Beyond Identity » Coloured Gedagte

Between two worlds

Internet Source — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 06:00:40 +0000

Britain has one of the fastest-growing mixed-race populations – but many people are still hostile towards interracial couples. We asked some of them how their lives have been affected. During the 1991 Gulf war, Richard Littlejohn wrote in the Sun that British women married to Iraqis ’should be left to rot in their adopted country, with their hideous husbands and their unattractive children’. Even making allowances for jingoism, this was vicious stuff – and typical of attitudes to interracial relationships for centuries. Today, the UK has one of the fastest-growing mixed-race populations in the world. According to a Policy Studies Institute report in 1997, half of all black men born here who are currently in a relationship have a white partner, and a third of black women (and one fifth of Asian men and 10 per cent of Asian women). One in 20 pre-school children in the country is thought to be mixed-race.

From Diana, Princess of Wales to Trevor McDonald, Michael Caine to Zeinab Badawi, countless celebrities have, or have had, lovers from different racial backgrounds. People of mixed race, from Zadie Smith to Halle Berry, Hanif Kureishi to Paul Boateng, are increasingly in the public eye; and in parts of our big cities, interracial relationships are so common that even to notice them is bad manners. When we set out to find couples for this article, some people thought that even taking an interest in the subject was racist.

Which it might be, if the relationships were untouched by other people’s assumptions. You don’t have to look far on the internet before you come across sites with quite vicious connotations: ‘A note to Asian (and white) men: who’s sleeping with your women?’ Then there are the offers of Thai brides and hot black chicks for people who like their flesh a particular, and preferably exotic, colour. (Since the eighteenth century, black people have been an icon for rampant, probably deviant sexuality).

Randall Kennedy, a professor of law at Yale University and author of a new book, Interracial Intimacies, (Pantheon) notes that African Americans take one of three views of such relationships: they see them as a positive good, decreasing segregation; they are agnostic, considering relationships a private matter – thus fending off the common assumption that successful black people want nothing more than a white partner; or they repudiate mixed relationships on politicised black-is-beautiful grounds.

The situation in Britain is less fervid than in the US, partly because of our different histories of slavery, partly because of the greater degree of residential integration here. Even so, the past couple of decades have seen a militant pro-black position that has led to mixed-race children being labelled black willy-nilly, especially for the purposes of adoption. Jill Olumide, interviewed below, has met white single mothers who have been told that they may not be suitable to raise their own children since they are unable to socialise them into ‘their’ ‘black culture’. As Paul Gilroy, the British-born Harvard academic has said, racism and this kind of anti-racism share precisely the same essentialist assumptions about totality, identity and exclusion.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown makes a powerful case in a recent book, Mixed Feelings, for awareness and acknowledgement of a new kind of Briton. People of mixed race are now 11 per cent of the ethnic-minority population, which implicates a lot of people if you include their parents and grandparents. Alibhai-Brown is wryly aware of the ‘unreal and unhelpful’ tendency of people like herself, in interracial marriages, to become ‘warriors for a cause’. It is possible, she reflects, that Britain is ‘good at’ certain types of diversity, such as food and sex; that doesn’t mean we’ve stamped out racism.

Even so, the final impression left by her analysis is pretty positive. Identity undoubtedly derives from being part of social groupings. But we also find and reinforce ourselves through our individual interactions. Interracial relationships have shown, time and time again, that no amount of social construct can kill human attractions.

I think mixed-race people should be much more visible: mixed-race children have an enormous amount to offer. I do feel like I have a cause about it: I’m a militant multiculty. Forward the mulatto millennium!

Read original article here…

>> Geraldine Bedell <<

What is a Coloured?

Internet Source — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:00:18 +0000

To a biologist, “race” means a very specific thing. It’s essentially a synonym for “variety”, or “sub-species”, and applies, as the name implies, to a portion of a species. Now, defining species is a massively problematic affair, and one that’s never really been settled. Nevertheless, most biologists agree that species are “real” categories, whereas other categories in the taxonomic hierarchy (Genus, Family, Order, etc.) are pretty much arbitrary.

