My only issue with her is that I was forced to listen to her music on the school bus.
So to sum it all up nobody's a 100 anything and everyone's mixed an everyone we're all related does it , and GOD doesn't see color or any other things. NO race BUT the human race
we are all from adam and huwaa(eve).all related and put into different tribes colours and languages only as a sign and proof of OUR CREATORS power . it was arrogant humans that tried to put us into labels and catagories as to separate the human race for political reason . im brown but i have a very diverse DNA . i was surprised to see all parts of earth which my ancestors were natively from . we are only better by deed and piety not skin tone . let's face it, in the end ,we will all be returning to our Creator and NO colour will matter .only deeds.
YOU ARE CLEARLY AN IDIOT.
Tuaregs are Arab or black. Mixed Eritreans and Somalians are mostly mixed with Arab not white.The Berbers aren't black.There's a lot of reverse colorism in Philadelphia(ninth- poorest US city,black majority). I'm a light skin black and I've lived in Philly for many years. In Philly many brown skin blacks and dark skin black young adults don't date light skin blacks,sometimes brown skin blacks date light skin blacks,more brown skin blacks than young adult dark skin blacks date light skin blacks.I lived in cities that weren't like this. My cousins lived in some zipcodes in Philly that have many lecherous sex offenders and black men wouldn't date my light skin black cousin and many black men wanted to date my brown skin black cousin.There are few light skin black and brown skin black or dark skin black young adult couples in Philly.