Plus Penguins are mulattos just like Puppet President Barrack H Obama. Half black half white. People always say, "He's is the first black President." I love saying, "Bullshit, he is only half black you dumb bastards." The look on their face is usually priceless. Except when its not, of course, and they just insist that he is still black anyways. Because you know even if you have a drop of black blood eight centuries ago you are still black. That is just how it works don't ask me to explain it.
You want a black President? Chris Rock has made it known he wants the job, and he is BLACK.
bhmf, normally I'm a fan of these kinds of challenging conventions through common sense arguments. And in a lot of ways it makes sense - Obama is just as much white as he is black. All the same, though, I think conventional wisdom wins the argument in this case by virtue of a decision that white people made generations ago:
ReplyDelete"In its most extreme form in the United States, hypodescent was the basis of the "one drop rule", meaning that if a individual had any black ancestry, the person was classified as black. New laws were passed in southern states and others long after the end of slavery to define white and black, under associated laws for segregation. Tennessee adopted such a "one-drop" statute in 1910, and Louisiana soon followed. Then Texas and Arkansas in 1911, Mississippi in 1917, North Carolina in 1923, Virginia in 1924, Alabama and Georgia in 1927, and Oklahoma in 1931. During this same period, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Utah retained their old "blood fraction" statutes de jure, but amended these fractions (one-sixteenth, one-thirtysecond) to be equivalent to one-drop de facto."
In short, white people decided a long time ago that a man like Obama was not as much a person as a "pure" white man. And that, in a lot of ways, is what is meant by "black" today - someone who, a couple of generations ago, could not attend school with, drink with, eat with, practice religion with, or sit next to a "white" person.
In a just world, there would be no such thing as hypodescent or a one drop rule, or indeed the categories of "white" or "black" at all since we've all got a little bit of everyone else in us. But we don't live in such a world.
You could say the "White House" has come a long way...
ReplyDeleteJames K. Vardaman, soon to be Governor of Mississippi, and Benjamin Tillman, US Senator for South Carolina, indulged in racist personal attacks in response to the invitation. Vardaman described the White House as "so saturated with the odor of the ni#@er that the rats have taken refuge in the stable",[25][26] and declared "I am just as much opposed to Booker T. Washington as a voter as I am to the cocoanut-headed, chocolate-colored typical little coon who blacks my shoes every morning. Neither is fit to perform the supreme function of citizenship."[27] Tillman opined that "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that ni&*er will necessitate our killing a thousand ni%$ers in the South before they will learn their place again."[28]
Hypodescent---fancy word for mulatto. The crazy laws that were passed to define who was who boggles the mind. You say "conventional wisdom wins the argument" and I see what your saying and I agree. But by all accounts "conventional wisdom" in this particular case is in a slow decline in popularity. For now at least. Class wars are on there way up though, should be fun!
ReplyDeleteI guess all I'm saying is that black + white = black is not something that mulattos made up to make themselves feel disenfranchised or whatever. Rather, it's something that white people made up to disenfranchise mulattos. So if a half-white, half-black guy counted as black at a restaurant at the time Obama was born, I don't see why he shouldn't count as black now that he's president.
ReplyDeleteWell your answer is this: although Obama is young as far as Presidents go (JFK younger perhaps?), he was still born a pretty long time ago in the relative scheme of things. Things are changing (big props Zimmerman) fast nowadays I think we will all agree. Nowadays we be breaking down some (but not all) conventions (i.e black people be president and shit).
ReplyDeletePlus you got some fuzzy fucking math and just because a white guy made something up does not make it so. White people make a lot of shit up. A lot of shit I repeat.
Also please note the people most adamant about O being black are WHITE people, so obviously mulattos did not make this shit up, WHITE people did, so that is why we WHITE jackals shall not engage in fuzzy racial math and shall instead insist O is not black but half black as I previously so eloquently stated.
Sometimes I wish we were all colorblind, at least in the black and white spectrums. The other colors are too pretty to do without, but white and black are not anything to write home about really, are they??? But then you could say that every color is a different shade of black and white or something semantic about the gray areas???
I like brown, in Costa Rica there is no mulattos or "half latino" or 1/16th "aborigen", white, brown & black if you born there and likes beans and speaka da spanish, you it.
ReplyDeletep.s. If you are really dark, a popular nickname is "Morena" or "Negrita"...