Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Sunlight bleeds between the bedroom window blinds; Sunday morning blinks into hazy focus. Wine-colored sheets, wrinkled and warm, shamelessly expose illicit elements of my burnt sienna frame. Everything is still. My body contorts around my love, clings without desperation around her voluptuous curves, her sun-kissed flesh. My curious vantage point, momentarily obstructed by her long ebony hair, spies her comfortable, satisfied expression. I shift. She murmurs. The public political combat between Fareed Zakaria and George Will on ABC News' This Week on the possible short-term anti-Latino anti-immigrant legislation for congressional Republicans can wait. The angel beside me presents the only Heaven I'll ever know.
I'm more known for my hate than my love; cast as the irascible iconoclast, my criticism here and elsewhere often meets opposition more emotional than rational. Case in point: Loving Day. I couldn't believe it: a holiday designed to uplift, support, and celebrate the Supreme Court precedent that legalized interracial marriages nationwide, Loving v. Virginia. My instinct lampoons this piss-poor excuse for human mirth and merriment, until I noticed the Washington Post's recent article on the newfound celebration. Then, shock overpowered reason. True, Loving v. Virginia altered society, crushed the artificial prohibitions between heterosexual participation in the institution of marriage in the United States, and expanded everyone's freedom of association. American free choice won it's day in court. Still, a holiday to support this most obvious of political victories appears to my mind, superfluous. Loving Day exposes the triumph of superficial exhilaration over superficial differences, bases the feel-good identity politics of orthodox left-wing multiculturalism over the Homo sapiens necessity to question other people's behavior. We judge lest we be judged alone.
Loving Day asks a modern American population traumatized by stolen elections, incompetent institutions, failing foreign policy and a worthless war President, a population always reluctant to further integrate its disparate sociopolitical demographics (each clamoring with violent desperation for the general public to both understand and fulfill their needs and wants, the national eureka improbable to enact and impossible to force) to revel in the miniscule but growing population segment that makes interracial interaction either a daily choice or a natural occurrence -- the interracial relationships and mixed-race American citizens -- just because basic fairness dictates their existence.
Honestly, anything that further congeals and politicizes the mixed-race community deserves accolades. I'm utterly disgusted with the Tiger Woods effect, where mixed-race Americans find their personal political narratives annexed by politicized monorace minority groups, self-interested and egotistical, who rip and slash and claw each other in order to claim total public rights to various mixed-race celebrities like soulless movie studio executives who hover over disaster victims with promises of lucrative payoffs to soothe the lingering psychosomatic effects of Oceanic Flight 815. Bizarre parallels to ancient one-drop rule discrimination abound, yet African American race imperialism claims such public luminaries as Halle Berry, Dwayne Johnson, Soledad O'Brian and Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL). When Black people deny self-determination to nascent minority groups, we should not allow surprise to mute the needed rebuke; without pulling everyone's ghetto pass, it remains possible to leave the race's crackhead desperation for professionally successful and morally invulnerable role models to Black youth intact and discard the excess pressure every new public figure with partial genetic connection to the African Diaspora must face as a Molotov condition of their genes and their celebrity. While I found the "Cablinasian" designation a clumsy gaffe, I can respect its independent thought and individualist candor. If Loving Day helps forge a new mixed-race political consciousness, a postmodern multidentity politics, then one useful pot of gold may be found at the end of the rainbow.
But I'm neither lucky nor charmed; when Teresa Heinz Kerry self-designates as African American, and Sen. Obama appeals to Democratic audiences of all stripes and ideologies as "the future of the party" without significant Senate accomplishment or outlier policy proscriptions, armed only with biography and charisma, my consistent cynicism realizes that modern American transracialism regards all sociopolitical racial definitions as fluid at best and pixelated usually. In a global village where all melanin is Max Factor, no Sen. Hillary Clinton tribal wisdom will provide cultural context for the mixed-race community, or anyone else. First Twenty-First Century maxim: Define yourself, or die.
Hence my overall gripe with Loving Day -- to present interracial relationships as legalized Jubilee masks today's multifaceted, complex prejudices against and obstacles toward interracial couples, and pretends that all the battles are won and all the wounds healed. Landmark Supreme Court decisions are not musical codas; they crescendo change, raise our discontent decibel until our harmonious discord shatters tradition and deafens discrimination. Our anthems of liberation are as of now unsung. The mainstream cherry-picks lighter and brighter multiracial Americans, that long-legged alabaster human art with high cheekbones, full lips, Nordic noses and anime eyes bred by design for an exotic Vogue photoshoot in midtown Manhattan, to add, quite literally, a dash of color to your favorite Wonderbread sitcom or that rambunctious reality show where the seven strangers on a deserted Indonesian island eat mutated caterpillars and steamed goat testicles while they parachute from their billionaire businessman benefactor's private plane replete with fresh grapes, Cristal, three sensual, half-naked, busty Dominican goddesses named Sophia, Marisol, and Persuajon, and a discredited hip hop mogul signature dancing for spare change, to find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start getting shameless. In the real world, tokenized multiculturalism renders inter-minority coalitions obsolete.
