Mini-doc on being Afro-Latino

You should watch it. It's a gem. Intersectionality for the muthafuckin win. 

I don't know how to handle the term "mixed"

Specifically in the context of persons who usually are not close to me in any way who feel the need to ask me,

"Are you mixed?"

or are so audacious as to presume a mixed racial background and bust right out with,

"What are you mixed with?" 

I'm sincerely unsure whether the sirs and madams who ask these questions understand how problematic they are. 

First off, dogs are mixed. I am not mixed. Nor am I a mulatto, a mudblood, a mutt, a half-breed, a quadroon, or an octaroon. (Click here if you're confused by any of these names.) If you phrased the question as, "Do you come from a multiracial background?" I suppose that the truthful answer is yes. If you were to move backwards through my family tree, you would discover multiple people of non-African descent. At the very least, you would discover German, Portuguese, and American-Indian ancestry. There's a good chance you'd find some White guy from Canada in the not too distant past (my dad's dad's dad), though I don't know for a fact that this person was White or what his nationality was, and will never know because no one living knows. No matter which side you go up or what branches you go off exploring, all over my family tree you will run into question marks. Things no one knows and no one can know. 

So, am I mixed? Technically, yes, I suppose. Historically speaking. Not recently. Not primarily through choice. I only know that the German (my dad's mom's mom) was an un-forced mixture. Thus I will claim that, if pressured, but I feel no obligation to recognize small percentages of my racial make-up formed through slavery, oppression, or other relations I am not sure were consensual. I feel especially unobligated to do so because the overwhelming majority of multigenerational African-Americans--Imani Perry's term for those of us who descended from slaves--share a similar history. Rather ironically, Blackness constitutes "otherness" to White America, while simultaneously containing Whiteness nearly definitionally. The question marks in my family tree are a trademark of life as a descendant of an enslaved population: if you wanted to say that the only Black persons allowed to identify as such are those with nary a White face on their family tree, the only Black people in America would be recent African immigrants. My mom's mom's mom was a dark-skinned woman with blonde hair and blue eyes. This is our history. So to those people who claim that I'm doing a disservice to American history and my ancestors' legacies by not identifying as multiracial, I say that you're doing the same disservice to American history and adding injury to current Black populations by not allowing us to incorporate our complicated racial histories into one story of preservation, rather than of domination and dissipation.

Am I mixed? Technically, yes, I suppose. Historically speaking. Not recently. Not primarily through choice. But I will never ever check that on a box. I will never say this of myself. I identify as a Black person. I interpret my Blackness as inherently containing elements that aren't Black, and I would appreciate it if you, people who question my monoracial identity, would accept my interpretation. How dare you seem incredulous when I respond that I'm "just Black"? How dare you try to say, "No you must be ________"? You don't know me like that, and I am allowed to identify however I please. If I screw up your schema of what a "just Black" person "should" look like (or act like or feel like or be like), then well, I'm not sorry. 


Also, my friend @iribobiri came up with the best response ever to the second question. I promise this will play out in my life at least once:

Ignorant person I've recently met: What are you mixed with?

Me: A wire whisk.

 

Marvel must have been as upset as I was

about Disney fucking up and not recognizing the black struggle in Captain America, because some CRAZY-ASS SHIT was announced yesterday: The new Spiderman in the Ultimate Spiderman comic book series IS HALF-BLACK AND HALF-LATINO, with an incredibly appropriate name for such a background: Miles Morales. You heard me, a BLACK AND HISPANIC MAN IS SAVING THE WORLD. Say whaaaaaaaa?

But evidently this is not as uncommon as I had previously imagined. I casually mentioned this to a friend and how I was trying to figure out how I felt about it, and he informed me that Marvel is actually hella diverse in its superhero portrayals. One of the incarnations of The Green Lantern was black, and there was a Black Panther before the Party (though the "Jungle Action" and "savage" themes are a bit problematic, don'tcha think?). A little more digging showed me that various incarnations of Spiderman and Co. have been getting more and more diverse for a while: in 1992 the company released a miniseries entitled Spiderman 2099, in which Spidey was half-White and half-Latino, and the Spider Girl that was introduced in 2005 is a Latina by the name of Anya Corazon. And sure, while my main superhero experiences in life have been admiring Whites superheroes on the silver screen, I certainly remember Halle Berry as the Black Catwoman (damn that woman is sex on a stick, but again with the animalistic thing. Larger questions: why are so many superheroes based on animals? What is this weird fascination with invincible half-man-half-beast creations, especially when those creations are also supposed to be sex objects? Bestiality isn't cool...), and some lesser appearances on the small screen: the Power Rangers usually had at least one token member, Captain Planet's Planeteers were pretty diverse, and the gritty urban qualities of the Ninja Turtles always made them seem kind of Black in my mind.

