I know what it's like to have people mock your appearance.I was called "four eyes" for a while in second grade when I first got glasses. Now that I'm in junior high, the critisims are pretty much the same. People sometimes call me "Frizz" beacuse my blonde hair is starting to break because I all ways have it in a ponytail.  

I know what it's like to have people mock your appearance.I was called "four eyes" for a while in second grade when I first got glasses. Now that I'm in junior high, the critisims are pretty much the same. People sometimes call me "Frizz" beacuse my blonde hair is starting to break because I all ways have it in a ponytail.  

American Colors: The Spin on Skin

The United States is uniquely ignorant in its obsession with race. All societies have institutionalised prejudice in one form or another; older societies have gone through many cycles of creating and dismantling hierarchies as various coalitions wrestled with the economic and social spoils available.

The idea here is to consider the American case as an anthropological absurdity rather than a comparative assessment of its moral status vis-a-vis related prejudice.

The first thing that struck me as absurd about American popular and institutional notions on race is its conscious connectivity with skin color. In reading through anthropological texts, the orthodoxy suggests that genetic differentiation intra-species was superficial (in terms of nose bridge structure/hair texture/skin color) and that the quasi-science of race nevertheless was defined in some non-superficial matrix : Austric, Caucasian, Mongoloid, etc., based on climatic and other adaptive contexts.

In the US, the census and many employment documents show a pervasive sense of politically/socially defined race categories exclusively and ignorantly based on skin color! So racial categories are white/black/yellow, etc. The sense of self/other is eurocentrically derived...so, the polite phraseology for blacks is african-american, whereas for whites, it is not european-american. So people from the Indian subcontinent who may be Caucasian or Mongoloid are called Asians (race category!). Thankfully I have not seen a category of "brown/yellow" in census documents; perhaps a young society cannot think in a less simplistic dimension than black/white in formulating prejudice hierarchies.

There is a definition of freedom and equality that seems inconsistent with the above, but is savagely upheld as being true despite the commonality of superficial race discourse across American society. A typical American is quite content to comment negatively on European or Asian (old society) class and caste hierarchies as laughably sophisticated prejudice in opposition to his/her own sense of freedom/equality in American society. The next moment, that same naive citizen will speak in the most ignorant manner about race categories in terms of skin color. This is ingrained at all levels in language, media, government, and in personal lives. A society founded on the massacre of native populations, and the systematic enslavement of other human beings must naturally be racist, but what is amazing about American racism is its focus on skin color as a defining characteristic of race, in defiance of all scientific and anthropological evidence.

I have the so-called "good hair" and cafe-con-leche skin.  It never fails, people assume that I'm "mixed" or "biracial" or some other variant.  Everyone needs to find a way to put my features into a box, to categorize something about me so I fit into their rubric.  I AM A BLACK WOMAN.  nothing more. nothing less. nothing ELSE.  and yet everyone wants to make assumptions about me.  as though, because i have "good hair" or speak the King's English, i must "have some white in me."  as though I cannot "be black" and be the other things people prize in me, whether its looks or brains.  i've never understood the deep need to racialize a phenotype, as though it ever gives us any insight into whom we're dealing with.  

I AM NOT A BLACK WOMAN.  I am not a white woman.  I am not Indian.  I am not Middle Eastern.  And I certainly am not Native American.  I'm a mutt just like everyone else, mixed with so many varieties that my dark hair, dark eyes, dark complexion, and sharp features confuse everyone who asks.  "Where are you from?"  I'm from OHIO.  I have no racial identity.  To call myself white, would not do justice to the stares, the raised eyebrows, and the curious glances I recieve from racist whites ("Can't even tell anymore what's what" - I recieved this taunt wearing a big fro-like wig in Little Italy, Cleveland Ohio).  Ethnically, I'm Catholic and Italian.  But hardly that.  I was raised in a white, Protestant community, where I had one of the darkest complexions.  

The point of all this is to point out what this website so eloquently describes.  That all people ARE THE SAME, AS MUCH AS WE ARE DIFFERENT.  The variation is too small and there are too many of us who fall through the categories, who hardly know or care to categorize ourselves.  

So, as for racist ideologies of who acts in a certain way, and who must "have some white in them," the fact is that we all do.  There is not a person on Earth today that is "pure" racially or ethnically.  Humans have been here too long, we've loved and died and now the mess that we face is sown out of the forgotten love of the past.  Now we look to our brothers and sisters and say "you are not like me."  I ask all of you, especially those who do not agree with me, to stop and think about who is not like you and who is.  And why that is.  