Of course we can't unify: our prejudices and proclivities define our cultural backgrounds, we delineate Self from its distance from the Other. Bias contours, hate borders. The amorphous require the outlines, and refuse the bloody artistry required to draw the identity demarcations themselves. Loving Day asserts the false premise that those political and cultural boundaries that cleave difference to characterize cultures simply don't matter, that the wicked wisdom of Jim Crow and Jim Bean that lynched Emmitt Till and erased Rosewood, Florida no longer makes residence in the hearts and minds of John and Jane Q. Public. The Loving Day website that organizes community barbeques and support parties for interracial couples and mixed race progeny boasts several Hallmark testimonials from persons quick to share stories of personal enrichment through interracial copulation, people who believe they literally fuck away their forefathers' bigotry. Reality bites. One can't discuss Loving Day realistically without a clinical recall of the reasoning behind anti-miscegenation laws in the United States: foreign control of Black male sexuality by the American ruling class, White slaveowners and displaced serfs alike. Remember. Recall the iron chains, evoke the bloodied whips; smell with historical olfaction the dank, diseased cargo holds heavy with sweaty, musty, moldy funk. Vomit. Block away the cries of the dying and the damned. Ignore the torn flesh. Disregard the infected sores. Ride the relentless waves, swallow your gnawing hunger. Remember revenge. Survive.
American chattel slavery conceptualized the African American man as sexual dynamo to prevent the mixed-race offspring from White mothers and slave sperm donors to gain legal parity with full European settlers. However, in today's hypertext hybridism, where identity manifests more malleable than high-definition bitmap images, an intra-racial insurgency challenges White Anglo-Saxon Protestant control over Black male sexual identity and free choice, and emerges from the formerly downtrodden and dispossessed Black woman. Reborn as college-educated, determined professional extraordinaire from rambunctious around-the-way girl clad in tight, low-cut DKNY spaghetti-tees, battered Boss blue jeans and black leather jackets, Mary J now considers a fundamental element of the good life the personal creation of a meaningful, committed, and loving marriage to a professional yet moral Black man, that produces respectful, educated Black progeny, with all the associated joy and struggle and camaraderie expected. Her sister Omarosa chafes; the masculine myths about their brothers inflate both their market share and their massive egos, and reduce formerly decent, hardworking, innocent young Black boys into low-budget Kanye Wests' with so much superheated helium under their wooly cornrowed craniums that even their conflict diamond encrusted Jesus Pieces and platinum grills from Jacob the Jeweler and Paul Wall won't impede their arrogant anti-gravity. Drive slow, watch these eligible Black men sell stereotyped sex to the highest bidder, notice new-age minstrels who capitalize from buffoonery and racial blasphemy. Please do not judge; if your home was where the hatred is, you wouldn't wait to touch the sky either. No matter; the college dropout welcomes Pamela Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith with open Schwarzenegger arms and black Trojan Magnum boxes. His latex gold crinkles with eager anticipation as these gregarious Girls Gone Wild discard the white cotton and inhale the white powder, willing to provide ecstasy hopped up on ecstasy. So what if this tan Talented Tenth misses a lecture on post-Civil Rights Movement cultural nationalism in African American Political Thought with Imam Amiri Baraka at eight-thirty A.M. in Cornell University's Goldwin Smith Hall; these buxom blonds blow bomb cock! I'm sorry, Ms. Jackson; it's a seller's auction block you can't afford.
Don't ask why. Black male sexuality remains inherently pornographic. Whether immortalized in still photography by National Geographic or Hustler, Americans reflect on the Black male's on-demand sexuality as gaudy and racist and indecent, crafted to provide sensory pleasure for their private enjoyment. Brothers plunge and strain and ejaculate their sour spunk into randy receptacles, entertain the masses with money shots and anatomical excess. Again we copulate without control. One can rewind and play our astounding intercourse at one's whim, marvel without sensitivity at our demonic stamina, our unconscious reverberations. We cannot love, only lust: the African Adonis, an anatomically correct automaton who sweats and grinds and strokes for your benefit, blessed with bodies black and brutal and true, boasts defined obsidian musculature devoid of grey matter. Mechanical animals who rut via remote, Black men often confront Black women whose fervent antagonism towards interracial relationships distills into an elegant ebony hand frosted with sensual fire-truck red nails that reaches for the bitter chastening rod James Weldon Johnson warned about; the Sony soul-controller of Black sexual choice caught between the playful mock conflict of a new-age Thomas and Sally, lightly misted with tropical sweat, pungent with post-coital pheromones, who battle with half-committed insolence over definitive controlling influence over Black male sexuality after long, torrid bouts of raw, unencumbered, unprotected lovemaking so spontaneous neither partner can be sure where consent ends and coercion begins. Resist anachronism; don't call it something new.
