{"id":42377,"date":"2015-08-24T18:50:51","date_gmt":"2015-08-24T18:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=42377"},"modified":"2015-08-24T18:51:19","modified_gmt":"2015-08-24T18:51:19","slug":"race-in-the-us-what-if-your-identity-was-a-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=42377","title":{"rendered":"Race in the US: What if your identity was a lie?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race in the US: What if your identity was a lie?<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Al Jazeera Magazine<\/a>
\n2015-08-21<\/p>\n

John Metta<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“There are no qualifiers to my blackness, and I will never again be Not Black Enough. I am a black man, and I am angry.”<\/em><\/p>\n

My father’s anger was a storm.<\/p>\n

Like many other boys, I was carefree and careless with a thoughtlessness that bordered on stupidity. The world revolved around my desire to laugh and run in a bubble of fun and I rarely noticed the wake of catastrophe that cast out behind me. But I was always aware of my father watching me, and I was aware of the storm.<\/p>\n

He was a giant of a man, with a voice like thunder in the distance. I was a butterfly, small and frightened, observing the horizon of his brow, watching to see if the storm clouds were coming near, waiting for the winds to blow in my direction.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, despite my raucous behaviour, they very rarely did.<\/p>\n

There was a deep anger in my father, but that storm ravaged other lands. Most often, my delicate wings felt only his whisper. But the whisper of my father was still a very powerful thing.<\/p>\n

Each of my siblings have their stories about these whispers, about the times my father sat them down to have A Talk – a proper noun that is capitalised in our childhood memories the way A Beating is for some children. A Talk was a gruelling ordeal of mental torture where your mind felt like a balloon filled with too much water.<\/p>\n

I, the only son of his six children (and his least intelligent child by far), was often caught off guard by A Talk…<\/p>\n

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

Race in the US: What if your identity was a lie? Al Jazeera Magazine 2015-08-21 John Metta “There are no qualifiers to my blackness, and I will never again be Not Black Enough. I am a black man, and I am angry.” My father’s anger was a storm. Like many other boys, I was carefree […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,8,3015,20],"tags":[14082,20808,20809],"class_list":["post-42377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","category-usa","tag-al-jazeera","tag-al-jazeera-magazine","tag-john-metta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42377","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=42377"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42379,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42377\/revisions\/42379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}