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Jun 29, 2008
African. That would suggest I'm from Africa. Funny thing, though, no one in my family, as far as I know was born in Africa, or has even lived or visited there for a time. So why am I expected to silently fall under a label, another method of categorization, a sly means of discrimination and simply allow myself to become African? I was born in Stuttgart, Germany on June 2nd of the year 1989. A few months later, I moved to Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, New York. I spent the better part of fourteen years there, spending only a whopping two just across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in Staten Island before moving to Columbia, South Carolina. My mother was born in New York, but raised in South Carolina. Her father was from the islands. Her mother was raised in South Carolina, and presumably born there. My- let's call him the Biological Sperm Donor- was West Indian, while my father is from St. Kitts, also West Indian. A ton of my cousins and aunts on my father's side live in various parts of Britian, with the rest remaining either in New York or the islands.
None of the above mentioned places involves Africa at all. Arguably, I'm West Indian. The general notion seems to be that if you're black, you're obviously African in some way. If you take a look at humans as a whole, there aren't really all to many white people (we're talking skin color here). That's because white people is an oversimplified, quite idiotic classification for a wide variety of people, the same way there are very few black people. When you really start looking at people and really trying to get an idea of their color makeup, you see neither white nor black. What you see are a range of reds, greens, pinks, peaches, and browns for both- albeit to varying degrees. If you really think about it, Asians, so-called Caucasians, Hispanics, etc would all be so-called white people- the differences in skin tones aren't nearly so drastic as the white/black split and so they'd be categorized as white. Yet, that wouldn't be quite right, would it? Specifically where asians are concerned there are significant differences where they simply aren't the same outside of skin color- the most obvious area being the eye lids. Similarly, it isn't quite right to group all so-categorized blacks into a group either. There are a wide range of so-called blacks- which skips out on a lot of the lighter spectrum, neglects any sort of medium, and dives straight toward one end. Simply put, the categorization of white and black is like an achromatic scale without any of the connecting values- like a rainbow without any of the obscure blends of colors between them that even make it possible.
Most importany, however, is the fact that to be African, you, indeed, have to be from Africa. There are white Africans. And there were race issues there as well. Any caucasian, any day of the week will tell you that they aren't “just white” because they're a quarter Irish- on their father's side, and an eighth cherokee, etc, etc with random fractions I don't really care about. Yet, blacks are “just black.” Automatically designated as Africans. Of course, there's a reason for that isn't there. Something about the whole “all blacks originated in Africa” bull. Yea, well there's the “all life originated in Africa” argument, which would make us all Africans. In the grand scheme of things, at some point or another someone in your family probably had sex with someone who wasn't “what they were.” I think the chances of anyone truly being “pure-bred” or whatever you want to call it are extremely low. And even if that were the case, that's still no guarantee that I'm African. And even if that were the case, I shouldn't have to carry the title one of my ancestors had if whites don't have to carry theirs and are free to continually combine and adapt. Really, I'll do just fine checking “other” unless it means turning down the free money the system decides they have to give us black people- such as a scholarship that a South African white probably isn't eligible for.