We end at the beginning. All interracial relationships expose the best and worst about the human condition amid Western civilization: we never learn to accept difference, no matter how intimate, no matter how beautiful. Our mundane humanity absorbs daily sacrifices and quiet indignities that deny culture and burn identity; interracial love only exacerbates such stress. Any assumption that interracial relationships erase racism prove incorrect; if anything, the emotional proximity affords new reasons to hate. Furthermore, all interracial relationship participants fall prey to the bizarre exoticism that fetishizes racial difference in the West; stereotypes that characterize people as submissive or bestial or spicy or aggressive exist regardless of the scented candles that surround your bubble bath, the aromatherapy wafting past your wet brown nostrils, the dexterous, slow, meticulous massage your dutiful boyfriend applies after his careful washing of your worn, soft flesh and your most mysterious arenas following that laborious laboratory day of endless PCR tests and repetitive DNA retrieval. Your love does not matter to another's hate; you forget this at your peril alone. Remember, all the controversy that surrounds interracial relationships emerges from those outside those struggles who believe they stand to lose from these natural realignments in the natural order. The model minorities massacre all those who defend the Asian American female's right to free association because their misogyny assumes that negative media input deconstructs all Asian American men from the brave and the bold to Long Duk Dong and William Hung, comical Asian masculinity misrepresentations whose suggestive monikers reinforce the stereotypical Asian male lack, not possible phallic overconfidence. Angry Black women exhale their frustrations over jungle fever without considering that some Black men simply do not care about Black women, period. (Not that hip hop is any indication, of course.) Sure, Black male progressivism may combat sexism and misogyny both in the workplace and in the community, in the club with 50 Cent and in the church with T.D. Jakes, but that's a holistic, macro-level project for these brothers, not concerned with dissecting women into arbitrary groups. The point is to live and learn from others' hate, not to ignore vitriol with immature blinders to continue childish ignorance. Interracial interaction is a political act, subject to all manner of reasoned discourse and unflattering criticism; Loving Day wishes people would practice libertarian laissez-faire politics, deny all responsibilities the individual owes the general population outside of physical and economic safety, and just live and love with barbeque sauce and George Foreman grills and fifth-grade remembrances of those who fought to marry under God and country before it was popular. I disagree. We can develop the love below without the offer of the mind above as sacrifice.
If we really love one another, we do not have a choice.
Related:
Loving Day & Loving Day, Part 2 by Reappropriate.com
Village Voice Interview with Ken Tanabe
Mrs. Williams on Loving Day
Happy (post-)Loving Day! from A Tangled Web
Loving Day Recalls a Time When the Union of a Man And a Woman Was Banned from ActingWhite.com
...a job a million girls would die for. from WilliamBruceWest.com
Interracial Relationships And Marriage: Ironies from Booker Rising
I'm more known for my hate than my love; cast as the irascible iconoclast, my criticism here and elsewhere often meets opposition more emotional than rational. Case in point: Loving Day. I couldn't believe it: a holiday designed to uplift, support, and celebrate the Supreme Court precedent that legalized interracial marriages nationwide, Loving v. Virginia. My instinct lampoons this piss-poor excuse for human mirth and merriment, until I noticed the Washington Post's recent article on the newfound celebration. Then, shock overpowered reason. True, Loving v. Virginia altered society, crushed the artificial prohibitions between heterosexual participation in the institution of marriage in the United States, and expanded everyone's freedom of association. American free choice won it's day in court. Still, a holiday to support this most obvious of political victories appears to my mind, superfluous. Loving Day exposes the triumph of superficial exhilaration over superficial differences, bases the feel-good identity politics of orthodox left-wing multiculturalism over the Homo sapiens necessity to question other people's behavior. We judge lest we be judged alone.
Loving Day asks a modern American population traumatized by stolen elections, incompetent institutions, failing foreign policy and a worthless war President, a population always reluctant to further integrate its disparate sociopolitical demographics (each clamoring with violent desperation for the general public to both understand and fulfill their needs and wants, the national eureka improbable to enact and impossible to force) to revel in the miniscule but growing population segment that makes interracial interaction either a daily choice or a natural occurrence -- the interracial relationships and mixed-race American citizens -- just because basic fairness dictates their existence.
Honestly, anything that further congeals and politicizes the mixed-race community deserves accolades. I'm utterly disgusted with the Tiger Woods effect, where mixed-race Americans find their personal political narratives annexed by politicized monorace minority groups, self-interested and egotistical, who rip and slash and claw each other in order to claim total public rights to various mixed-race celebrities like soulless movie studio executives who hover over disaster victims with promises of lucrative payoffs to soothe the lingering psychosomatic effects of Oceanic Flight 815. Bizarre parallels to ancient one-drop rule discrimination abound, yet African American race imperialism claims such public luminaries as Halle Berry, Dwayne Johnson, Soledad O'Brian and Sen. Barack Obama, (D-IL). When Black people deny self-determination to nascent minority groups, we should not allow surprise to mute the needed rebuke; without pulling everyone's ghetto pass, it remains possible to leave the race's crackhead desperation for professionally successful and morally invulnerable role models to Black youth intact and discard the excess pressure every new public figure with partial genetic connection to the African Diaspora must face as a Molotov condition of their genes and their celebrity. While I found the "Cablinasian" designation a clumsy gaffe, I can respect its independent thought and individualist candor. If Loving Day helps forge a new mixed-race political consciousness, a postmodern multidentity politics, then one useful pot of gold may be found at the end of the rainbow.