There are a lot of reasons, very little to do with the souls of the "others."

I know what it feels like to be judged.I get called mean names refering to mexicans and it bothers me.It hurts and I tell them so but they only continue their mocking.They ridicule me for my heritage.Would they like it if I ridiculed them?I don't think so.

Sometimes people ask me if I'm confused when they ask me about my ethnic background when  I tell them. "are you confused?" I say no but they can't fathom that I would tell them I am a member of an Native American tribe be the direct descendant of a german princess, and be a middle class mexican american and have a white New York granny (who also happens to be of mixed ancestry)all at the same time. I ain't confused. I just say I'm human like everyone else, not some space alien that droppped out of nowhere. I tell them that we're all related (my people say Mitakuye Oyasin) not only by being human, but biologically as well. People almost always asume that i can speak Spanish because of my name, but if I tell I dont, they say I'm stupid, as if the Spanish language should be genetically imprinted on every English speaking Latino/a out there. I get that crap mostly from Mexicans anyway. People don't know how truly un-unique we are when it comes to race. If you knew the dark skinned man  sitting next to you on the bus were actually a distant cousin, how would you approach speaking to him, would you say anything at all? It sucks to be judged by outward appearance under any circumstance by those who don't understand , but as long as a person knows that they can be above ridicule, their lives can be made a lot easier. I don't let the misconceptions of others bother me. If I did I couldn't sleep at night.

My ancestory consist of great people and so does my family.Im very happy and content to say "That Im an uncle to 3 beautiful bi-racial young ladies and a brother-in-law to a very beautiful woman.Heck, my girlfriend is from the South Pacific and I hope to have a life with her,despite the negative influence and hostilities that ignorant people throw our way.I say bring it on,sharing and living a life is by far the greatest thing we can give ourselves and unto society.

I think it is interesting, the way we’re seldom happy with ourselves.  

I hear a lot of people talk about feeling bad about themselves when they were kids because they didn't conform to societal standards of beauty, which seem to center around looking "white."  I've heard people talk about wanting blond hair or a lighter complexion when they were kids.  This surprises me because I am blond and very "white," but when I was a child I wanted to be darker, to have long, thick brunette hair like my mother, who of is Choctaw descent.  

I was the only one in my family to look the way I do and my mom used to call me her "blond sheep."  This is because I have a different father and never really knew his family.  So, to me it was far more desirable to look like the family I knew.  

Also, every where I looked there were blonds.  It seemed like most of the models and movie stars where blond, and the majority of fashion dolls on the market were blond with blue eyes.  The media inundated us with blonds and for that reason they just didn't seem very special or interesting to me.  I always wanted the dolls with long, dark hair, Barbie’s sidekick Midge, and such.  I just thought they were infinitely more beautiful.  

I even went so far as to dye my hair as a teenager, but with disastrous results: it never looked natural, and I had to deal with roots nearly every two weeks because any new hair growth whatsoever showed vividly.

Today I feel better about they way I look; I have come to accept that I’m different from my family. However, I still very plain compared to women with dark complexions and dark hair, they just look more interesting to me; their coloration seems to emit an aura of healthiness.  I realize such associations and ideas are arbitrary and illogical, but they are difficult to overcome nonetheless.

I hear everyone quick to announce that we are all the same, as if differences is a bad thing. We are not all the same, but that is what is beautiful about the human experience. Diversity is beautiful thing. Love your differences. There is nothing wrong with admiring your chestnut, cocoa brown, or dark chocolate skin because at one point in time, and still till this day, we are told not to do so. That we, as people of color, could not be beautiful. It was through the activism of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Planthers, Colored Womens League, Harlem Renaissance, and countless other movements and individual contributions that has allowed us to say that we are beautiful. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that because it does play into the fabric of who we are.

Also, in response to Sydney D., I know what it was like to often to be called "African booty-scratcher" and all the other references to my ethnicity as a Nigerian woman. I was young and could not understand it, but as the branches on my tree grows, I comprehend. I understand that we as black people have internalized the hatred that has been displayed to us. Someone once told me about the hierarchy of hate. How one group that is hated on always looks for another group to hate on to make themselves feel better.

I am no longer mad or hurt. I see those who choose to still voice those type of comments as ignorant. More so, I understand their position. This is what has fed my longtime goal of unity and communication among African and African-American people.

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