adymackenzie
Anasui
adymackenzie
Anasui
adymackenzie
Sermanther
Idk. My cousin calls himself mulatto, which is why I say it. Yeah...Well it's a term that derived out of slavery.
My boyfriend considers himself mulatto and he's not black (although he does have African ancestry due to the Puerto Rican side... Come to think of it, I do as well but you wouldn't ever have guessed it). He's Puerto Rican Italian. It's just that his skin is too dark to be white but too light to be black. He's literally in the middle. Where I am from, "mulato", or mulatto in English, tends to mean somebody who is very tanned with dark hair and dark eyes. It doesn't necessarily have to deal with racial heritage, just physical appearance.
It's weird, you look at him and you would think he is multi-racial because he looks European, Hispanic, and African. But when you look at the ethnic gene pool of Puerto Rico, the main groups are Indian (Tajino), Spaniard, and African. I happen to have all three from my father, and my boyfriend has two of them and Italian instead of Spaniard.
I didn't say that you had to be black and white in order to be a "mulatto." The word is used to describe people of mixed ancestry, yes, but it was also a term that they gave to children that were produced from slave and master relations (that's why I mentioned slavery..and I definitely should not have used the word "derived," sorry!); to call someone a mulatto in that time was the equivalent of the N word.
If it's not a big deal to you guys, that's okay--honestly, I don't hear that word being thrown around from people who aren't mixed anymore, lol. BUT if I ever had a child and someone called it a mulatto, I'd have a bone to pick. I guess it depends on how you view the history of the word.
Understood. Here in Puerto Rico, we tend to call loved ones "negrito/a" which means "black" in English. Depending on where you are, a word can completely change its meaning.
I do remember somewhere in a history book that talks about the cultural aspect of what we view as ethnicity. If you want, I can post it here. It's really interesting how in one country a person can be one "ethnicity" to a completely different one by just hopping on a plane...
I'm definitely interested.
y, tu sabes espanol?
Soy guatemalteca!
Espaol es mi segundo idioma. Y aqui esta el articulo:
Common Sense and Sociology: What is Race?
...According to common sense, our racial classifications represent biological differences between people. Sociologists, in contrast, stress that what we call races are social classifications, not biological categories.
Sociologists point out that our "race" depends more on the society in which we live than on our biological characteristics. For example, the racial categories common in the United States are merely one of numerous ways that people around the world classify physical appearances. Although groups around the world use different categories, each group assumes that its categories are natural, merely a response to visible biology
To better understand this essential sociological point- that race is more social than it is biological- consider this: in the United States, children born to the same parents are all of the same race. "What could be more natural?" Americans assume. But in Brazil, children born to the same parents may be of different races- if their appearances differ. "What could be more natural?" assume Brazilians.
Consider how Americans usually classify a child born to a "black" mother and a "white" father. Why do they usually say that the child is "black"? Wouldn't it be equally as logical to classify the child as "white"? Similarly, if a child's grandmother is "black", but all her other ancestors are "white", the child is often considered "black". Yet she has much more "white blood" than "black blood". Why then, is she considered "black"? Certainly not because of biology. Rather, such thinking is a legacy of slavery. Whites- in an attempt to preserve the "purity" of their "race" in the face of numerous children whose fathers were white slave masters and mothers were black slaves- classified anyone with even a "drop of black blood" as "not white".
This sounds ridiculous, but even a plane trip can change a person's race. In the city of Salvador in Brazil, people classify one another by color of skin, and eyes, breadth of nose and lips, and color and curliness of hair. They use at least seven terms for what we call white and black. Consider again a U.S. child who has "white" and "black" parents. If she flies to Brazil, she is no longer "black"; she now belongs to one of their several "whiter" categories.
On the flight just mentioned, did the girl's "race" actually change? Our common sense revolts at this, I kow, but it actually did. We want to argue that because her biological characteristics remain unchanged, her race remains unchanged.. This is because we think of race as biological, when it really is a label we use to describe perceived biological characteristics. Simply put, the race we "are" depends on where we are- on who is doing the classifying.
And our classifications are fluid, not fixed. You can see change occurring even now in those used in the United States. The category "multiracial", for example, indicates changing thought.
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