{"id":41162,"date":"2015-05-19T18:24:23","date_gmt":"2015-05-19T18:24:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41162"},"modified":"2015-05-19T18:51:22","modified_gmt":"2015-05-19T18:51:22","slug":"proving-my-blackness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41162","title":{"rendered":"Proving My Blackness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Proving My Blackness<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The New York Times Magazine<\/a>
\n2015-05-24<\/p>\n

Mat Johnson<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

I grew up a black boy who looked like a white one. My parents divorced when I was 4, and I was raised mostly by my black mom, in a black neighborhood of Philadelphia<\/a>, during the Black Power<\/a> movement. I put my dashiki on one arm at a time like every other black boy, but I was haunted by the moments I\u2019d be out with my mother and other black people would look at me as if I were a cuckoo egg accidentally dropped in their nest. The contrast between \u201cblackness\u201d and how I looked was so stark that I often found myself sifting through archaic, pre-20th-century African-American racial definitions to find a word that fit me. Mulatto<\/em><\/a>, 50 percent African. Quadroon<\/em><\/a>, 25 percent African. Octoroon<\/em><\/a>, 12.5 percent African. The next stop down, at 6.25 percent African, was mustefino<\/em>. I\u2019d never heard anyone call himself mustefino, and I didn\u2019t want to personally relaunch that brand.<\/p>\n

Some people wondered why, in a society that represses black people, I would even want to be black. But I never wanted to be black. I was<\/em> black. What I wanted was to retain my connection to my heritage, my community, my family. To my mom. And I wanted proof. So last summer, after exhausting my attempt at amateur genealogy, I spit into a test tube for a DNA test. Only then did I realize, in a panic, that my life of racial ambiguity would soon be over…<\/p>\n

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

Proving My Blackness The New York Times Magazine 2015-05-24 Mat Johnson I grew up a black boy who looked like a white one. My parents divorced when I was 4, and I was raised mostly by my black mom, in a black neighborhood of Philadelphia, during the Black Power movement. I put my dashiki on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,2039,8,20],"tags":[2355,8894,13109],"class_list":["post-41162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-mat-johnson","tag-new-york-times-magazine","tag-the-new-york-times-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41162","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=41162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}