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vulgarweedPale on the outside, dark on the inside.
It's International Blog Against Racism Week: (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
ibarw). I'm hoping for something more eloquent later, but for now, I say this: I am mixed and I'm proud of that. My mother is an adventurer like Indiana Jones who used to fangirl Cicho Buarque and Caetano Veloso as a pretty teen (I inherited her silver elbow-length Edie Sedgwick gloves): when she was just a teenager, she left her home continent to go to college far away. When she was there, she met a handsome white boy who wanted to go sit in fire towers in the US West like his hero Jack Kerouac (I still have some of his very old black turtlenecks and Park Service uniform shirts). They had an INS shotgun wedding. I was conceived on the honeymoon.
The issue here is that she is brown; he is white--and I am white, because in the genetic-roulette game, I came up looking much more like him. My complexion and climate tolerance is that of the Irish-women-raped-by-Vikings-a-thousand-years-ago color that he has. It doesn't mean I'm smarter or anything, it just means I'm that much more susceptible to skin cancer. And that much more likely to get hired through no merit of my own. There's a whole litany of white-privilege possibilities foisted on my socially-inept lower-middle-class Appalachian ass. I know I've barely managed to score jobs no matter how badly I dress (I've overheard bosses' conversations) - can you imagine how poor I'd be if I dressed this badly and was also brown-skinned?!?!?
It also means that any time you've made a joke or offensive remark about brown or black people in my earshot? You've attacked me. All my relatives by blood in Brazil are brown, and many of them by marriage are black. Any time I have done so, in my life (I admit I have; I'm ashamed of it, but the whole spirit of IBARW is admitting to that, right?) I was lashing out in my fear of other lives I could have lived. It means that whenever a fictional world is created where people of non-European descent don't exist or are disposable? Please don't write my mom and her whole family out, because I would not exist without them--and I wouldn't want to, because I love them.
The book that moved me the most that I've read in the last half-decade was Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama. I read it in '04 because I live in IL and he was running for Senate then. And when I got to the parts where he went to Kenya for the first time as a young man, meeting relatives--grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, half-siblings--who lived in a different world and spoke a different language, who vaguely resembled him but had a different skin tone, ate different food, listened to different music, argued about different politics, knew different landscapes and foliage and yet still were family, I wept. Because that is my life too. I have had that experience. Can I even tell you what it means to me, as a biracial binational person, to have a biracial binational person as President? It means a LOT. Yet he cannot claim that with pride. As a visually Black man, even now if he walked out on the street in Washington DC without the Secret Service, some cab drivers would STILL refuse him. He cannot be openly proud of being binational, because even now there are conspiracy-theory dipshits convinced he can't be a legit citizen--I dunno why, because of his "foreign" name?
I don't know. I just conclude this post to say, don't assume that because some random person in the bar next to you has pale skin that it's OK to tell racist jokes. You never know. Just fucking don't, that shit is never funny. And don't assume that just because your mental map of the US in the seas of the world is full of "here be dragons" everywhere that you're among fellow-feelers. If you think that, why don't you just keep your mouth shut? (Fuck American exceptionalism. I'm 40, laid off, with pre-existing conditions, lusty and kinky, 35-27-36. I am single and TOTALLY in the market for a Canadian or EU mail-order spouse, for the vastly greater healthcare and general "freedoms".)
(Though I must admit, I'm totally "white" in the following ways: I can't dance, and I really, REALLY fucking hate temperatures above 75F. It's fun travelling with Mom. She likes to lie out on the beach and soak up the winds, and thinks the water is always "too cold" no matter how close to the equator we are. I think the whole point of going to the beach is about the sea, and I spend the whole time there in the water. Very likely, that may have something to do with our respective orixas.)
It's International Blog Against Racism Week: (
ibarw). I'm hoping for something more eloquent later, but for now, I say this: I am mixed and I'm proud of that. My mother is an adventurer like Indiana Jones who used to fangirl Cicho Buarque and Caetano Veloso as a pretty teen (I inherited her silver elbow-length Edie Sedgwick gloves): when she was just a teenager, she left her home continent to go to college far away. When she was there, she met a handsome white boy who wanted to go sit in fire towers in the US West like his hero Jack Kerouac (I still have some of his very old black turtlenecks and Park Service uniform shirts). They had an INS shotgun wedding. I was conceived on the honeymoon.The issue here is that she is brown; he is white--and I am white, because in the genetic-roulette game, I came up looking much more like him. My complexion and climate tolerance is that of the Irish-women-raped-by-Vikings-a-thousand-years-ago color that he has. It doesn't mean I'm smarter or anything, it just means I'm that much more susceptible to skin cancer. And that much more likely to get hired through no merit of my own. There's a whole litany of white-privilege possibilities foisted on my socially-inept lower-middle-class Appalachian ass. I know I've barely managed to score jobs no matter how badly I dress (I've overheard bosses' conversations) - can you imagine how poor I'd be if I dressed this badly and was also brown-skinned?!?!?
