While I'm here, have some random links! :D

[seeingred]

Just Translate It? How not to carelessly alienate the lucrative Spanish-speaking market.

If you have the stomach for it, cringe and laugh at the idiot remarks of racists, thanks to Something Awful. (Speaking of Español, my fave anecdote is: "I love talking Spanish around non-Spanish speaking people since it usually gets them all riled up. I had

Comments

[judiang]

Caitlin Moran was amusing. But what's really amusing is that African Americans are inherently mixed race. Which is why the "one drop" rule was created to make sure the black taint didn't pollute the general white gene pool. Interestingly now that Obama is president, some whites are quick to point out that he's mixed race instead of the plain black man he would be as a private citizen. Cuz ya know, that makes him more acceptable since it's obviously the white part that's shining through. Oh, I just love the vicissitudes of racism.

So I suppose I could start calling myself assertive mixed race until his presidency is over when I can return to being an angry black woman.

[seeingred]

I cannot now remember where I read this, but early on, one state of the US had a "one drop rule" which went in the other direction, so to speak: any child of Black and White parents was de jure White. Which meant, of course, they couldn't be a slave. I think this lays bare the arbitrariness and the purpose of racial categories: they're not natural and commonsense; they mean money for somebody.

[antikythera]

Noo, angry black woman should not be watered down... :P

A lot of white Americans are inherently mixed-race in a similar way, if I'm understanding what you're saying there. I have heard that there's more genetic diversity in sub-Saharan Africa than there is in all of western Europe.

Although, white people tend to take for granted that they know precisely where in Europe their ancestors came from, so maybe it's easier for us to not think of ourselves as 'mixed' and instead to precisely delineate (for example) half-English, 1/4-Italian, and 1/4-Lithuanian.

[antikythera]

I like that last link. If there are Afrimixes, I think I'm a Euromix, which sounds like some kind of bargani-bin house/trance album.

[seeingred]

*cracks up*

It boggles my mind to think that, since the borders between "races" are completely arbitrary and changeable, by surprisingly recent standards I'm in a mixed marriage: English/Irish. (OTOH, given my paternal grandparents' thorough Catholicism, I've probably been touched by the green paint brush myself.)

[antikythera]

Interesting that we and Caitlin Moran are using 'mixed race' to refer not only to mixes between different visible colours of people, but also to highly-diverse backgrounds within a given colour (such as Week and Cyrish and my own Britaluanian heritage).