But I'm neither lucky nor charmed; when Teresa Heinz Kerry self-designates as African American, and Sen. Obama appeals to Democratic audiences of all stripes and ideologies as "the future of the party" without significant Senate accomplishment or outlier policy proscriptions, armed only with biography and charisma, my consistent cynicism realizes that modern American transracialism regards all sociopolitical racial definitions as fluid at best and pixelated usually. In a global village where all melanin is Max Factor, no Sen. Hillary Clinton tribal wisdom will provide cultural context for the mixed-race community, or anyone else. First Twenty-First Century maxim: Define yourself, or die.
Hence my overall gripe with Loving Day -- to present interracial relationships as legalized Jubilee masks today's multifaceted, complex prejudices against and obstacles toward interracial couples, and pretends that all the battles are won and all the wounds healed. Landmark Supreme Court decisions are not musical codas; they crescendo change, raise our discontent decibel until our harmonious discord shatters tradition and deafens discrimination. Our anthems of liberation are as of now unsung. The mainstream cherry-picks lighter and brighter multiracial Americans, that long-legged alabaster human art with high cheekbones, full lips, Nordic noses and anime eyes bred by design for an exotic Vogue photoshoot in midtown Manhattan, to add, quite literally, a dash of color to your favorite Wonderbread sitcom or that rambunctious reality show where the seven strangers on a deserted Indonesian island eat mutated caterpillars and steamed goat testicles while they parachute from their billionaire businessman benefactor's private plane replete with fresh grapes, Cristal, three sensual, half-naked, busty Dominican goddesses named Sophia, Marisol, and Persuajon, and a discredited hip hop mogul signature dancing for spare change, to find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start getting shameless. In the real world, tokenized multiculturalism renders inter-minority coalitions obsolete.
Of course we can't unify: our prejudices and proclivities define our cultural backgrounds, we delineate Self from its distance from the Other. Bias contours, hate borders. The amorphous require the outlines, and refuse the bloody artistry required to draw the identity demarcations themselves. Loving Day asserts the false premise that those political and cultural boundaries that cleave difference to characterize cultures simply don't matter, that the wicked wisdom of Jim Crow and Jim Bean that lynched Emmitt Till and erased Rosewood, Florida no longer makes residence in the hearts and minds of John and Jane Q. Public. The Loving Day website that organizes community barbeques and support parties for interracial couples and mixed race progeny boasts several Hallmark testimonials from persons quick to share stories of personal enrichment through interracial copulation, people who believe they literally fuck away their forefathers' bigotry. Reality bites. One can't discuss Loving Day realistically without a clinical recall of the reasoning behind anti-miscegenation laws in the United States: foreign control of Black male sexuality by the American ruling class, White slaveowners and displaced serfs alike. Remember. Recall the iron chains, evoke the bloodied whips; smell with historical olfaction the dank, diseased cargo holds heavy with sweaty, musty, moldy funk. Vomit. Block away the cries of the dying and the damned. Ignore the torn flesh. Disregard the infected sores. Ride the relentless waves, swallow your gnawing hunger. Remember revenge. Survive.
American chattel slavery conceptualized the African American man as sexual dynamo to prevent the mixed-race offspring from White mothers and slave sperm donors to gain legal parity with full European settlers. However, in today's hypertext hybridism, where identity manifests more malleable than high-definition bitmap images, an intra-racial insurgency challenges White Anglo-Saxon Protestant control over Black male sexual identity and free choice, and emerges from the formerly downtrodden and dispossessed Black woman. Reborn as college-educated, determined professional extraordinaire from rambunctious around-the-way girl clad in tight, low-cut DKNY spaghetti-tees, battered Boss blue jeans and black leather jackets, Mary J now considers a fundamental element of the good life the personal creation of a meaningful, committed, and loving marriage to a professional yet moral Black man, that produces respectful, educated Black progeny, with all the associated joy and struggle and camaraderie expected. Her sister Omarosa chafes; the masculine myths about their brothers inflate both their market share and their massive egos, and reduce formerly decent, hardworking, innocent young Black boys into low-budget Kanye Wests' with so much superheated helium under their wooly cornrowed craniums that even their conflict diamond encrusted Jesus Pieces and platinum grills from Jacob the Jeweler and Paul Wall won't impede their arrogant anti-gravity. Drive slow, watch these eligible Black men sell stereotyped sex to the highest bidder, notice new-age minstrels who capitalize from buffoonery and racial blasphemy. Please do not judge; if your home was where the hatred is, you wouldn't wait to touch the sky either. No matter; the college dropout welcomes Pamela Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith with open Schwarzenegger arms and black Trojan Magnum boxes. His latex gold crinkles with eager anticipation as these gregarious Girls Gone Wild discard the white cotton and inhale the white powder, willing to provide ecstasy hopped up on ecstasy. So what if this tan Talented Tenth misses a lecture on post-Civil Rights Movement cultural nationalism in African American Political Thought with Imam Amiri Baraka at eight-thirty A.M. in Cornell University's Goldwin Smith Hall; these buxom blonds blow bomb cock! I'm sorry, Ms. Jackson; it's a seller's auction block you can't afford.
