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Writer's pictureEvelyn Fortson

BLACK, PERSON OF COLOR, OR TIME TO REBRAND?


Historically, a person was considered to be Black if they had one drop of Black blood. The one-drop rule was used during slavery in America to assign the children of mixed ethnic groups to the status of enslaved people and to promote the ideology of White supremacy. This also created a caste system based on the color of one's skin. You were legally White if you were a Free Person of Color before the Civil War and had less than one-eighth of Black blood. Many Free People of Color cloaked themselves in the safety of whiteness during that period in America’s history.


Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and we have a Woman of Color, running to be the President of the United States of America. If anyone questions her Blackness, they are immediately looked upon as someone who swallowed the Kool-Aid that the orange man gave them. Little did Trump know when he asked, “When did Kamala become Black?” that he would spark a thoughtful response. I asked myself, “If her mother is Indian from India, and her father is from Jamaica, where were her Black Aunties and Big Mommas?” What I was really saying with that question was Kamala Harris’s experience in America was not the experience of African Americans whose ancestors were enslaved on southern plantations for hundreds of years. Her experience was that of a second-generation immigrant. Her parents came to America willingly to seek a better life. My parents and their parents and their parents…knew that the American Dream and the inscriptions on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” was not referring to them.


I will cast my vote for Kamala Harris because she is far better than the orange alternative, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for her to right America's wrongs. I will, however, hope that she remembers the warm embraces of those Black Aunties and Big Mommas who took care of her until her mother could pick her up from daycare at the end of the day.


I am more than a Person of Color, and the Black woman descriptor is too general. Apparently, it is advantageous in certain circumstances for some to call themselves a Black person in America when, in fact, they are people of color with a distinct cultural and ethnic heritage that is vastly different from descendants of the enslaved. Instead of passing for White, some people are now passing for Black. That is until being Black becomes a little too real, pedestrian, or no longer serves a purpose.


So, Black people whose roots run deep in the blood-soaked soil of former plantations, what should we call ourselves now? What we call ourselves should separate us from color and identify us as descendants of the people who built this country and its incredible wealth. Our history, unique struggle, and redress in this country can’t be consumed in the pan-ethnic moniker “People of Color, of Black.”

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