Race/Related: The generations of pain I felt in one racist moment
Both Black and White, and Neither
My skin is light, but my curls reveal my Blackness. It only takes one drop. Being half Black and half white means I cannot easily check off one box or another. And I'm not alone — the number of people identifying as multiracial in the United States has surged in recent years. I am too Black to be white and too white to be Black. I rarely feel as though I belong in places like the one my friends and I were at on July 5: An overcrowded New Jersey bar decorated in red, white and blue, where I could count the number of Black people on one hand. That night, though, I felt indignant. If you're unfamiliar with the term "mulatto," as many of my friends were before the holiday weekend, it is an offensive, archaic term to describe a person with white and Black parents. Derived from the Spanish word for mule, or "mulo," it was used during slavery to liken biracial people to the hybrid animal and to justify their legal and social oppression. A white guy came up to me in the bar and tapped my shoulder. He didn't greet me before asking, "Are you half white, half Black?" I rolled my eyes without responding. Then: "I love mulattos," he said, before doubling down and going even further, saying in vulgar sexual terms what he'd love to do to "a mulatto." Excuse me? What era are we in? I felt like I was being mocked, sexualized and dehumanized. "For somebody to use it today, it really is an especially derogatory use, because it's really going back to the era of slavery in the U.S.," said Ann J. Morning, a sociology professor at New York University whose research focuses on racial classification and multiracial identity. This was a deliberate act of racism, meant to provoke me and my biracial friend, whom he pointed at while repeating the slur. We didn't react in spite of his and his friends' laughter. I'm aware that racism has pervaded the United States since before its founding. But hearing it from people my age, Gen Z, is disorienting. Knowing they find humor in it is deeply unsettling. This kind of dehumanizing language is not unusual. During an April 2024 campaign rally in Michigan, Donald J. Trump referred to immigrants accused of crimes as "animals" and "not human." "In the current political moment, I think we're really seeing a turning back of the clock, a return to sort of these past, older ideas about race, and especially about racial superiority and inferiority," Morning said. Whether he knew it or not, that guy's crude comment echoed a long history of racial fetishization, tracing back to when European colonizers viewed Black people as possessions and Black women were hypersexualized, in order to justify the violence that the colonizers inflicted upon them. "There was kind of a sub-industry of slavery, which involved selling women who were very light-skinned explicitly for purposes of sexual exploitation," Morning said, describing special auctions for so-called "fancy girls." So in those words at the bar, I heard the weight of that history. "Mulatto" used to be a racial category on the census, along with "octoroon," meaning one-eighth African blood, and "quadroon," meaning one-fourth African blood. The 1870 census defined "mulatto" as including "all persons having any perceptible trace of African blood," according to the Pew Research Center. Scientists included these categories on the census because they were trying to prove that biracial people were not fertile and a "doomed class of people," Morning said, which was a pseudoscientific justification to prevent interracial mixing. Our society's ideas about race are constantly fluctuating, Morning said. Racial categories have changed on nearly every census since the first in 1790, she said. The 2030 census will include new "Hispanic or Latino" and "Middle Eastern or North African" boxes to check. Race is a political and social classification system, she said, which humans invented to divide people into different "categories of worth." Healing A Painful Family DivideMy white mother is a likely descendant of colonizers, her ancestors being English and Irish. My Black father is a descendant of slaves. I am both. I've spent my life in predominantly white spaces: I went to a small, progressive private school in the suburbs of Minneapolis, attended a private university and work for a corporation. I grew up in the middle of conflicting ideologies: My mom is a conservative, and my dad is at the opposite end of the political spectrum. They divorced when I was 7. My relationship with my mom was on the verge of collapse in 2020, shortly after George Floyd was murdered 10 minutes from my high school. We had spent the previous four years failing to understand each other. But as I was leaving for college, I realized I needed her. The relationship between a mother and daughter is invaluable and irreplaceable. One summer Sunday afternoon in 2021, I reflected on how politics had divided our home. I felt ashamed and wondered if I had been a terrible daughter. I apologized to my mom, and she held me for the first time in a long while. We needed each other. We wanted to fix our relationship. Our love for each other ultimately prevailed. I now understand that the deepest divide in this country is not one between Democrats and Republicans or conservatives and liberals. It is one from which racism takes root: how we choose to treat each other. Do we respond to our differences with hate and a desire to control, or with empathy and love? This is what defines our society. I know my mom has no hatred for any group of people, and I love her dearly. But racism isn't always about hate. It can also stem from patterns we inherited or habits we've never questioned. My grandfather and uncle, both of whom are now dead, disowned my mom when she married my dad. That kind of thinking doesn't just fade with time. "I worked hard to make a generational change and heal that awful and destructive way of thinking in my family," my mom recently said. Her family eventually came around, and they always loved me. But was it because my skin is lighter, I'm soft-spoken, or pretty, as they'd often say? Or maybe their views really did change. Racism is taught and exists in all of us. It is embedded in the systems that structure our lives. The only way to overcome it is to have a burning passion to disintegrate it, within ourselves and our communities. Thank God it only takes one drop. The fire for justice that I inherited from my enslaved ancestors burns brighter than the racism of my white ones. Invite your friends.
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