Thursday, April 24, 2008

Mothers do count






One thing I really dislike about American culture is the insistence that if you are black you are black. There is no such thing as being one sixteenth black. There is no cool cred to be gained from that. And if you are, but do not obviously show it by your face or skin colour, why then you are only passing white

When Tiger Woods first said he was not Black but comblinasian there was an outcry. He was in denial

My immediate reaction was to think: He is saying Hey! I have a Mom too, you know.

But “Woods' description of his racial identity led one observer to wonder how he could say he is only 25 percent Black, when his father is Black”

This is a salute to women who are destined to go through life with much of the rest of the world putting their children firmly into a different racial, ethnic or community box. As if this were apartheid South Africa

And themselves into the box marked Middle aged white woman who knows nothing about what it is like to be black

Even if they have now largely escaped the box labelled (in a pseudo-scientific polite version of the phrase I cannot use here) miscegenationist. Breeding children who, by a unique genetic process, were destined to inherit the worst vices of their parents respective racial groups

But it is our good fortune that Lewis Hamilton, Halle Barrie, Barack Obama … managed to overcome this appalling destiny of their genes



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