... brown babies and beasts of burden ...

... whenever I'm flipping through channels and I happen upon the face of Wanda Sykes I'm compelled to stop ... to watch and listen ... such is the effect of her elfin visage on me ... it's the same sort of compulsion when I see the goofy mischief in Tracy Morgan's face ... I expect the laughter to come instinctively and I'd put money on it being slightly uncomfortable at times too ...















... 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 ...

... Methuselah was a white man? ...

... The marriage of an 80 year old man and a 20 year old woman was the talk of the town. After being married a year, the couple went to the hospital for the birth of their first child.The attending nurse came out of the delivery room to congratulate the old gentleman and said, "This is amazing. How do you do it at your age?" The old man grinned and said, "you got to keep the old motor running"...

... The following year, the couple returned to the hospital for the birth of their second child. The same nurse was attending the delivery and again went out to congratulate the old gentleman. She said, "Sir, you are something else. How do you manage it?" Grinning, the old man said, "You gotta keep the old motor running"...

... A year later, the couple returned to the hospital for the birth of their third child. The same nurse was there for this birth also and, after the delivery, she once again approached the old gentleman, smiled, and said, "Well, you surely are something else! How do you do it?" The old man replied, "It's like I've told you before, you gotta keep the old motor running" ...

... The nurse, still smiling, patted him on the back and said "Well, I guess it's time to change the oil. This one's black" ....

* * *
... this is one of those frequently forwarded, text-only funnies that circulate in cyberspace or get retold at workplace water coolers ... if you've heard it you may have cracked a smile or cranked out a chuckle ... chances are you didn't bust a gut ... taken simply as a piece of humor there's a certain inconspicuousness about it ... a standard set-up, a good rhythmic build-up ... and a snappy punchline to sum-up ... painting a vivid picture in the mind ...

... Methuselah breeds with twenty-something, again! ... plenty room for humor here ... yet, hardly had the second chortle escaped from my throat, when I questioned why the ending proved so unexpected and effective ... had I subconsciously defaulted to the assumption the subjects were white? ... with ages being the only descriptives the very first indicator that they were indeed white was the very last word in the joke ... hence the racial assumption was made to the common default ... white, unless otherwise specified ... if not, why the bada-bing?

... don't feel no way ... I am not re-publishing this joke here to daisychain the humor but instead to explore themes of race, racism and racialism ... words as powerful as we make them ...

... in this dispensation of time, as the eloquence of Peter Tosh might refer to the here-and-now, while we are experiencing a re-invigorated bangarang around race issues, it is important to consider variables in perspectives ... so ... while it's true that the joke could be re-tooled to apply in other demographic circumstances, it is also true that this version wouldn't work without some basic assumptions ...

... comedy must always have been a medium for testing public resistance to race talk ... I am remembering the mid-seventies spotlight on Richard Pryor and his in-yo-face challenges to society's ostrich approach to racisms ... I'm certain the influential comic who gave us 1974's "That Nigger's Crazy" would have had something to add to the joke of the old cracker cuckold and the bastard tarbaby ...

... the revolution is being televised and it will be blogged too ... conventional and virtual media carry power to balance out the default eurocentricities in the collective subconscious ... comedy and a sense of humor is a must ... compulsory ... jokes release tensions, sometimes after raising them ... one time sweet, next time salt another time bitter as gall ...

... I will peep more jokes and laugh at more foolishness ... maybe generate some of both on my own ... this picture of an elderly gent and his companion came in my e-mail a week before the joke did ... I couldn't resist associating the two ... a judiciously-juxtaposed visual can aid a story ... to this end I'll take it upon myself to suggest posting the image with the joke for the remainder of its shelf-life as humor-of-the-day ... it doesn't prefigure the punchline nor does it require a default assumption ...






... and somehow still ...

in the end,
bottom line ...

Gramps has got himself a brand new bag ... and Ellie-Mae got a whole lotta 'splainin' to do! ...