Don't ask why. Black male sexuality remains inherently pornographic. Whether immortalized in still photography by National Geographic or Hustler, Americans reflect on the Black male's on-demand sexuality as gaudy and racist and indecent, crafted to provide sensory pleasure for their private enjoyment. Brothers plunge and strain and ejaculate their sour spunk into randy receptacles, entertain the masses with money shots and anatomical excess. Again we copulate without control. One can rewind and play our astounding intercourse at one's whim, marvel without sensitivity at our demonic stamina, our unconscious reverberations. We cannot love, only lust: the African Adonis, an anatomically correct automaton who sweats and grinds and strokes for your benefit, blessed with bodies black and brutal and true, boasts defined obsidian musculature devoid of grey matter. Mechanical animals who rut via remote, Black men often confront Black women whose fervent antagonism towards interracial relationships distills into an elegant ebony hand frosted with sensual fire-truck red nails that reaches for the bitter chastening rod James Weldon Johnson warned about; the Sony soul-controller of Black sexual choice caught between the playful mock conflict of a new-age Thomas and Sally, lightly misted with tropical sweat, pungent with post-coital pheromones, who battle with half-committed insolence over definitive controlling influence over Black male sexuality after long, torrid bouts of raw, unencumbered, unprotected lovemaking so spontaneous neither partner can be sure where consent ends and coercion begins. Resist anachronism; don't call it something new.
We end at the beginning. All interracial relationships expose the best and worst about the human condition amid Western civilization: we never learn to accept difference, no matter how intimate, no matter how beautiful. Our mundane humanity absorbs daily sacrifices and quiet indignities that deny culture and burn identity; interracial love only exacerbates such stress. Any assumption that interracial relationships erase racism prove incorrect; if anything, the emotional proximity affords new reasons to hate. Furthermore, all interracial relationship participants fall prey to the bizarre exoticism that fetishizes racial difference in the West; stereotypes that characterize people as submissive or bestial or spicy or aggressive exist regardless of the scented candles that surround your bubble bath, the aromatherapy wafting past your wet brown nostrils, the dexterous, slow, meticulous massage your dutiful boyfriend applies after his careful washing of your worn, soft flesh and your most mysterious arenas following that laborious laboratory day of endless PCR tests and repetitive DNA retrieval. Your love does not matter to another's hate; you forget this at your peril alone. Remember, all the controversy that surrounds interracial relationships emerges from those outside those struggles who believe they stand to lose from these natural realignments in the natural order. The model minorities massacre all those who defend the Asian American female's right to free association because their misogyny assumes that negative media input deconstructs all Asian American men from the brave and the bold to Long Duk Dong and William Hung, comical Asian masculinity misrepresentations whose suggestive monikers reinforce the stereotypical Asian male lack, not possible phallic overconfidence. Angry Black women exhale their frustrations over jungle fever without considering that some Black men simply do not care about Black women, period. (Not that hip hop is any indication, of course.) Sure, Black male progressivism may combat sexism and misogyny both in the workplace and in the community, in the club with 50 Cent and in the church with T.D. Jakes, but that's a holistic, macro-level project for these brothers, not concerned with dissecting women into arbitrary groups. The point is to live and learn from others' hate, not to ignore vitriol with immature blinders to continue childish ignorance. Interracial interaction is a political act, subject to all manner of reasoned discourse and unflattering criticism; Loving Day wishes people would practice libertarian laissez-faire politics, deny all responsibilities the individual owes the general population outside of physical and economic safety, and just live and love with barbeque sauce and George Foreman grills and fifth-grade remembrances of those who fought to marry under God and country before it was popular. I disagree. We can develop the love below without the offer of the mind above as sacrifice.
If we really love one another, we do not have a choice.
Related:
Loving Day & Loving Day, Part 2 by Reappropriate.com
Village Voice Interview with Ken Tanabe
Mrs. Williams on Loving Day
Happy (post-)Loving Day! from A Tangled Web
Loving Day Recalls a Time When the Union of a Man And a Woman Was Banned from ActingWhite.com
...a job a million girls would die for. from WilliamBruceWest.com
Interracial Relationships And Marriage: Ironies from Booker Rising
14 Comments:
At 6/20/2006 11:58:00 AM,
Jenn
said:;
Incredibly good post, James. I particularly liked when you said:
I'm utterly disgusted with the Tiger Woods effect, where mixed-race Americans find their personal political narratives annexed by politicized monorace minority groups, self-interested and egotistical, who rip and slash and claw each other in order to claim total public rights to various mixed-race celebrities like soulless movie studio executives who hover over disaster victims with promises of lucrative payoffs to soothe the lingering psychosomatic effects of Oceanic Flight 815.
