{"id":50792,"date":"2016-12-18T23:48:22","date_gmt":"2016-12-18T23:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=50792"},"modified":"2016-12-18T23:48:22","modified_gmt":"2016-12-18T23:48:22","slug":"what-does-it-mean-to-be-black-enough-three-women-explore-their-racial-identities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=50792","title":{"rendered":"What does it mean to be \u201cblack enough?\u201d Three women explore their racial identities"},"content":{"rendered":"

What does it mean to be \u201cblack enough?\u201d Three women explore their racial identities<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/a>
\n2016-12-11<\/p>\n

On \u201cHistorically Black<\/a>,\u201d our podcast about black history, narrator Roxane Gay<\/a> introduces three new\u00a0voices.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are you?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cAre you adopted?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are you mixed with?\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Many photos and stories submitted to \u201cHistorically Black<\/a>,\u201d The Washington Post Tumblr<\/em> project, have touched on what it means to identify as a particular race and ethnic background. Throughout this project, multiple stories surfaced a theme that pointed to an ongoing internal and external conflict based on the societal criteria that deemed a person \u201cblack.\u201d These stories identified the struggle to understand the judgment\u200a\u2014\u200aby both black and non-black communities\u200a\u2014\u200abased on the way one dresses, speaks and acts.<\/p>\n

This has led to a hard, and conflicting, question: What does it mean to be \u201cblack enough\u201d in modern America?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the question Marcelle Hutchins faced ever since she, her twin sister and their mother emigrated from Cameroon<\/a> to Portland, Maine<\/a>. Hutchins\u2019s mother married a white man, and together they settled in as a family. But as early as the third grade, Hutchins faced the harsh reality of integrating into American society.<\/p>\n

\u201cGrowing up, I really struggled with my identity in America. For a long time, I often questioned, you know, who I was in this world. And I was told by a variety of different people that I didn\u2019t fit my birthright, that I didn\u2019t act the way I should act or the way black people should act, and because of my mannerisms I was too white,\u201d Hutchins said.<\/p>\n

According to Jelani Cobb<\/a>, a historian and writer at the New Yorker<\/em>, defining \u201cblackness\u201d is inherently complicated\u200a\u2014\u200abecause race is an invented category dating back to slavery, and the category can encompass a range of identities and cultures. People identify as black, African American, African, Muslim, Native American, biracial and sometimes more.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most kind of basic understanding is the one-drop rule<\/a>, wherein people said if a person had any drop of blood, black blood, they were black. And the purposes of that were to present whiteness as a category of purity and that any tincture of African ancestry would irrevocably taint a person and remove them from the, you know, pure category of whiteness,\u201d Cobb said. \u201cThere\u2019s a wide range of ancestries that are included within the category of black, and so the category itself is amorphous.\u201d…<\/p>\n

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

What does it mean to be \u201cblack enough?\u201d Three women explore their racial identities The Washington Post 2016-12-11 On \u201cHistorically Black,\u201d our podcast about black history, narrator Roxane Gay introduces three new\u00a0voices. \u201cWhat are you?\u201d \u201cAre you adopted?\u201d \u201cWhat are you mixed with?\u201d Many photos and stories submitted to \u201cHistorically Black,\u201d The Washington Post Tumblr […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,125,8,20],"tags":[25799,25800,2875,2581],"class_list":["post-50792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-marcelle-hutchins","tag-roxane-gay","tag-the-washington-post","tag-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50792","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=50792"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50793,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50792\/revisions\/50793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}