Musings of a Colored Girl

In 1955, my mother gave birth to a colored girl. By the 1960s, I was black and proud. Sometime in the 1980s, I became African-American. I think that I'm black again in 2006 but sometimes I'm still African-American.  Recent comments posted to this entry reminded me that I've also been a Negro.  No wonder I'm neurotic!

White America often accuses black folks of playing the race card. I think we play the hand we were dealt. America is obsessed with race. A child is born of two parents, one of Caucasian ancestry and one of African heritage. Equal parts of both, the child is identified as black. A friend of my mine once said that it offended him that it took two white people to make a white child but only one parent with any fraction of black lineage to make a black baby.

Black people have become swept up in this need to identify people by race. When Tiger Woods appeared as a golfing phenomenon, there were black folks who became angry when he identified himself as a mixture of Asian, Black and Caucasian. We wanted to claim him as exclusively ours. This obsession with race that infiltrates American culture makes us believe that our worth as a people hinges on ensuring that our identity remains intact. We object to including a category for multiracial on census forms because we fear that it will dilute our numbers, there will be fewer of us who are black, African-American, colored.

Twice this year, newspaper headlines have touted the birth of twin babies, one black and one white. In each instance, one parent was of mixed race.  I was bemused by one headline that read,"Twins Are of Different Races." The article quoted doctors who stated their own surprise and commented on how unusual and rare an occurrence this is. None of them took this as an opportunity to point out that race is a social construct. The babies aren't different races; they just have different skin tones. The Human Genome Project and other genetic research programs have found no consistent genetic markers to identify race. We are all human beings, we just look different. Classifying people by skin color has no more logic behind it than classifying us by hair or eye color.

I think that I want to be a colored girl again. When I look in the mirror I see a woman with chocolate brown skin and dark brown eyes, a woman of color. When I look around, I see a world full of people, each and every one of us,a person of color.