It also means that any time you've made a joke or offensive remark about brown or black people in my earshot? You've attacked me. All my relatives by blood in Brazil are brown, and many of them by marriage are black. Any time I have done so, in my life (I admit I have; I'm ashamed of it, but the whole spirit of IBARW is admitting to that, right?) I was lashing out in my fear of other lives I could have lived. It means that whenever a fictional world is created where people of non-European descent don't exist or are disposable? Please don't write my mom and her whole family out, because I would not exist without them--and I wouldn't want to, because I love them.
The book that moved me the most that I've read in the last half-decade was Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama. I read it in '04 because I live in IL and he was running for Senate then. And when I got to the parts where he went to Kenya for the first time as a young man, meeting relatives--grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, half-siblings--who lived in a different world and spoke a different language, who vaguely resembled him but had a different skin tone, ate different food, listened to different music, argued about different politics, knew different landscapes and foliage and yet still were family, I wept. Because that is my life too. I have had that experience. Can I even tell you what it means to me, as a biracial binational person, to have a biracial binational person as President? It means a LOT. Yet he cannot claim that with pride. As a visually Black man, even now if he walked out on the street in Washington DC without the Secret Service, some cab drivers would STILL refuse him. He cannot be openly proud of being binational, because even now there are conspiracy-theory dipshits convinced he can't be a legit citizen--I dunno why, because of his "foreign" name?
I don't know. I just conclude this post to say, don't assume that because some random person in the bar next to you has pale skin that it's OK to tell racist jokes. You never know. Just fucking don't, that shit is never funny. And don't assume that just because your mental map of the US in the seas of the world is full of "here be dragons" everywhere that you're among fellow-feelers. If you think that, why don't you just keep your mouth shut? (Fuck American exceptionalism. I'm 40, laid off, with pre-existing conditions, lusty and kinky, 35-27-36. I am single and TOTALLY in the market for a Canadian or EU mail-order spouse, for the vastly greater healthcare and general "freedoms".)
(Though I must admit, I'm totally "white" in the following ways: I can't dance, and I really, REALLY fucking hate temperatures above 75F. It's fun travelling with Mom. She likes to lie out on the beach and soak up the winds, and thinks the water is always "too cold" no matter how close to the equator we are. I think the whole point of going to the beach is about the sea, and I spend the whole time there in the water. Very likely, that may have something to do with our respective orixas.)
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-30 12:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-30 02:02 pm (UTC)Yes!
Date: 2009-08-01 06:41 am (UTC)I went there with Mom at 17, and I was 17 and I was evil. But I remember that was also when I read Jorge Amado for the first time - he's the great novelist of Mom's home town - because I understood the world better through books at that time. Also the last time I saw my grandfather alive, and the first time I visited the farm where my mom was born. Which appalled me. There were frakkin' sharecroppers. (There was one little girl about 7 years old who followed me around, and we had a moment where we sat in a car and listened to a Love & Rockets tape.She loved it. I gave it to her.)
The latest trip was in '04, and that was the best one yet. Finally, I'm old enough to appreciate my mom and her family fully, I think. That's when I truly found out who her orixas and mine are, because I finally got to meet the great-aunt I kept hearing about who is a priestess in the Candomble and knows. It's also when we got to have some time of our own in a hotel room, and really explore.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-30 04:11 pm (UTC)I'm mixed - Jamaican/Welsh. Like you I'm on the whiter end of the spectrum, but every member of my non-white family has experienced racial slurs and prejudice. Even my husband - who's as white as they come - has suffered from being married to someone 'not quite white' .. though that probably should read as 'not white enough'. He's even been disowned by his family.
Though not an American I was overjoyed when your new president was elected. To me it seemed like a personal victory - even though I don't even share your politics. It just seemed like one more rung on a global ladder of equality had been reached ... one more. I mean I know there're a hell of a lot more steps on that long bloody ladder but, well, it's a lot higher than was ever reached before.
Like you, I'm a white chocolate truffle - and I couldn't be happier.
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Date: 2009-08-01 06:56 am (UTC)Your background sounds fascinating! Even within my extended family, there are nasty comments and cold-shouldering - even though in northern Brazil, "white" and "black" don't necessarily have the same meaning! It's a class distinction in some ways. Mom is considered "white" in her home city because she's on the lighter side of the spectrum there, but not here (in northern Brazil, it's a continuum, like the Kinsey Scale, not an either/or). Her family had money at one point - imagine her shock when she came to the US as a college exchange student with full scholarship, speaking two languages already, and had a host family who were disappointed when she didn't react with noble-savage awe at TV and flush toilets!
My dad's family did not take it well. Even the ones who acted OK about it later went on to make snide remarks about "spics" when my first cousin was dating a Nicaraguan guy and didn't understand when we both wanted to stop the car and walk home!
I went to the Election Night fest in Grant Park (I live in Chicago) and also the inauguration, and while everyone there was rejoicing and happy, the stars of the night were really the many elderly African-American people there in tears, who never thought they would live to see it (and remembering their loved ones who didn't, but were there in spirit). I've never seen so many hyped-up young people in a city crowd going out of their way to be courteous to the old and disabled before.
I called my mom from the events. She was in happy tears too.
It's not that I think he's perfect. Good LORD, he's not. But it does make me so happy and proud that he can go overseas - to Germany or Ghana, doesn't matter - and the people there are so glad to see him, and he always shows such sincere interest and respect for history and culture. What a contrast compared to what we had before.