It seems that almost every time I meet someone new, black, white or any other race, they seem to ask me what I’m mixed with. My immediate reply is “I’m black,” but for some people that answer is never good enough. Now if we’re being truthful, I’m a gumbo bowl. The fact of the matter is that my family is French creole, but seeing as French creole is almost a dead race, I identify as black because that is what we are.
The real question isn’t what I’m mixed with, the real question is: Who are you to define what black looks like? Who are you to insist that I’m not black because my skin is a certain color and my hair looks a certain way? The problem doesn’t come from outside of our race but within our race. Black is a number of shades, hair textures, body types and different types of bone structure.
We seem to forget that pre-integration black women were constantly raped and abused. Mixes of children were common, especially in the days of slavery. Keeping with the fact that they used to breed us like dogs, what _is_ fully black? We are not truly one thing, because there isn’t a pure breed of any of us. So next time someone asks me what I’m mixed with I might as well ask them what they’re mixed with, because do any of us truly know?
The most insulting thing that we do to each other is assume that because someone is “pretty” that they are not exactly like us. Someone “pretty” has to be mixed, almost as if we do not believe that just being black is beautiful as well. And nine times out of 10, mixed people find this assumption insulting and exclusionary because it’s been implied that somehow that mixed people are not “fully black” and put into a separate category. By insisting that someone tell you their pedigree, you’ve dismissed, in one way or another, their proud declaration of “I am black,” blocking them from the one group they’ve thought themselves a part of their entire lives.
Oreo, mutt, light-bright — all of these are terms I’ve been called multiple times in my life, and all have become derogatory terms. These terms force mixed people and “lightskins” to stand on the outside of the circle, wondering what they can do to get to the middle. I’ve always thought of it this way: two circles. One white circle, one black circle. Your questioned pedigree forces you to hang on the outside of the black circle, so you migrate between the two, unable to penetrate either circle fully. So you circle them like the Earth circles the sun, or like an electron circles an atom, but you’re never able to penetrate their inner circle.
Now, not every black person makes the mistake of exclusion, but there are many black people who do. Many black people that assume that black looks a certain way or is a certain thing, but I doubt that there could ever be a perfect definition of being black because there’s so many ways of being black. All black people are gumbo bowls, and we are all one and the same together.
