Prometheus 6   

 

Where HE stands

George at Negrophile linked to Black Like I Thought I Was, which you must read because I can't find a piece of the article I want to leave out of the extract.

The punch line comes in the middle:

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…when the results of his DNA test came back, he found himself staggered by the idea that though he still qualified as a person of color, it was not the color he was raised to think he was, one with a distinct culture and definitive place in the American struggle for social equality that he'd taken for granted. Here was the unexpected and rather unwelcome truth: Joseph was 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian – and zero percent African.

…"My son was flabbergasted by the results," says Joseph. "He said, 'Dad, you mean for 50 years you've been passing for black?'" Joseph admits that, strictly speaking, he has. But he's not sure if he can or wants to do anything about that at this point. For all the lingering effects of institutional racism, he's been perfectly content being a black man; it has shaped his worldview and the course of his life in ways that cannot, and probably should not, be altered. Yet Joseph struggles to balance the intellectual dishonesty of saying he's black with the unimpeachable honesty of a lifelong experience of being black.

Posted by P6 at October 8, 2003 07:59 AM | Trackback URL: http://www.prometheus6.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1895