{"id":56931,"date":"2018-10-14T01:35:47","date_gmt":"2018-10-14T01:35:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56931"},"modified":"2018-10-14T01:35:47","modified_gmt":"2018-10-14T01:35:47","slug":"mi-negro-embracing-my-blackness-as-a-puerto-rican-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56931","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Mi negro\u2019: Embracing my blackness as a Puerto Rican man"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Mi negro\u2019: Embracing my blackness as a Puerto Rican man<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/a>
\n2018-09-14<\/p>\n

Ed Morales<\/strong><\/a>, Adjunct Professor
\nCenter for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
\nColumbia University, New York, New York<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Several years ago, at the height of New York\u2019s stop-and-frisk policing policy<\/a>, two officers stopped me at West 125th Street and Broadway and insisted that I was carrying a knife. I was walking from Columbia University\u2019s campus, where I\u2019ve taught seminars on Latinx<\/a> identity since 2010, after picking up a couple books at the library. Because I wasn\u2019t teaching that day, I was wearing a backward baseball cap, worn-out jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, attire that apparently made me look like a criminal suspect.<\/p>\n

The officers were Latinx with complexions similar to mine, but in that moment, they made a racialized judgment about how I represented a culture of criminality often associated with black and Latinx people. They stared at me with insistent eyes, demanding that I hand over a weapon that I didn\u2019t have. They had been signaled by my unkempt appearance and the furtive movement of my hand toward a keychain holder protruding from my right front pocket, a plastic Puerto Rican flag in the shape of an island. They were operating in the context of 125th Street<\/a>, a dividing line between the largely white collegiate neighborhood of Morningside Heights<\/a> and the predominantly black gentrifying neighborhood of Harlem<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The officers looked blankly at my university ID and reluctantly questioned me for several agonizing minutes, then decided I was not who they were looking for. But the experience reminded me that I can never escape my racial identity: In a society ruled by a binary perception of race, my complexion classifies me as \u201cother,\u201d but at any point in time, what I\u2019m wearing, where I\u2019m standing and how the sunlight hits my skin will color how I\u2019m judged…<\/p>\n

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

Puerto Ricans \u2014 the racially mixed descendants of Native Americans, European colonizers and African slaves \u2014 defy the binary racial categorization embedded in U.S. society. For most, defining themselves by race is a daunting task that often ends in defiantly choosing \u201cneither,\u201d \u201cother\u201d or \u201cmixed.\u201d Some embrace the labels Hispanic, Latinx, or \u201cbrown\u201d as their racial identity, even though those labels do not constitute a defined race, according to the prevailing rules.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,14646,8,20],"tags":[9107,2875,2581],"class_list":["post-56931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latino","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-ed-morales","tag-the-washington-post","tag-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56931","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=56931"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56932,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56931\/revisions\/56932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}