{"id":37680,"date":"2014-10-10T18:07:01","date_gmt":"2014-10-10T18:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37680"},"modified":"2014-10-10T20:24:10","modified_gmt":"2014-10-10T20:24:10","slug":"americas-sex-and-race-failure-why-raven-symone-and-an-ohio-couple-are-struggling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37680","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s sex and race failure: Why Raven-Symone and an Ohio couple are struggling"},"content":{"rendered":"

America\u2019s sex and race failure: Why Raven-Symone and an Ohio couple are struggling<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Salon<\/a>
\n2014-10-08<\/p>\n

Brittney Cooper<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies
\nRutgers, The State University of New Jersey<\/em><\/p>\n

How a TV star shunning labels, and a lesbian couple with a Black baby illustrate the fight to assert one’s humanity<\/em><\/p>\n

This week, iconic Cosby<\/a> (grand)kid Raven-Symon\u00e9<\/a> caught up with Oprah<\/a>, telling her in an interview<\/a>: \u201cI don\u2019t want to be labeled gay… I\u2019m a human who loves other humans. \u2026I\u2019m American not African American.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know what country I\u2019m from in Africa, but I do know I have roots in Louisiana<\/a>. I\u2019m an American, and that\u2019s a colorless person.\u201d It would be tempting to frame these recent remarks on race and gay identity from the Cosby Show and Disney star as just more ideal and myopic millennial musings on race. But I think her comments tell us something about the operations of contemporary notions of the \u201chuman\u201d that are worth unpacking.<\/p>\n

Let me begin by saying that using one\u2019s Louisiana roots is perhaps the worst place to begin in an argument about how the term \u201cAmerican\u201d is a \u201ccolor-less\u201d one. Both sides of my family have lived in Louisiana since the earliest census records I could find. That census, the 1870 census was the first to record the names of all the black people that had been freed within the last decade. With great care, citizens were designated with a \u201cC,\u201d \u201cM,\u201d or \u201cW,\u201d for \u201ccolored,\u201d \u201cmulatto<\/a>\u201d and \u201cwhite\u201d respectively. Well into the late 20th century, my grandmother referred to Black people as colored.<\/p>\n

Certainly, Raven-Symon\u00e9\u2019s arguments bear the trace of the postracial rhetoric so prominent among certain (though not all) segments of millennials<\/a>.\u00a0 But her desire to not acknowledge or carry the \u201cAfrican\u201d designation in \u201cAfrican-American\u201d is far from new. To be clear, many Black people who are Americans, are not \u201cAfrican American\u201d in the sense that we mean that term today, namely as native born Black people. Voluntary rather than forced migrations of diasporic Black people from the Caribbean and from West Africa have been a characteristic of the U.S. Black population since the early 20th century.\u00a0 The side eye<\/a> I\u2019m giving to Raven-Symon\u00e9 is not about a desire to demand that all Black people in the U.S. take on the moniker \u201cAfrican American,\u201d but rather about the fact that her framing suggests that it is the connection of Africa to blackness<\/em> that has her wanting to disavow a hyphenated identity…<\/p>\n

…Among the many things I find troubling in her statement is the idea that America is color-less. It is a society built on a foundational color schema in which black skin is figured as the condition for unfreedom and white skin as the condition for freedom. Louisiana itself had a notoriously restrictive definition of the one drop rule as Dr. Yaba Blay<\/a> discusses in her book \u201cOne-Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race<\/a>,\u201d Louisiana law classified all people with \u201cone-thirty-second or less\u201d of Negro blood would be \u201cdeemed, described, or designated\u201d officially as \u2018colored, \u2018mulatto,\u2019 \u2018black,\u2019 \u2018negro,\u2019 \u2018griffe<\/a>,\u2019 \u201cAfro-American,\u2019 \u2018quadroon<\/a>,\u2019 \u2018mestizo<\/a>,\u201d \u2018colored person,\u2019 or \u2018person of color.\u2019 Well into the 1980s, i.e. well into Raven Symon\u00e9\u2019s lifetime, this law was used to designate putatively white people as black…<\/p>\n

…This kind of rhetorical move is also salient coming on the heels of recent reports of an Ohio lesbian couple<\/a> opting to sue their sperm bank for erroneously giving them black donor sperm.\u00a0 I get suing for negligence and shoddy service. But for this queer couple, the presence of their Black daughter disrupts their ability to exist comfortably in the space of whiteness that defines their community, a community that they admit is deeply homophobic. Having chosen to be a queer family in the midst of a heteronormative<\/a> white universe in Ohio<\/a>, their Black child has now disrupted their access to white power and privilege. This biracial black girl is growing up with distraught, devastated queer parents who love her despite her blackness. Having internalized antiblackness, they note their discomfort with taking her to a black neighborhood for haircuts and their fear of the racist reprisal of neighbors and family members…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

America\u2019s sex and race failure: Why Raven-Symone and an Ohio couple are struggling Salon 2014-10-08 Brittney Cooper, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey How a TV star shunning labels, and a lesbian couple with a Black baby illustrate the fight to assert one’s humanity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,666,125,8,394,20],"tags":[18111,260,18110,10962,7993,3343,7992],"class_list":["post-37680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-gaylesbian","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-brittney-cooper","tag-ohio","tag-raven-symone","tag-salon","tag-yaba-a-blay","tag-yaba-amgborale-blay","tag-yaba-blay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}