This is today’s insight for me. I try to have one good thought a day, even if I have to take it. (It’s like outsourcing my thinking ;-).) But seriously, if I had to be reductionist about the Black/White definition issue about racial classification in American history, this phrase would it. I look more towards what the definition *does* than what it is. What it does show is white power, white supremacy, by demonstrating that “they” have the power to decide, while others, mainly blacks but others like mulattos, Asian Americans, etc. can only respond and react. This power they have—to dominate and control the narrative around the “race issue”—cuts to the very heart of the meaning of black. By simply getting to define who is black, it shows from many people’s reactions that they—or more accurately the political supremacy issue from the controlling whites in power—get to make the definition and then impose it on everyone else.
For example, I don’t get to consider myself white or not, others have the right. Though I found out last month from my DNA test one of my earliest ancestors to arrive in America was a black woman from Senegal on a slave ship to Louisiana in the 1740s, no one, including myself, would have any reason to consider me “black” before that test result. Despite two more slaves arriving from Haiti after the revolution in 1804 with the French sugar croppers who left and came to Louisiana with those slaves, “mixing” and making my grandfather 25% black, no one considered my father—to my knowledge—to be even part black as he was born in northeast. I don’t even know if he knew. So if I don’t tell anyone, no one will every consider me anything but white, especially now that’s I’m in Texas, where white supremacists are in charge more abrasively than in the northeast (please move to Texas Hakeem Jefferies!).
We can judge the primacy of who has control by the reactions of everyone. People could have responded, “Welcome Hallie, we love you”, “So glad to hear you’re black now Hallie, we’re the better race”, or “We welcome your mother also to join us in the black kingdom, because that’s where the love and joy are”, but they didn’t. They acted like it was “negative” to be labeled Black, or, as the author said better, is just a garbage can where anyone who is white gets to decide who isn’t and to thrown into the trash bucket. I think we need to start reacting differently on social media to these type of things. “Isn’t it great Ariel the mermaid is now black” and maybe add a taunt, “Because everyone knows blacks are better swimmers.”
If anyone wants to kick Hallie out and make her white again, I’ll be glad to take her place as I’m just hanging out in the backyard now. I know I’m not much black, only three slaves, or as I call them “my American human ancestors”, but I’d be relieved not to be burdened by my current association with such an American whiteness that has dehumanized others for so long. Good-bye Ted Cruz, you vile nasty pig! I’m leaving white Texas forever. (I hear my black neighbors on the other side of the fence on this beautiful day going into their luxury in-ground pool, maybe they’ll invite in, and even teach me to swim a few laps. (Peace to you)