... I happened upon Wanda's stand-up this week, her topical material these days is heavy on Obama ... understandably ... and still includes the shtick she used at the White House Correspondents dinner event she was invited to regale ... clearly, like many, she's proud of America for electing a black Prez ... adding, "that's unless he fucks up, then it's like, who voted for the half-white guy? .... who voted for the mulatto?" ...
... hold up ... reeeewind .... mulatto?! ...
... now, as we all know ... context is everything in controversial matters, especially in comedy, and despite my knee-jerk cringe I don't have a problemo with the use of a word in service of an act of contemporary performance ... for me this includes the notorious "n" word ... "nigger/nigga"... after all, they are just words ... words which can be rendered odious by rank overuse, ignorant abuse or malicious intent ... no ... the spark that has set off my powderkeg is to be found in the aftermath ... the whole idea of mixed-race sub-labelling ...
... even taking into consideration cultural variances ... I'm told the antecedents of the term carry no negative holdover in Spanish and Portuguese speaking cultures and mulatto/mulatta is seen as an affirmation of aesthetic positives ... well, just how do you separate a cafe-au-lait range of skintones and ringlets from the commercial trading of Africans? ... and what were the purposes for the arithmetic of African-ness on a scale of mulatto(half-African) to hexadecaroon(one-sixteenth African)? ... to quote Wikipedia ... "Defining an individual mathematically is inherently reductive, and these terms derived from the slave trade which treated these people as chattel." ... yet still, some people refer to themselves as mulatto ... I've heard defense of the fifteenth-century coinage with simple justification ...
..."it's in the dictionary"...
... it's safe to say Wiki is the new Webster's ... I hope to trigger a spike in hits on the definition of mulatto ... there you find a wider treatment than a dictionary would offer ... you're given enough insight to decide whether the term is a descriptive or a loaded label ... meanwhile children are born, and those who would comment can scamper to clarify the appropriateness of their terminology ... if I'm a mulatto for instance, are my children also? ... there are undoubtably even narrower slots into which Wanda's own recently arrived twins could be put ...
... interestingly, as I write this there's a case in Louisiana, U.S.A. of a marriage license being denied to an interracial couple ... the backlash of outrage, though quick, loud and widespread only goes so far to counter the intuition that such attitudes are symptomatic of deeply ingrained social biases based on historically engineered hierarchies ...
... confronting these aspects of our multi-cultural realities can feel Quixotic at times and most would rather not bother or have to in these modern times ... me included ... but alas ... a luta continua ...
... my approach has settled into a mature place ... just the facts ma'am ... the term mulatto derives from the Spanish/Portuguese word for mule ... we know that a mule is only produced from a horse and a donkey ... so ... as cute as these noble-yet-lowly beasts-of-burden can be when they are babies, they are a result of inter-species mating and are therefore generally sterile ... I don't know about you but none of the mulattoes I know fit this description ...
You are Toooooooo Much, I am enjoying reading your blog...I grew up in Louisiana I do understand this post.
ReplyDeleteThank you for suggesting this post to me. Mullatto is definitely not really in my vocabulary. My daughter's father identified as biracial, or he'd say: half black and half Irish. (Although I'm sure there was some white in there somewhere.) I never know how to define my daughter because although I guess you could say she's a quadroon, she has white skin, red hair and hazel eyes. Her African heritage comes through in the kink of her hair, her build and some of her facial features. Usually I'll say she's "part black." Or if I'm feeling like a jokester I'll say she's "light bright."
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