folklorefanatic

I’ll be your hostess, because as of right now, there’s no one else here.

When I saw ‘the shadows,’ I mean in the ever-changing, mutable world of life as a multiracial person. There are several factors that may influence my opinions on racism, feminism/womanism, classism, etc:

1. I’m an American.
2. I’m a family historian. That means that documentation may mean more to me than it does to you, and that I may pay attention to controversial subjects (like the one-drop-rule) and try to talk about them in an academic context depending on the subject.
3. My mother is white. Her known family has been white for at least ten generations (as far as I can tell). I don’t just mean white. I mean Whitey McWhite. I can trace her ancestors back to the first Pilgrims, Revolutionary War Patriots, the Carolingian royal lines in Europe, Chaucer, Charlemagne, the early British kings…you get the point.
4. My father is multiracial. It’s very difficult to ascertain all of the origins of his family, because he’s from the Caribbean, which means that it’s extremely difficult to trace his ancestry back once you reach the servant/slave lines. One grandfather was Amerindian and white, one was black, one grandmother was white, and one was multiracial.
5. My brother’s facial features look more Anglo-Saxon than mine do, but his skin is VERY slightly tanner than mine. I have very pale, porcelain-meets-olive skin, probably exacerbated by the fact that I only go outside two weeks out of the year. I’m paler than my mother. My father could look any number of things except white. He’s been coded as Arab before several times, but that’s only because he doesn’t have a five-inch ‘fro anymore.
6. My first cousins, my brother and me are the first people in my father’s family who can pass as white in most parts of the United States.

Originally published at The Multiracial Muse. You can comment here or there.