Today's political post

[minoanmiss]

Watching Americans debate whether or not Jamaicans are Black, from my vantage point as a Jamaican immigrant who grew up in the US under quite unambiguously applied anti-Black racism, makes me want to laugh till I throw up. Or maybe just throw up.

Comments

[dine]

WTH? I mean seriously, what?

I do not get idiots, sometimes - especially American idiots

[minoanmiss]

Word, so much word.

[goss]

whether or not Jamaicans are Black

RIGHT???? *headdesk x million*

Also that people cannot seem to wrap their heads around the fact that a regular human person can have Afro-Indo heritage. As a Trini living in a community with TONS of people of that exact mix of genes, I am flabbergasted by the ignorance of Americans.

[acelightning73]

There are Americans who would be horrified about the tensions concerning people who are half Japanese and half Chinese, or half Vietnamese and half American Southern Black. And far too many Americans don't consider anyone who isn't completely Caucasian thereby "black" (inconsequential, incompetent, prone to criminal behavior and drug abuse) , this applies to anybody from an Italian-American with a heavy suntan to a Hawaiian Native to a Saudi Arabian.

I once met a girl who was half African-American and half Chinese. She was astonishingly beautiful to look at. Long straight black hair to her butt. Typical "Oriental" face - high cheekbones, almond eyes, but with a slightly broad nose. But she was one of those girls who KNOWS she's gorgeous, and plays it for all it's worth.

[minoanmiss]

I want to smack many of my fellow Americans with the whole island of Trinidad indeed. I'm not sure if there's any other country which quite celebrates ignorance the way the USA does. Feh.

[amaebi]

Celebrating ignorance. Sneering at knowledge. That’s exactly it. That fabled US character. I guess it’s how white USians continue to represent the ancestral stereotypes of (always male, always white) straw-chewing yokels replete with parasites and peering forth dimly from outhouses.

[full_metal_ox]

goss: Also that people cannot seem to wrap their heads around the fact that a regular human person can have Afro-Indo heritage. As a Trini living in a community with TONS of people of that exact mix of genes, I am flabbergasted by the ignorance of Americans.

acelightning73: There are Americans who would be stonkered about the tensions concerning people who are half Japanese and half Chinese, or half Vietnamese and half American Southern Black.

And yet we’re the very same people who’ll regale you with the global complexity of our Ancestry.com and 23andMe findings: half-horse-half-alligator-with-a-lil-touch-o-snappin-turtle, and let’s not forget the Cherokee Princess (who outweighs 31 stodgy Lutherans in heritage impact when you want to wear a cosplay war bonnet to Coachella.)

[amaebi]

So so so gruesome, so so true.

[full_metal_ox]

Pop-Cultural Fun Fact: the Afro-Indian demographic is big enough to have influenced the MCU’s choice of the Hindu deity Hanuman as the patron Gorilla God of the Jabari tribe.

[amaebi]

Huh. I had no idea that the Jabari gorilla was in any way a Hanuman. Yet another instance of Hanuman’s rise in popularity and ubiquity over the past century.

[acelightning73]

I don't know what they use to determine who's "really" black, but most of the Jamaicans I've ever seen in person have been dark brown with nappy hair. (I worked with a bunch of Jamaican sound techs at the UN. They once taught me a few words of patwah.)

To an average white American, Jamaicans are just another flavor of "black", they smoke weed, they make reggae music, and they talk funny. And almost all of them I've met are friendly and open-minded about just about everything there is. Compared to the people I met in Iceland, I like Jamaicans a whole lot more!

[minoanmiss]

Hahahahahah, dark brown with nappy hair, that's me. But I'm from the side of Jamaica that doesn't smoke weed. It's a whole internal cultural debate thing.

Alas I can't speak patwah -- my mother beat it out of me. I can recognize it though even across a crowded room!

[acelightning73]

I needed the translations when they swore at malfunctioning studio equipment. It's a very colorful language, historically a trade language derived from the collision of different cultures.

And I like a lot of Bob Marley's songs -"BuffaloSoldier", "No Woman No Cry", and of course "One Love." If I'm missing some cultural nuances, I'm sorry.(And this white lady does love Mother Nature's gifts.)

[minoanmiss]

HONESTLY

[hitchhiker]

wtf is wrong with this country :(

[mekare]

Look, I will admit to being ignorant of a lot of cultures (there is always more to learn), but this is just..UgH

[anna_wing]

The use of "diverse" as a synonym for "non-Caucasian" is the bit that always makes me twitch. Given the vast areas of the world where ethnicities are indeed extremely mixed, but none of the common US skin-colour distinctions are relevant in any way...

[amaebi]

Amen. My reprobate white USian brothers and sisters are chronic with the euphemisms.

[rydra_wong]

what.

Also, is this a rehash of the "debate" about whether Obama was African-American?

[amaebi]

Continuation. Playing the oldies eternally.