So the question is, in light of all these cultural representations to the contrary, why do I think "White" when I think "superhero?" Why did I see Racialicious's article about this and think, "Hmm...that's interesting," rather than "Damn, it's about time?" like I did when Disney finally announced its plans for a Princess of African descent? Why was I not bothered by the dearth of mainstream superheroes of color? One of the Ultimate artists was quoted as saying 

"Maybe sooner or later a black or gay — or both — hero will be considered something absolutely normal,”

and while this is obviously something I'm in very strong support of, I just think it's crazy that I didn't recognize a need for it. The nerd-by-day, hero-by-night trope familiars like Peter Parker, Clark Kent (omg I lusted SO HARD after Tom Wellings on Smallville when I was in high school; I'm not even gonna front--oh hey, and the hottie from the Famous Jett Jackson grew up to be Cyborg on Smallville for a hot minute), and even the kids from Kick Ass was something I could buy into and identify with regardless of race. And don't get me wrong, I think that's fantastic...but not when it stands in the way of me seeing larger problems in popular culture. Anyway, I applaud Marvel for their [evidently consistent] efforts to diversify and dig themselves out from under the mountain of white privilege their characters have simply by having been created in a time when that shit was PC. 
Sigh, except some people evidently still think that shit is PC, because this is already an internet meme:

Evidently some people are still scared of men of color in masks...

PS It should be noted that DC is working hard to integrate the field of superhero-dom too, with characters like Vixen (another hypersexualized black woman being compared to an animal, greattttt), The Amazing Man, Cyborg (though the only part human thing worries me a bit), and Kid Quantum, among others. I didn't want to not give props where props were deserved. If you want to see a list of all the black superheroes to ever exist in the history of the university under any comic company, check out Wiki's list. There are a lot of them, yeah, but the fact that I've never heard of most of them goes to show that there's still a balance issue.
PPS: THE BEST THING I'VE SEEN ON THE INTERNET REGARDING THIS ENTIRE TOPIC: 

"And really, there’s nothing new about people of color receiving disproportionately exposure to environmental radiation and medical experiments. A few good superpowers is the least they deserve." --Channing Kennedy for Colorlines

More truth is in that statement than I can possibly get into right now, so I'm gonna...uh...*drops mike, walks away*

Mixed? Me? No! Well...Kind of. Technically. Should I care?

Racialicious posted something today that brought up a topic I struggle with from time to time, mostly whenever I'm filling out some form that asks about my racial identity and asks me to select all that apply. 

I am a black person. I prefer to identify myself as a Black American, though I can accept multigenerational African-American (Imani Perry term), and will respond to African-American more broadly. I don't like the term African-American because I don't have very strong ties with Africa culturally or otherwise. I am somewhat Afrocentric, with my style of jewelry and sometimes clothing, and my hair to a degree (but that wasn't the original intent), and how I try to celebrate Kwanzaa. I think I prefer to think of it as ethnocentric. But another part of my reasons for disliking the term African-American is the simple fact that some of my foremothers and forefathers [yo, why is forefathers a word as recognized by the internet and foremothers isn't? Sexist and rude.] were not of African descent; their inclusion in my family tree was done through a mixture of choice and domination. This means that technically, despite the fact that I and my parents and my mother's mother all identify as black people, I am an individual of mixed race. Is this an identity I should embrace? I am a black person [with bits of German, Portuguese, Native American, mysterious-probably-white-Canadian, AND NOBODY KNOWS OR CAN EVER KNOW WHAT ELSE]. It is an inherent part of the process of having descended from a people who were not regarded as people. Am I denying the other parts of my ancestry by claiming only my blackness? Is this doing my ancestors (moreso the ones in my family tree due to love) a disservice? Or does claiming a black identity automatically include all the various mixings that produced black people, because to be a multigenerational African-American means to have been mixed? I don't ever check anything but Black/African-American on forms that say to select all that apply, because I don't identify as anything else. Should I?