Mixed People Monday – Melissa Harris-Perry

This is one sharp lady.

The MSNBC talk show host and college professor has a white mother and a black father, though she self-identifies as black.

So What Determines Your “Race”?

So is skin color the key to what we are now?

Good Lawd.

From Gawker:

Former Democratic strategist Karen Finney, who was once the first African-American spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, was revealed today to be the new host of a 4 p.m. weekend show on MSNBC. Good for her, and good for MSNBC, which adds Finney, pictured at left, to an already diverse roster of talking heads that includes Chris Hayes, Melissa Harris-Perry, and Al Sharpton.

Don’t mention Finney’s race to Tim Graham, however. Graham, a so-called media “watchdog” for the conservative Media Research Center, doesn’t think it’s fair for MSNBC to herald Finney’s entrance as an arrival of another African-American host—y’know, considering her skin is so light and all.

 

 

Finney has a black father and a white mother so she is actually mixed. However, much like President Obama, Finney has the right to self-identify however she chooses. What is most interesting to me though in situations like this, that show once again how silly our “race” notions are, is that the key to determining if is is ok for her to be called black (or African-American) is her lighter skin and straighter hair. But Graham has no problem labeling Obama as black (also black father and white mother) presumably because he has darker skin and less straight hair.

So I guess this is kind of an admission that what your parents are has nothing to do with your “race.” Just how you look.

Just silly. I say again people, there are no different “races,” just different blendings.

 

Kim Kardashian & Kanye West Will Make Interesting Parents

The happy couple present their own unique challenges.

Kim Kardashian recently spoke about her pregnancy and thoughts on raising her baby with Kanye West:

Kim Kardashian recently opened up on another topic that has honestly been on our minds, the challenge of raising an interracial child. During an interview with BET, the reality star discussed preparing for motherhood, including what she plans to teach her bi-racial baby about race.

“Obviously you want your children, for me, to travel the world and experience different races and different cultures everywhere so I think that would be something that is important to me to give as much information as I could.

The mother-to-be said she’s also gotten some tips from some of her pals.

“I have a lot of friends that are all different nationalities and their children are bi-racial, so they have kind of talked to me a little bit about it and what to expect and what not to expect,” she said. “But I think that the most important thing is, how I would want to raise my children, is to just not see color.”

I am sure her heart is in the right place, because one thing about Kim we know is that she has no problems with seeing beyond skin color. But she has the idea wrong though. Our goal should never be to ignore color or ethnic differences. Indeed, we should revel in them. Enjoy them. Different colors and looks and cultures make the world so much more interesting. We don’t want a colorblind society. We want one that appreciates “colors” and embraces them, and does not discriminate against them. I think in a way that is what she meant though. But I just wanted to note the difference. Nothing wrong with seeing color. How we react to it is the issue.

One other point on the excerpt above, which I read on The Huffington Post. The writer used the phrase “…the challenges of raising an interracial child…” Well of course I don’t agree that people are “interracial” since we are all one race, only culturally or ethnically different. But I also take issue with the idea that raising a mixed child is more difficult somehow. I have two and have no particular difficulties compared to friends who have kids who do not benefit from being mixed. All children are a challenge. Girls present challenges. Boys present challenges. Being a minority religion presents challenges. Disabilities present challenges. Let’s not make it out that being mixed is somehow a particularly tough situation. It, like the others mentioned, means different things. But all children are unique in that way.

 

American Black Presidents Before Obama?

Ole Andrew Jackson may have been a brother.

One of the problems with the “one drop” rule, that racist idea that one drop of black blood makes a person black, which one of those still accepted beliefs here in America, at least to many, is that if you apply it fully, it may turn out everybody is black. After all, wouldn’t that simply be a question of how far back you want to go.

Several scholars are now saying Barack Obama may not, according to the one drop mindset, be our first African-American President. Look out! This may cause some people great consternation.

Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and ole Thomas Jefferson all may have had blacks in their genealogy.

Well, well, well.

Of course I don’t buy into the one drop rule. But this goes to show, defining people by what they look like or what is in their ancestry is all just a wasted exercise. We are all mixed somewhere down the line.

Read more about these other “black” Presidents here.

 

Another Year of Getting Beyond Racial Classifications

So what is she?

Here’s to 2013 being a great year for all of us and to it being a year when we see our society and world get ever closer to the silly and outdated notion of “race” as a divider becoming meaningless, or at least less so.

Hailee Steinfeld, above photo, symbolizes the idiocy of “race.” Hailee’s maternal grandfather, Ricardo Guillermo Domasin, was born in Los Angeles, in 1938. Ricardo’s dad, Peter L. Domasin, was born in 1904 in the Philippines (his own mother’s maiden name was Lorisca). Ricardo’s mother, Evelyn Olivia Bain, was born in Los Angeles, in 1910; she was Hailee Steinfeld’s great-grandmother. Evelyn was African-American, and she and her parents, Thomas Edward Bain and Wilma “Willie” Peterson, are listed as either African-American or Mulatto in every census. So what “race” would that make Hailee?

Simply human.

Looking forward to 2013 and plenty more blogging.

Facebook Holding Onto Outdated Concepts of “Race”

Come on Facebook, don’t be so backwards thinking.

This is a great piece by Glenn Robinson of the blog, Mixed American Life:

I had been telling people that identity sites like Facebook and Google+ don’t have a field for race – because race does not define us.

Well, maybe I was wrong – again.

