{"id":41261,"date":"2015-06-01T19:49:06","date_gmt":"2015-06-01T19:49:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41261"},"modified":"2015-06-01T19:49:06","modified_gmt":"2015-06-01T19:49:06","slug":"why-you-can-kiss-my-mulatto-ass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41261","title":{"rendered":"Why You Can Kiss My Mulatto Ass"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why You Can Kiss My Mulatto Ass<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

BuzzFeed<\/a>
\n2015-05-26<\/p>\n

Mat Johnson<\/a><\/strong>, BuzzFeed Contributor<\/p>\n

\u201cThe recent re-emergence of mulatto<\/a> identity isn\u2019t about race, it\u2019s about actively acknowledging a multiethnic reality in a simplistically racialized world.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Yo, I\u2019m a mulatto<\/a><\/em>. And I have to tell you, it\u2019s great. I was black for most of my life, which is also great, but the thing is I look white and, coincidentally, my dad\u2019s also white (he\u2019s great too), and after a while I needed a word that offered me a better fit, and acknowledge my father and his whole family\u2019s impact on my life, which was also a big part of my identity. So I converted to mulatto, which I see as a subset of the larger African American experience.<\/p>\n

I actually love the word mulatto<\/em>. I love it for its rolling linguistic sound \u2014 moo-lah-toe<\/em> \u2014 sliding off my tongue the way Lolita<\/a> did for Humbert Humbert. But I also love mulatto<\/em> for the illicit pleasure of watching the uncomfortable cringe the word sometimes elicits from others, even when I say it to describe myself: an African American novelist who just happens to look like a washed-up Latvian<\/a> rugby player. The discomfort is a response I\u2019ve encountered from black people, from white people, and even sometimes from many mulattoes \u2014 or rather, I should say, \u201cfirst-generation mixed people of black and white ancestry.\u201d That inelegant mouthful is what mulatto<\/em> means, but I can\u2019t shorten it without saying \u201cmulatto,\u201d because there is no other word in the English language that captures that meaning while connecting it with the larger sociopolitical history of North America.<\/p>\n

The word mulatto is at some level absurd: Of course it\u2019s absurd; it\u2019s an antiquated relic of a racist past. Just like the reductive racial classifications of black<\/em> and white<\/em>, which are equally absurd in the face of the overwhelming complexity of ethnicity, caste, and historical context…<\/p>\n

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

Why You Can Kiss My Mulatto Ass BuzzFeed 2015-05-26 Mat Johnson, BuzzFeed Contributor \u201cThe recent re-emergence of mulatto identity isn\u2019t about race, it\u2019s about actively acknowledging a multiethnic reality in a simplistically racialized world.\u201d Yo, I\u2019m a mulatto. And I have to tell you, it\u2019s great. I was black for most of my life, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,20],"tags":[13345,2355],"class_list":["post-41261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-buzzfeed","tag-mat-johnson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41261","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=41261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}