I'm interested to consider why minority groups continue to partake in the "racial draft", fighting to claim multiracial celebrities like scraps of meat. What do we hope to gain by this act? Any thoughts?
Also, it's an interesting parallel you draw between the White male control of black male dehumanized sexuality and Black females -- although I wonder -- do you see the same kind of dehumanization and stereotyping towards the Black male in both cases? If so, do you think that there is some sort of objectification of the Black man here -- not that Black females only want to date within the race to promote racial unity and authenticity but some sort of bizarre effort to claim the "best" that sexual selection has to offer? I can't honestly say that I have much of an opinion to offer here -- I am not a Black woman nor have I had much opportunity to dialogue with a member of the Black female community on this subject, so it would be presumptuous of me to try to talk from that perspective. Nonetheless, I'm a little concerned that it seems like you might be suggesting that this control of Black male sexuality might trump the sexism faced within the community by Black females as you describe a few paragraphs down.
In the end though, I can't help but agree with the assessment that we cannot turn our brains off in our desperate need to cling to a Hallmark cards world full of love where no one ever experiences racist pain and we can fuck ourselves into some sort of interracial, all-the-colours-of-the-rainbow afterglow.
At 6/20/2006 12:32:00 PM,
James
said:;
Black people hope to gain versions of public Blackness better than themselves from the racial drafting, in my opinion. Honestly, Sen. Obama's continued love from the Black community provides the useful example. It doesn't matter how multiracial or inherently American his narrative; Black people are quick to claim him as the most influential Black political figure in American politics, because he's accepted by White America and his not Republican.
Obama's only skill so far is raising money for the Democratic Party. Maybe later he'll surprise us, but now he's the Black leader that proves Black men aren't all criminal Death Row inmates that create violent street gangs.
As to the war over control over Black male sexuality, I think the Mandingo stereotyping becomes rather omnipresent in the discussion; everyone's guilty of believing those myths most of the time. But no, I don't think any Black females desire Black male partners in order to boast about total ownership of premium male sexual prowess.
I think the Black female attempt to forge meaningful lives on their own terms trumps all other outside the race considerations, even if the "meaningful life" criteria originate from other community voices, like their mothers, the church, BET, Terry McMillan, etc.
Further, I'm not saying that the war over control of Black male sexuality trumps any other concerns, including sexism in the Black community. If anything, I'm saying that this anti-sexist Black man won't operate with a preference towards Black women to combat the sexism in his environment.
At 6/20/2006 07:47:00 PM,
philly jay
said:;
So what the main point James?Sometimes I have a hard time understanding what you write, and I don't feel like reading it over again.Not trying to offend :)
PS- I like the title, very clever.
At 6/20/2006 09:34:00 PM,
William
said:;
I love you, Philly Jay. For real. You ask the questions that James won't let me ask. But you know, Lamb, I've gotta say this was a good article. A little long in the tooth, but I think I get it. I think you're saying that Loving Day shouldn't be a big deal because it's commemorating something that should be a given anyway.Kinda like making a big deal about Wednesday. There ought to be a Wednesday, to balance out the week, but we don't have to have a party every Wednesday. At least, that was my take. And I loved the parts that I understood because this wasn't an angry James. In fact, with that first paragraph, I was about to turn the lights down low, and, well...nice post :-P
At 6/20/2006 09:56:00 PM,
James
said:;
Philly, Will, thanks for reading. Good to know I can disappear for a while and still come back to a few visitors.
Philly, I'd rather not try to distill the whole post to one sentence; rather, I'd say that if you have a specific query, I'd be happy to respond. My writing... I appreciate when people read my stuff, but I try to allow folk to draw their own conclusions. Glad the title worked!
If you think I don't come to a basic thesis, though, I can respect that.
Will, thanks for the compliment. I edited this one for two days because I wanted accuracy in both tone and substance. And as for the first paragraph, hey. Even mental patients listen to Gnarls Barkley on occasion.
At 6/29/2006 08:11:00 PM,
kristen
said:;
glad to see you back! i was wondering where you went. don't leave us too long like that again
as for the post i found it an excellent illumination about the ways in which interracial loving(pun intended) indeed just about anything interracial (adoptions for instance) is co-opted by people to show how advanced society has become since our racist 'past' i am going to have to add that this view is usually held by whites who see an interracial couple, family et al not be attacked in the streets as a sign of "progress" when indeed tiger doesn't even like being called Black, and some people find it hard to associate with someone on any level if their racial/ethnic makeups were not "clearly known"
as someone who constantly dissed my sister for claiming that her "good hair" meant she had "Indian in her family", i know and see how interracial identites are favored over single race identites (as if we can even claim a single race, right?) my only problem was the link to the craig-henderson pice. it was not a piece about black women frustrated over the practice of black men datng non-black women, it was the author of a book on Black interracial relationships taking questions, comments from a plethora of people, incl. asian amer men black men, whites, etc. it was a bit misleading, though i clicked the link to find something that quite illuminating and interesting read in addition to this post.
thanks for the mental masturbation yet again, james (hey good title for a future post, no?)