Facebook went there – at least on this ‘Brief survey’ that popped up at the top of my page.

Click here to read more on what Facebook did when it comes to taking us all back to a place we had hoped to have gotten past.

“Mixed Mexican” and The Fallacy of Race

Funny and enlightening at the same time.

Saw this on Mixed American Life’s site. Very good video demonstrating the complexity of “race” and it’s non-existence. Worth watching.

Here is the video.

You May Not Be The Ethnicity You Think

So who are you really?

I don’t know how many times I have to say it people, the concept of race is just plain silly. Race, as commonly used, just doesn’t exist. The question isn’t where are your people from, it’s how far do yo want to go back? All too often, people want to stop their genealogy at a point that they prefer, not where it really goes. Cuz if they were fully looking, they just might find they are not so easily defined. Take the Melungeons.

For years, varied and sometimes wild claims have been made about the origins of a group of dark-skinned residents of the southeastern Appalachia region, once known derisively as the Melungeons. Some speculated they were descended from Portuguese explorers, or perhaps from Turkish slaves or Gypsies.

Now a new DNA study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogyattempts to separate truth from oral tradition and wishful thinking. The study found the truth to be somewhat less exotic: Genetic evidence shows that the families historically called Melungeons are the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin.

And that report, which was published in April in the peer-reviewed journal, doesn’t sit comfortably with some people who claim Melungeon ancestry.

“There were a whole lot of people upset by this study,” lead researcher Roberta Estes said. “They just knew they were Portuguese or Native American.”

 Now there’s a wake up call. You wonder how this changes their outlook on their Black brethren. Probably causes some very confused feelings and discussions around the dinner table.

Race is stupid.

Here is the full and very interesting story.

A White Father And A Black Child?

Why the labels at all?

“You can call the child biracial, but everyone will think of her as black.  It’s not like how your people determine if the child is Jewish based on the fact that the mother is Jewish.  If one parent is black, the child is black.  That’s just how it is.”

        This is a very interesting quote from an article written by a White father of a Mixed child, about a comment he heard regarding the age old “one drop” rule. The rule, which way too many people accept as real, says that one drop of black blood in you makes you Black regardless of the rest of  your mixture. It is a stupid and silly concept rooted in racism and one that surprisingly most people, even Blacks espouse. Indeed I would venture to say that more Blacks accept this concept than others, even though its root implies that the Black gene “taints” all others.

       Truly ignorant.

       But I love the honesty of the author. It reminds of the idiocy of how we see “race” summarized by the sentence that a White woman can give birth to a Black child but aBlack woman cannot give birth to a White child. That this makes sense to people is beyond my understanding. And it is so interesting to me that people often justify this idiocy by saying it is not them that think this way, they are just saying society thinks that way so therefore it is reality.

       Well this very notion ignores the reality that WE are society. The speaker is society. Society does not think. It is a concept. People think. Or they are supposed to. The collective that is society has been wrong on many fronts before. And we have proven the ability to turn what “society” thinks. So I don’t buy that this is society’s judgement so therefore it is right or something we should therefore also espouse. “Society” in this case is ignorant. As individuals we can be smarter.

       Here is the link  to the father’s wonderful article.

The Idiocy of “Race”

Who we are is not so simple as "race."

Here is further proof of the idiocy of the concept of “race,” that it just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever:

The federal Department of Education would categorize Michelle Lopez-Mullins — a university student who is of Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee and Cherokee descent — as “Hispanic.” But the National Center for Health Statistics, the government agency that tracks data on births and deaths, would pronounce her “Asian.” And what does Lopez-Mullins’ birth certificate from the state of Maryland say? It doesn’t mention her race.

Lopez-Mullins, 20, usually marks “other” on surveys these days, but when she filled out a census form last year, she chose Asian, Hispanic, Native American and white.

The chameleon-like quality of Lopez-Mullins’ racial and ethnic identification might seem trivial except that statistics on ethnicity and race are used for many important purposes. These include assessing disparities in health, education, employment and housing, enforcing civil rights protections, and deciding who might qualify for special consideration as members of underrepresented minority groups.

But when it comes to keeping racial statistics, the nation is in transition, moving, often without uniformity, from the old “mark one box” limit to allowing citizens to check as many boxes as their backgrounds demand. Changes in how Americans are counted by race and ethnicity are meant to improve the precision with which the nation’s growing diversity is gauged: the number of mixed-race Americans, for example, is rising rapidly, largely because of increases in immigration and intermarriage in the past two decades. (One in seven new marriages is now interracial or interethnic.)

In the process, however, a measurement problem has emerged. Despite the federal government’s setting standards more than a decade ago, data on race and ethnicity are being collected and aggregated in an assortment of ways. The lack of uniformity is making comparison and analysis extremely difficult across fields and across time.

Under Department of Education requirementsthat take effect this year, for instance, any student like Lopez-Mullins who acknowledges even partial Hispanic ethnicity will, regardless of race, be reported to federal officials only as Hispanic. And students of non-Hispanic mixed parentage who choose more than one race will be placed in a “two or more races” category, a catchall that detractors describe as inadequately detailed. A child of black and American Indian parents, for example, would be in the same category as, say, a child of white and Asian parents.

Absolutely crazy. In a way it is progress because at least our government is moving away from the three races concept basically. But the only real solution is to recognize that there are no races of people, only differing ethnic and culture differences. As I have maintained, the concept of “race” is outdated and only divides.

Time to end the idiocy. Here is the full article.