Species are remarkably hard to define, but most people just go along with the idea that species are marked by reproductive isolation. If organisms interbreed naturally and have fertile offspring, they belong to the same species. Clearly, then, all human beings belong to the same species (as evidenced by the very existence of coloureds). No problem there. (This definition of species is tied into the recognition that gene flow and the lack thereof is the core of biodiversity, incidentally.) Now sub-species are usually defined somewhat as follows: naturally occurring and geographically distinct variants of a species.

Now once upon a time, this might have been useful. After all, the San were different to the Bantu people, who were different to the Europeans, who differed from the Chinese. Sure, there was some blurring along the borders, but mostly you could tell where people were from just by lookngi at them. But over the last five centuries or so, the world’s been getting smaller, and now we live in a “global village”, where the term “black” applies to people who live in Africa, in Europe, in America, and whose ancestors came from a myriad of places (though ultimately, we all stem from Africa) – all over the place, really.
So does it make sense to speak of the white race? Or the black race? Or, heaven forefend, the coloured race (coloureds, being mixtures, mess any attempt to speak of human sub-species up totally)?

>> Internet Source <<

A little apology:

For the life of me I can not remember where I extracted the above from. Please forgive me. If you do know, please inform me urgently so that I can link and give proper credit to the source and author.

Smiling my silence

Ross — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:43:00 +0000

A little more than a year ago I had to deal with the most trying time in my life. Firstly, I have to concede that in all probability I deserved what I got, retribution for naughty and guilty pleasures, I guess. Betraying the trust that a brother or a friend afford you is not worth all the gold in world. Living with this nagging betrayal, awaiting the right moment to bear the truth, your heart, fearing the possibility of losing a friend does not make for good bed mates. And then one day, out of the blue like a thunder strike on a clear sunny-bright day, the right moment seems to appear. The mate responds with misplaced male bravado of it is cool, it is just one those things. Not what I expected. Truth be told, no excuse, no nothing can ever redeem a betrayal. One can be forgiven, but believe me, forgiving yourself is easier said than done. You made the bed, now sleep in it.

Because of what was said and not said, done and not done I almost lost something that was very dear to me. After several months of almost pleading, cajoling and a considerable amount of self restraint on my part, my precious, my pet project was returned to me. One would think that I was relieved and pleased. Alas, to my ultimate surprise I wanted almost nothing to do with my website, it felt tainted. I even thought of abandoning this South Africa multi-media mixed race documentary endeavour completely. As time wilted by, slowly but surely the interest, the fascination, the philosophy, the love and the passion for the documentary and people started permeating my being again. Thus here we are, the inertia, the transition has come full circle.

Let’s just say, I am not willing to trade the pain, the aggravation nor the personal disappointment for anything or anyone in the world. The amount of self reflection, self knowledge and sense of who I am, and the verve to be best I could possibly be that I have grasped is absolutely beyond priceless, beyond ego, beyond identity. Any adverse situation affords you the opportunity to learn the most. An eye for an eye mentality leads to blind and scarred people. No war has ever led to peace. There is no victory in war. And sticks and stones, may break my bones, but ‘I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate, him’- Booker T Washington. Amen. Aum.

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism

Internet Source — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 17:55:11 +0000

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage – the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas – or of inherited knowledge – which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.

The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to “protect the family name” (as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another) – the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third cousin gave a concert at Carnegie Hall (as if the achievements of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another) – the parents who search genealogical trees in order to evaluate their prospective sons-in-law – the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history – all these are samples of racism, the atavistic manifestations of a doctrine whose full expression is the tribal warfare of prehistorical savages, the wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany, the atrocities of today’s so-called “newly emerging nations.”

The theory that holds “good blood” or “bad blood” as a moral-intellectual criterion, can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice. Brute force is the only avenue of action open to men who regard themselves as mindless aggregates of chemicals.

Read full article here…

>> Ayn Rand <<