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| Mom, Dad & Me circa 1949 |
Recently, my sunset watching gang at Venice Beach had a gender reveal party for a pregnant couple, and we were all asked to bring baby pictures. The best one I could find was this picture of me as a toddler, sitting between my mother and father. As you can see, my father was quite dark, and my mother was fair skinned, which accounts for my medium shade.
I first became aware that I was black—and that this was a bad thing—three or four years after this photo was taken.
I was born in 1948, and raised in Atlantic City, NJ, but my mother, and her family, were from Dudley, NC. Every summer we would drive down to spend a few weeks with the grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins in the South. That is where I first learned what it means to be black in America. I can still remember the shame and rage as if it was yesterday.
Mom had taken my younger brother, Cory, and me into Goldsboro, NC, the closest city. As we passed a Woolworths, my brother and I started clamoring for some ice cream, a regular treat from the Woolworths in Atlantic City, and my mom was forced to tell us that we couldn't get ice cream at this Woolworths because we were black!
Every black child in America has endured a similar dark epiphany.
With her fair skin, straight brown hair, and green eyes, my mom could "pass" for white, and did so as a college student in Savannah, which meant that she didn't have to ride in the back of the bus, and probably could slip into Woolworths for an ice cream without being challenged—provided she was alone. But she couldn't do that with her children, her husband, or even her North Carolina family. So, other than those exceptional college years, she was black all of her life.
I could never "pass" for white, and neither could Kamala Harris. She could have told the bus driver or the people at Woolworths that she was Indian, or South Asian—and see how far that got her. They would have told her to get to the back of the bus and out of the store because as far as they were concerned, she was black. If she had insisted on her rights as another racial identity, the cops would have been called to show her just how black she was.
Trump & the NABJ
To a room full of black journalists, Donald Trump promoted the racist fairy tale that Harris had formerly identified as Indian or South Asian, and only recently decided to be black. This has been met with a flurry of responses showing that she identified as black as early as when she went to Howard University and joined AKA. That's bad news for me because I was one the few blacks in my freshman class at Washington University (St. Louis) and joined SDS because all the fraternities were white—but then, so was SDS, but at least it was radical.
All of these rebuttals showing that she has always identified as black miss the point, and that's the beauty of Trump's racist attack. He's positing racial identity as a personal choice, whereas for people of color, your racial identity is what white people say it is. That central fact seems to be missing from this whole dust up.
One difference between gender and race is that while gender, however you define it, represents an organic category, race is a completely synthetic one. It has no basis in biology. We are all one species. Grouping people by skin color makes about as much sense as grouping them by hair color, which would be our most prominent color identifier if we were still mostly covered by hair, as most mammals are. Instead, we adapted to the sunlight provided at different latitudes by allocating different melanin levels and types to adjust the bare skin to protect us while still producing the necessary vitamin D.
Since race is a completely synthetic category, your race has always been determined by what your white supremacist society says it is.
Keep in mind that the "white" race was invented in the mid to late 1600s, less than 400 years ago in the soon to be United States, and it was invented for purpose of making negroes a permanent slave class. Just consider how the label "white" first made it into Virginia laws. It was in a 1691 law titled “An act for suppressing outlying Slaves”:
And for prevention of that abominable mixture and spurious issue which hereafter may encrease in this dominion, as well by negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women, as by their unlawfull accompanying with one another, Be it enacted by the authoritie aforesaid, and it is hereby enacted, that for the time to come, whatsoever English or other white man or woman being free shall intermarry with a negroe, mulatto, or Indian man or woman bond or free shall within three months after such marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever,...
That appears to be the first use of the label
"white" to describe people in a law
anywhere, but since most Europeans in the colonies had referred to themselves as English or Christian,
"white" had to be introduced as a synonym for English or the reader might not know who they meant by
"white." Please note also that this first ever use of the
"white" label in law was to outlaw intermarriage between the newly created race and non-whites. Also note that negroes were not yet labeled
"black," that only came several decades later. Even the
Virginia Slave codes on 1705 makes no mention of the
"black" label (no pun intended), although it uses the label
"negro" 16 times, and the label
"white" 9 times.
It has historically been a truth that a fair complexion was no guarantee of the ability to adopt a white identity. Initially, the Irish weren't considered white. The Italians neither. The Poles of Chicago didn't get the "right" to be "white" until the race riots of 1919. The view that Jews couldn't be white was the ideology behind the Holocaust, and the controversy over that question roils the extreme right til this day.
It's also been shown that even the fairest skin, bluest eyes, and blondest hair haven't always provided protection against being branded black. Such was, by all accounts, the description of one Jane Morrison, 15, who via a complicated odyssey ended up being sold in January of 1857 to the slave trader James White in the slave market in New Orleans. Once sold into the slave trade, she was categorised as a negro or black. Her "white-like" features only made her a more valuable "black." She ran away, and with the help of a benefactor, sued for her freedom in October of that same year in a Jefferson Parish courtroom. In a case that wouldn't be settled until after Lincoln's assassination, it would be heard by no less than three juries, and the Louisiana Supreme Court twice. The rich court records these proceedings left provide a unique window into the way race is defined in America.
While her blonde hair and blue eyes seemed to broadcast the conclusion that she was white, jurors were told not to believe their eyes. It was said that the mere fact that she had been sold into slavery was enough to prove her a negro. The defense said that while the required "drop of African blood" might not so easily visually detected, it could be proven by "scientific" racism with regards to her bone structure, by claims about her demeanor and sexuality, and lack of "feminine whiteness." In the end it would take a civil war for Morrison to claim her white identity. Race has never been about self-identification because race was developed as a method of social control.
In ConclusionTrump's claim that:
"I didn't know she (Harris) was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black.",
turns the racist paradigm completely on its head. It's not the person of color that informs the white world what his or her racial identity is. It's quite the opposite. It's the white world, and white supremacists like Donald Trump, that inform the non-white people what subhuman category they have been lumped into, and almost nobody is talking about that. That's the beauty of Trump's gambit.
Clay Claiborne
3 August 2024
I prefer to be identified as African American, but have used the label black for the purposes of this essay even though it has certain negative connotations embedded in it.
