The important answer to:
“If race is not real, why talk about it?”
Race Categories
Brown is the New White, Steve Phillips
Ron – Black, Cuban, Mexican and Switched at Birth as Chinese!
“As a sort of irony, I was born a Chinese baby. Baby Boy Wong”
Our friend Ron Lyles shares how he was mislabeled as a Chinese baby at birth, how his family’s former slave-owners found him, and the importance of including ‘culture’ in dialogues about race.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.youtube.com
How I Learned about the One-Drop Rule: Mark
TRANSCRIPT:
FANSHEN: Recently I asked my friends when was the first time that they heard about the one-drop rule. And their answers were really incredible, so we’re sharing them here and we’d like to hear yours. So send us an email (onedropoflove(at)gmail, tweet us, anything, and let us know: when was the first time that YOU learned about the one-drop rule?
MARK: I self-identify as mixed, but I am politically Black. In our family we never talked about race or the one-drop rule – anything. And so basically I just intuited that there was a one-drop rule because I was defined as Black growing up as far as my experiences.
My dearest friend, growing up, would call me “contraband” because he learned about the phrase – he read something about slavery and that a slave that was seeking freedom, if they were caught they were considered ‘contraband’ and he thought that was funny. I had no knowledge, so he was calling me contraband and it hurt like hell and I had no ability to defend myself or to articulate a different argument.
So it really wasn’t until I graduated from high school, I was in the Marine Corps, I came across an interesting story in the New York Times about a woman who was suing the State of Louisiana because her birth certificate said that she was ‘Colored.’ She was raised White, she self-identified as White. And she fought her case all the way up to the Supreme Court and lost because according to state law, in 1970 if you were just any – any trace of Black, you were Colored to 1/32 Black, you were Colored. And she had 3/32s – they even went so far as to hire a genealogist. And so that fascinated me – it really resonated with me. I couldn’t articulate why, but I just found it a fascinating story.
Ten years later I was attending school at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland and I learned about the one-drop rule. And that’s where I learned about slavery, I learned about Manifest Destiny, etc. etc. etc. And I learned about the one-drop rule and I learned how pernicious and ridiculous it is and how hard we work to create a caste system and what really saddened me was defining Black as a negative – that if you had any part Black in you, that was not a good thing. And that’s…that’s heartbreaking. Nobody should ever have that experience and it will end because of people like Fanshen, who are creating this space for us to talk about elements of racism such as the one-drop rule and I’m very appreciative and have much gratitude for allowing me to share my story of how I learned about the one-drop rule.
SPOKESPERSON: Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel to keep up with the latestOne Drop news and other videos. Do you have ideas for more video content? Tell us what you’d like to see. We’ll see you next time to share more drops of love. Be sure to tell us by commenting here and on Twitter and Facebook, how YOU are spreading drops of love.
From
http://www.onedropoflove.org/how-i-learned-about-the-one-drop-rule-mark/
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.youtube.com
Community Village: LOVE this Tweet from Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai
See on Scoop.it – Community Village Daily
looking for that one / love that binds us together / make community
@yellowgurlpoet
See on communityvillageus.blogspot.fr
Transformations: Transgender Man Works to Change Media, Perceptions
See on Scoop.it – Mixed American Life
“Lance Hicks used to get mad when schoolyard bullies would argue with him about his race. “I used to carry around family photos to show them because I would get really upset when people would tell me that I wasn’t the race that I said I was,” he says, sitting on a bench in Clark Park. “Its just that idea that a perfect stranger based on how you look feels entitled to say they know more about you than you do.”
Hicks has a white parent and a black parent. He also has fair skin and light eyes. So when people look at him, they often only see a white man. But his race is not the only part of his identity people often misread. Hicks, 22, has been correcting them about his gender since coming out as transgender at 15.”
– MORE –
See on www.pridesource.com
Elizabeth Warren and the Politics of Racial Passing | Marcia Dawkins
See on Scoop.it – Mixed American Life
“This year’s election season is “the battle of the racial passers.” While many have fixated on the authenticity of a multiracial President Obama and a Latino Mitt Romney, questions of racial identity and passing have taken center stage in the Massachusetts Senate race between GOP incumbent Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren as well.
To put it bluntly, Brown is accusing Warren of “passing,” or representing herself as a member of a different racial group than the one to which she belongs. These accusations are to be expected, as I wrote in my new book, Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity, which deals with how people from all walks of life reconcile who they are with who society tells them to be in a society where racial definitions are constantly changing.
…
When the votes are counted this November, Warren’s racial identity will be less significant than the fact that questions about her identity persist as means of disqualification. Such questions demonstrate the ongoing problems of racial identification in the twenty-first century.
But, if we’re willing to get past the noise and listen to Warren, we may also find some answers. Answers to questions like: What are you? Who is most qualified to respond? What evidence can be considered? Warren’s identity also provides a new answer to the old question about the definition of race. Is race real? Is it biological? Is it sociological? For Warren the answer is complicated. Race is clearly invisible — a fact of life that may also be, to some degree, a fiction.”
See on www.huffingtonpost.com
Interracial Brooklyn
See on Scoop.it – Mixed American Life
New York, however, was one of the states that had never had laws against interracial marriage.
…What explains the rise of Intermarriage?
The US had a big immigration reform in 1965, which led to a sharp rise in immigration from Asia and Latin America. As the US population became more racially diverse, there was more opportunity for Americans to meet (and fall in love with) people from other races. Immigrant destinations like New York City tend to have more intermarriage as a result of having more racial diversity.
…In order to figure out how many interracial couples there are, one must first divide people into separate and mutually exclusive racial/ethnic categories. In dividing people into mutually exclusive racial/ethnic categories, one immediately confronts a series of definition problems that have no unique solution.
The fact is that race exists in America only because we Americans believe in race and invest the categories with meaning…”
via
See on www.mixedracestudies.org
Color terminology for race – Wikipedia
See on Scoop.it – Mixed American Life
Charles Darwin argued that the number of race categories is completely arbitrary and subjective.
See on en.wikipedia.org
Counting People of Color | Damali Ayo
See on Scoop.it – Community Village Daily
“I went through a phase where anytime I was in a crowd, I counted the number of people of color– out loud so whomever I was with could hear me. Eventually my friends started doing the same thing. Then they started noticing the dearth of people of color in situation after situation, then in their own lives, and then…they realized they had to change that.” -Damali
See on us1.campaign-archive1.com
Mixed American Life 
You must be logged in to post a comment.