At 6/30/2006 09:46:00 AM,
James
said:;
Hey Kristen, thanks for commenting!
As for the link, when I read the discussion, it seemed that the author kind of 'checked out' before the period was done. She was eager to answer questions about what drives Black men to date interracially, and to counter demeaning stereotypes of Black women - nothing else.
Not only did the author have nothing to say to the Asian man who asked about Asian female outmarriage, but one of the author's answers to a brother who "can attest to the fact that it is extremely hard to find a compatible woman in my race" was this: "Keep looking though...there are scores of Black women out there who are not only about the material trappings."
Not scores of women out there ... 'scores of Black women out there'.
Really, she was there to discuss Black male IR, and my cynicism prevents me from looking at that as anything more than a sistagirl pity party.
At 6/30/2006 11:05:00 PM,
Philly Jay
said:;
Ok, I read it over. I THINK I got it now at least a little :)
I also just checked out the "why black men date interraical" article.Warning long reply/rant.
It didn't really make sense to me.You'll find all kinds of answers to that.Some of those answers will be just plain stupid and ignorant.Many of those answers(if not most) don't have anything to do with black women either.And you need to read a freaking book to find that out???!!
Last but not least, why should the black community care that much about who black men and women are with in the first place??I don't want to downplay the issuses completey, but it can seem like we are worrying about trivial stuff here.Maybe it's because I can see a nonblack face in my imediate family and not even blink.
Or maybe it's because I'm a black man and don't deal with the same issues(but then that assumes all black women think it is a issue).I don't know.Hell, I keep getting strangers calling me "brotha" and my female friend "sista" like we are all family and looking out for each other JUST because we are black.Man, I don't even know your ass lol!! :p
At 7/12/2006 06:29:00 PM,
Ken Tanabe
said:;
Hello James,
Thanks for writing about Loving Day, and thanks for the email to let us know about it. I finally found the time to read your posting with the attention that it deserves. It's quite rich, and it is certainly a great source of discussion points. I feel like this could be the beginning of a long conversation.
A few of the points you made stood out to me. First, you stated that a day "to support this most obvious of political victories" is "superfluous." If the Loving case (and other important related history) were as well known as Brown v. Board of Education, then perhaps we might have the luxury of deciding whether or not a celebration is superfluous. You seem to be familiar with this subject matter, but there are many out there who are not. The celebrations are not just for their own sake - they serve as an annual opportunity to educate.
I agree with you when you wrote that "landmark Supreme Court decisions are not musical codas." There was a good amount of resistance for years after the Loving decision from state governments. The wounds are deep and still exist today. It's interesting that, from your perspective, celebrating means that all wounds are healed. In this, Loving Day is inspired by Juneteenth. Many people would argue that the wounds of slavery are not yet healed. However, this doesn't stop thousands of people from celebrating the end of that slavery.
You characterize the stories in the "Real Couples" section of LovingDay.org as being "Hallmark." You also suggest that those who would share their stories are eager to prove their personal enrichment and to compensate for the racism of their ancestors. The phenomenon you describe does exist. Most of these stories are submitted online by people we have never met. I cannot definitively tell you that no one who writes a story is trying to compensate for something.
I believe that these stories serve an important purpose. In many way, they support many of the points you wrote about: people are still facing discrimination, the problems are not gone, a court decision has not solved all of our woes. I wonder if you heard the piece on This American Life about the child that was taken from his parents in 1961 because they were an interracial couple (http://audio.wbez.org/tal/313.m3u). Not everyone has a story like this, but even more everyday stories have value - especially if they are genuine and told with good intentions.
I found your points about the black male sexual image to be interesting and relevant. You touched on some other important stereotypes like "comical Asian masculinity." One point I believe you omitted was that laws against interracial couples were originally designed to keep European settlers from marrying Native Americans. These laws predated slavery.
The last paragraph of your writing was the most interesting to me - not necessarily for being right or wrong, but for raising so many questions so quickly. Do interracial relationships bring out the best and worst in society? Do they give us new reasons to hate? Does love not matter to another's hate? We could go on for a long time about these ideas.
I'm not sure if anyone has ever characterized your work in a way that differs greatly from its intended purpose. If they have, then you might understand my feeling about the final sentiments in your posting where you write that participants in Loving Day are "denying their responsibilites" and want to just "live and love with barbecue sauce." From my perspective, if you host a Loving Day celebration, then you are responsible for teaching your guests something about the Loving decision and an important part of our history that too many know nothing about. If all people cared about was barbecue sauce, then they could just have a barbecue for no reason.
