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Re: What do you think about multiracial children?
Taken from a reasoning on Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum
The thread for this reasoning is linked here
Posted by Erzulie
February 01, 2005
Peace all.
I think that there is absolutely nothing problematic about a Black person, and more particularly a Black woman, asserting that she understands this current fixation on multiculturalism to be a false and dangerous paradigm. Black women and our perspectives are often silenced, excluded and abandoned when people start talking about the wonders of multiculturalism. More importantly, Black women who understand biracial progeny involving those of African descent as most often existing in relation to the projected demise of Black women's dignity, beauty and voice as the white supremacist aesthetics and values are still entrenched in the minds of many people globally, should not be demonized especially in Black safe places such as this.
Also, Black women are wise in maintaining a discerning approach to light skinned biracial folks as it is often probable that their allegiance to Black empowerment may be unsettled and inconsistent. Those of us sisters who are activists-by whatever definition-should be careful not to drain ourselves with political fence sitters and spirit parasites. Self-honouring and self-defense strategies employed by exploited people is never bigotry from this standpoint. Even biracial children (of Black men and non-Black women), as innocent as they may be, have often been conditioned already to relate to Black women in overly needy or disparaging ways. This can be very tiring and/or hurtful though often very subtle. This has been my experience. This is not to mention the absurdly strained relations between Black women and the Black men engaged in relations with non-Black women. There is overwhelming silence about this pain of rejection as Black women are often pushed to appear strong and unaffected by this growing preference for white femininity by Black men. By extension we become the bitchy ones when we express our feelings and our analysis of this trope of white supremacy.
As a woman of the African Diaspora, I am quite aware that most of us Black folks on this side of the Atlantic have European, Native, Latino etc foreparents. However, my everyday life as a dark-skinned woman does not reflect the creolization of my bloodlines nor serve me any privileges as marked by the colour hierarchy. Whatever the case, this (often forced) hybridity may not be the case for other peoples who lived outside the brutal chaos of the slave trade that shaped the so-called New World. Thus I cannot speak for the genetic makeup of Africans on the continent especially when most of my information would come from Western sources infected with their own agendas. Instead of thinking that we can always school African peoples on their his/herstory perhaps we should consider how in step we are with white supremacy in assuming their ignorance and when we do not question and deconstruct the knowledge of the West.
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