[full_metal_ox]

As with the current they’re-eating-CATS-AND-DOGS!!! uproar about Haitians in Springfield: I recall hearing that one about Chinese immigrants in Dayton in the 1990’s.

(And under prize circumstances: a couple fellow bus passengers were gossiping about the closing of a neighborhood Chinese restaurant. What had happened was that standards had deteriorated under a change of management, and they were shut down for health violations. My seatmates just knew what that had to have entailed: Kettering’s precious little furbabies were in danger of showing up as Meow Po and Bow Wow Gai Pan at the lunch buffet!(1)

Wait for it; we were at that moment riding past SICSA, the local animal shelter—which was so crammed to bursting with rescue animals that they’d bought out the neighboring strip mall and were in the process of converting it into an expansion wing, the construction being clearly visible from the street. I attempted to raise the question of how all these unhoused animals had survived the Asian Apocalypse, but it was like waiting on a Big Wheels for a traffic opening at the Indy 500.)

(1) And isn’t it telling that they assume immigrants would of course try to sneak-feed Anglo-diasporics substances that the latter’s cultural tradition regards as abhorrent. I mean, it’s not like we’re talking about pork—-which every Jew, Muslim, Diné, Rasta, African Orthodox Christian, vegetarian, and vegan would like if they’d only quit being irrational fussbudgets and give it a try.)

[amaebi]

:(

[amaebi]

*enters the vomitorium*

[lunabee34]

:(

*hugs*

[princessofgeeks]

The stupid, it burns.

[sabotabby]

American politics are so bizarre.

[dewline]

There are days when you and I are jointly convinced that our own politics have never been much better.

[petra]

*screams with you*

[sage]

Stupid should hurt.

[claudia603]

I can't even....*shakes my head in despair*

[dissectionist]

I’m trying to remember a quote I came across once, about how white folks will grant whiteness to others when it’s useful (to white folks) and take it away when it’s not (useful to white folks). Like when we need to delegitimize others as people, we withhold whiteness, but when we need to delegitimize their claims as people of color, we bestow whiteness. A Canadian example would be how we took land away from Indigenous people because that was convenient for us and we justified it on the basis of their non-whiteness, but then it became inconvenient to have so many Indigenous people, so we made a lot of rules that took Indian status away from Indigenous folks (like if an Indigenous woman married a non-Indigenous man, she and all her offspring lost their Indian status and any possible claim to territory).

I’m guessing this current fight happening in the US is based on similar principles.

[minoanmiss]

I remember hearing about the exact same concept and it's absolutely in play here. Combined with another interesting concept I've run into, which is that a lot of Black Americans have the view that anyone who says they are Black + Something Else is trying to repudiate being Black and "shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways". It's a weird application of the One-Drop Rule, I think: being Black "should" supercede any other demographics, so anyone who admits to any other demographics as well must be trying to say they aren't really Black. I remember being bewildered by this in my youth, that while White people applied the exact same stereotypes to me that they did to everyone else they saw as Black (I was SO confused by the watermelon and fried chicken thing), Black people got mad at Afro-Latinos for talking about both sides of their heritage and at me for talking about being Jamaican.

Ugh.

I really truly hate the way Election Season dredges up the nastiest stuff about the US, over and over.

[dissectionist]

Jamaicans and other Caribbean people are, at least in Toronto, probably the largest demographic of Black people here. (Okay, decided to look it up to fact-check myself, and I was right in that a lot of immigration from the Caribbean started in the 1960s; however, more recently in the 2000s, immigration from African nations has become more frequent than from the Caribbean.) I suspect you’d be hard-pressed to find Black folks up here who think you’re denying your Blackness by talking about being from the Caribbean, simply because that heritage is so incredibly common here.

It’s wild to me that anyone would think a Black Jamaican (specifying Black because I understand about 5% of Jamaicans are completely non-Black, and I’m not talking about them here) doesn’t fall under the overall “Black” umbrella.

[minoanmiss]

Yet another reason I need to visit Toronto. :)

It’s wild to me that anyone would think a Black Jamaican... doesn’t fall under the overall “Black” umbrella.

Word. SO much word. Not least because so many of My Fellow Americans [tm] have been happy to give me (and my parents, and nearly every Black immigrant I've talked to about this) plenty of shit for being Black the whole time we've been here! But NOW we might not count?! WTF. ahahahahaha. sob

[sovay]

Coming late to this post, so please have some *hugs* and WTF if you want them. I am sure there is a nuanced conversation to be had about who counts as Black and why, but boy howdy does this not sound like it.

[edit] Your comments are having the nuanced conversation! Hooray. Jeez.

[conuly]

Race is obviously a non-scientific way of sorting people into groups, and the only methods any of us actually use to figure out race are "eyeball it" and "what do they say they are".

So, uh, well... Kamala Harris certainly looks Black to me, and I believe she self-identifies as Black, and she's obviously an American and she grew up in the USA, so you can't say she doesn't have at least some of African-American specific cultural identifiers, so why are we indulging shitty people being shitty?