My baby will be mixed race. So why did I automatically think of him as ‘black’?Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, United States on 2015-09-01 01:38Z by Steven |
My baby will be mixed race. So why did I automatically think of him as ‘black’?
The Guardian
2014-10-14
I picked a black baby to represent my unborn child on a cake because of my own adherence to the ‘one-drop rule’
My 87-year-old grandmother has a very specific way of saying the word black: she drags out the a and makes the k extra hard for an effect that drowns the c. “Blaaaak” out of my grandmother’s mouth is an admonishment, not a color. “Blaaaak” out of my grandmother’s mouth travels a step beyond being a pejorative to having the hair-raising resonance of a word that damns as well as describes damnation itself.
“Blaaaak” out of my grandmother’s mouth is a curse…
Read the entire article here.