The Future is Mixed

Most of America and much of the world is celebrating the election of Kamala D. Harris to Vice President.

Vice President-elect and Madam Vice President — MVP fills many “first” boxes that include; Woman, Black, South Asian, Step-mother, from California, born in Oakland, Historically Black college graduate, Black sorority, and so on and so forth.

What always comes first though is the fact that V.P. Harris is a Black woman because in America Blackness is the most important attribute a person has because whiteness requires it to be so.

The “one-drop rule” is alive and has never really gone away. And the one-drop rule goes two ways:

Whiteness demands that Blackness “present” itself; and Black people require Blackness acknowledge itself.

Two different demands and approaches that are both the outcome of hundreds of years of chattel enslavement, generational rape, and the outcome of generational rape: mixed race children.

White America has never interrogated itself about what it means that Black Americans are a range of colors — light and almost white, to brown, to black, and all shades in between.

Our ancestors did not arrive on these shores with the range of black and brown skin modern Black folk now have.

Black Americans got color ranges because white men raped enslaved Black girls and women, and those violent sexual acts produced mixed-race children.

And even once slavery ended, white men could and did continue to rape Black women without fear of legal repercussions, and with the same result as their forefathers and their rape acts — produce mixed-race children.

Faced with lighter skinned babies, white men were forced to confront their offspring and create a space for them in society as long as that space was away from their families. The children were killed, sold to other families, or just ignored and left to be raised by their mother and step-father.

The obvious parentage was explained by the enslavers as the result of the “evil Black girl or woman” who used her…