Loving Day is a celebration, but it's really about education and fighting a long history of racism through that education. You may choose not to celebrate, but if you are trying to teach people about history and if you are trying to start conversations about civil rights, then your goals are the same as ours.
Again, thanks for writing. I welcome your insightful opinions and I hope that we can continue this dialogue.
At 7/16/2006 10:10:00 PM,
Bullet Proof Diva
said:;
Welcome Back Sir James. I check in to see if you return and I see you did last month!
I didn't know where you were going at first, but as usual, your writing is outstanding and thought-provoking.
(Wise Diva, new link: www.bulletproof-diva.com)
At 11/06/2006 10:13:00 PM,
Ann
said:;
Many people think that all the curelty of slavery, failed Reconstruction and Jim Crow segregation can just be washed away if we all just sex each other up.
I do not agree.
You cannot fuck your way to equality.
If that were true, with all the raping and sexual coercion of black women by white men, America would be the most non-racist country in the world.
But that did not end racism. It only changed black people into numerous shades of paint jobs.
Also, I disagree with you on the black man progeny being denied on a par-level with white male progeny.
The true purpose behind the anti-miscegenation laws was to prevent white men form MARRYING black women and ACKNOWLEDGING their half-caste offspring.
If white men had acknowledged their half-white/half-black children, they would have given legitimacy to the children's existence, and also to the children's mothers.
And many times the first time a white man had a sexual experience in the American South was with a black woman, and that also was the first time he became a father.
The enactment of the anti-miscegenation laws served to protect white women from aggressive sexual advances from white men, to protect white women from rape by white men (yes, there were white men who raped white women, but, by and large they took their rape aggressions out on defenseless black women who had no legal recours against rape from white men), and most of all, anti-miscegenation laws served to degrade an entire race of women as if they were prostitutes to live only for the base carnal desires of white men.
The prupose of the anti-miscegenation laws was to keep inheritance property, legitimacy and male family lineage in the WHITE FAMILY.
Why do you think the white race changed the European standard that the child should follow the race of the father? Changing this law to where the child followed the race of the mother (white mother meant free child, black mother meant slave child), allowed white men to rape and breed mixed-blood children with not only black slave women, but with black women during segregation, well after slavery was abolished.
Even till this day, white men would rather only have sex with a black woman and not marry her.
No matter how decent and virginal and upright she is.
This is one sick twisted hatred that white men started against black women 400 years ago.
And this sick dehumanization doesn't have any let up in sight.
Yes, white men can no longer walk into a black family's home and rape all the females living there.
But, this sick racist myth of the "loose, lascivious, bad" black woman started by white men still looms in the minds of those who believe in this stereotype created by white men.
As far as some people are concerned, black women are still "un-rapeble".
At 11/07/2006 02:26:00 PM,
ann
said:;
Oh, and James, speaking on the anniversary of the Loving vs. the State of Virginia (Loving, got to love that name. With a name like "Loving", how could the racist state of Virginia expect to win against this couple.), I think it is ironic that of the two people who would challenge this hated law, it was a white man and a black woman.
Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter.
How ironic, indeed.
Sadly, Richard died a little over 30 years ago due to a drunk driver crashing into his vehicle. Mildred still lives.
And I agree.
It is not enough to have barbeques and red soda to commemorate this ending of a law which had the audacity to say whom you could not love, be intimate with or marry.
The true "celebration" of this abolition of anti-miscegenation should be the learning of and teaching of the profound effect this brave couple had on America.
It is more than just running around in the park, playing games and shooting the breeze.
It is acknowledging the end of a barbaric intrusion in people's lives about the most intimate endeavor they will ever undertake.
At 11/28/2006 12:35:00 PM,
Stephanie B.
said:;
To Ann,
I agree. It makes me so angry that mainstream media paint pairings of Tom and Sally and Strom and Carrie as "romantic" as oppose to what they really are:
Coercion and rape.
They deliberately downplay the Loving family as if they don't exist in real life. They were the ones who challenged the status quo, not Strom and Tom. The Loving couple deserves all the credit, not the ones who used Black women.
Stephanie
At 1/26/2008 06:41:00 PM,
Stephanie
said:;
James,
One more thing that I hate the media for telling the public over and over that IRs, especially IRs between Black men and White women are the epitome of progress. Then they shift the blame for the opposition of IRs from Whites to Black women without taking into account why some of us have ambivilent views toward IR. Ann writes about the history of IRs and we better read what she says regarding them. It's not an angry rant over IR. It's the sexualized racism dynamics that place Black women at the bottom of the hierarchy. That hierarchy is still in effect.
What they want the American public to ignore whenever they say IRs are the symbol of progress or that alone solve the racial problem is the racial/sexual exploitation of Black women by whites in the past 400 years in America. Until we confront that past, people of Color are skeptical of the notion of IRs as cure for race relations.
Also, the media ignore IRs between people of Color. It's all about Whites, esp. between Black men and White women.
Stephanie B.
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