Anything but Black
23rd November 2015 · 0 Comments
Actor Taye Diggs wants his young son to know that he is racially mixed — not Black.
Diggs, 44, conveniently made his controversial remarks as he promotes his second book, Mixed Me.
He said he doesn’t want his son to not acknowledge half of who he is genetically.
“I don’t want my son to be in a situation where he calls himself Black, and everyone thinks he has a Black mom and a Black dad, and then they see a white mother, they wonder, ‘Oh, what’s going on.’”
Diggs added that he would call President Barack Obama the nation’s first “mixed” president, not the first Black U.S. president.
Taye, Taye, Taye.
It’s always interesting when people act like when it comes to racial identity Black folks are the ones with the problem.
For the record, we didn’t set any of this in motion.
We never saw the need to measure the amount of “Black blood” a person has or create artificial ways to classify people based on their genetic makeup.
But the French did.
In case you forgot, it was the French, the freedom-loving, egalitarian French, who created a 32-part racial classification system based on the amount of Black blood a person has. Some of the categories from that system include mulatto, quadroon, octoroon and griffe.
Some Christian leaders used the Bible to justify slavery and racism, explaining that Black people are descendants of Ham and/or Cain and are cursed to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”
Anglo-Saxons certainly did their part as evidence from early literature shows. As early as the days of William Shakespeare, there was a conscious effort to equate everything that was Black with sin, impurity, evil and treachery. Whiteness, on the other hand, represented purity, virtue and goodness.
In the Shakespearean play “Othello,” a white character talks about a Black man making “the beast with two backs” with a white woman.
Even though Shakespeare had a Black mistress, he was very critical of her kinky hair and dark skin in one of his sonnets, as if to say he maintained a relationship with her despite her many flaws as a non-White woman.
While numerous European cultures celebrated what they believed was the racial superiority of people with white skin, European explorers, invaders and conquerors traveled to far off lands where they raped Black, Brown, Red and Yellow women.
This tradition carried over into the so-called New World where slave traders raped African women on ocean vessels and where plantation owners saw nothing wrong with raping enslaved African women and impregnating them.
The “mixed” offspring of these illicit unions were granted special privileges that dark-skinned slaves could not even imagine.
Such a shameful history has prompted some in the Black conscious community to refer to men like Thomas Jefferson as the “Fondling Fathers.” History and science have proven Jefferson fathered children by an enslaved Black women named Sally Hemings. It wasn’t that long ago that some of Jefferson’s white descendants acknowledged the existence of their darker cousins. Some still haven’t.
But Black people are supposed to be the ones with the problem.
We didn’t create the racial caste system that impacts every area of our lives but are often villainized for pointing it out to those who refuse to acknowledge it and addressing it head-on.
Taye Diggs needs to convey to his six-year-old son, Walker Nathaniel Diggs, that Africa is the birthplace of humanity. All human life can be traced back to the Motherland.
White supremacists scoff at the notion of the brotherhood of mankind and don’t want anyone to know that all human life sprang from a single common ancestor that scientists have called Eve.
That’s why white supremacists summarily dismiss science and the “theory” of evolution.
Even those who often proclaim that they take the Christian bible literally dismiss the findings of Dr. Louis Leakey who discovered the ancient remains of our Beloved Ancestor in Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. Here’s why: If the Bible says that Man was created in the image of God, and science has proven that we are all descended from a single common African ancestor, what does that say about God and how does anyone reconcile that reality with the notion of white superiority.
Historically, the “mixed-race” strategy has been used by white supremacists to divide , conquer and control people of color. It was used in Santo Domingue to convince Blacks with French and African blood to side with French slave owners rather than the enslaved Africans who toiled on the plantations before the Haitian Revolution. It was similarly used in apartheid-era South Africa by the white minority government to dilute the power base of the freedom movement by separating Black South Africans from those who were classified as “colored.”
We’ve seen how the light skin-dark skin issue has divided, distracted and confused Blacks in America and now see how words like “biracial” and “mixed” are being used by the ruling class of a shrinking white populace as the nation moves closer to the day that white Americans become a racial minority in the U.S.
It is a fear that has fueled the anti-immigration movement and prompted the U.S. government to actively seek to boost the white population with “new blood” from places like Eastern Europe.
A similar strategy has been utilized in New Orleans, aka New Johannesburg, which is practicing educational and economic apartheid while pushing Black residents to the geographical fringes of the city to seek new dwellings on “homelands” similar to apartheid-era dwellings like Soweto in South Africa, Meanwhile, the CBD is looking more and more like South Africa’s “Sun City” with the French Quarter serving as “Antebellum Disney,” a playground for people who want to experience 18th-century Nouvelle Orleans.
To boost the white population in the Crescent City, the powers that be are encouraging the grandchildren of those who fled from the city after Brown v. The Board of Education to “come home” and importing new whites under the guise of rebuilding the new New Orleans.
For the record, there is nothing “post-racial” about racism and white supremacy in New Orleans and the rest of the U.S. Like the ocean, racism has its ebbs and tides, but it’s ever-present.
It is amazing that in the 21st century there are still as many racially confused people as there are. With the Information Superhighway at their fingertips and libraries all over the U.S. literally bursting with books about genealogical research, history, anthropology and biology, people still don’t get it.
Despite his clearly African features, former Major League Baseball star Sammy Sosa still tells people he’s Latin American. It never occurred to him that his African ancestors may have been dropped off in South America and forced to work on plantations and adopt the Spanish language and culture — just as enslaved Africans in the American colonies were forced to speak English and those in French colonies like Santo Domingue were forced to speak French.
It is both sad and disappointing that so many celebrities and entertainers with the power to inspire and uplift the masses are too lost, confused or self-absorbed to use that power for the betterment of humanity. With millions of people literally hanging on their every word, they say things like : I’m Cablinasian,” and “I’m American, not African-American, but I have traced my roots back to all the continents of Africa.”
Or, “I want my son to know that he is mixed,” like the rest of us aren’t mixed. I’m going to say this really slowly so that nobody misses it: WE ARE ALL MIXED — and we are all descendants of a common African ancestor.
Some of us are just more “mixed-up” than others.
Societal snobs should stop proclaiming that they come from “old families” because we all come from the same old family.
The only difference is that some of us were deliberately robbed of our culture, language and history by those who knew that this would put us at a distinct disadvantage and make us easier to control and oppress.
No one can tell Taye Digs how to raise his son or what to teach the young man, but the youngster may one day wake up, as former tennis star James Blake did recently, and discover that law enforcement officers don’t care what color his mama is when they catch him on the street Driving While Black, Breathing While Brown or simply Being Beige.
Sick villages raise sick children and confused parents raise confused children.
It’s all relative.
Sadly, this nation is still being dominated by white supremacists and law enforcement officers of all hues who believe in every fiber of their being that Black, Brown and Beige people have no rights that whites are bound by law to respect.
The sooner Taye Diggs and his son learn that, the better.
This article originally published in the November 23, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
