So, the other day I had a Whatsapp chat with my cousin. It didn’t last long. He had paused to soak in the evening air and surrounding cityscape after a bike ride...

My Cousin: "Long time, no speak. You Good? The family’s good?"

We exchanged the usual pleasantries before I dropped on him what was really on my mind.

Me: "I have some feelings about the definition of Blackness post (Kamala) Harris Nomination"

My Cousin: "Of course, you do".

He was right. I did have some definite feelings about the situation and about not only this moment, but how she has been portrayed by the media since she began her journey on the National stage.

I live in the “States” and we are approaching the final months of election season. Well, truth be told the 2020 election season started just after midnight on November 9, 2016 immediately after the call to concede was placed to the new U.S. President.

Speculation had quickly begun on who would be up for the challenge to run against the newly elected controversial President-Elect.

Fast forward through the years of scandals, impeachment, growing racial tension, global pandemic and economic tribulation and here we are.

Saying this is a country divided, is too mild a point to place on this moment. I will also not fall into the trap of “What has this country become??” Whenever someone in my bird-app timeline writes that, I laugh. I often wonder who these people are who have just discovered racism existed in 2016? Where did they live? What did they eat? What colour was the sky in their world? I thought the movie Bird Box was a farfetched premise but apparently there are millions of people who live an open-eyed existence while also being socially blind. The experiences of Black & Brown people had completely eluded large swaths of society, where I guess the feeling was all Black men were treated like Will Smith in their daily lives and all Black women like Oprah. The theory of being colour-blind regarding race, is derisory and insulting. How can any person of colour think it is a good idea to NOT be seen?? So, in the spirit of being direct and to the point, the United States was NEVER a “melting pot”. That cute metaphor became popularized by Israel Zang will, who wrote a play of the same name about a family who emigrated to the United States from North-Western Europe. They came in search for a better life and a society that was free of the horrors of ethnic division and racial loathing. The “melting pot” theory suggests that the result of such a long and arduous journey would be for the grateful newly minted Americans to lose “some” of their own cultural identity to blend in with the masses and become one community, fully assimilated, with liberty and justice for all.

In the real world where we all live, many who came from Europe who were actually White had to just anglicize their name to fit in and be spared from the humiliation and marginalization of signs that read: “No Ni---ers, no Jews, No Dogs” To escape the “scourge” of their cultural identity the Europeans that arrived here had to to rid themselves of accents and customs in order to move seamlessly through society.

So, what could a Black or Brown person do to move seamlessly through society? Change our last name? Buy some new clothes? Get a snazzy new hairstyle? Try to hide the lilt in our accent? No. There was no way any person of colour was able to hide their identity to fit in to the American society. The unvaried melting pot was a lie. There was no way for us to “blend” in. There was not even an avenue granted to just live in peace. We were different and our differences were not celebrated. We did not blend in.

I remember hearing stories from relatives & the family of friends who first arrived in New York, they were anxious to find other relatives and a community to belong to. They longed for a place where they would hear the familiar sounds and smell the familiar food from home. In numbers there was safety, a friendly smiling face who understood you, and welcomed you so that you did not feel alone.

Our people who came here slept on sofas, and floors until they could get a place of their own and they walked and took the bus before they could get a car. When the success of being self-sufficient was achieved, they reached their arms out to other family members and friends and sometimes strangers who were starting their own American journey. They gave back because they understood, they had been there before. I remember my parents bringing big coats to the airport to pick up relatives in October. I thought it odd until I heard the words “Lawd it cole!” as they quickly wrapped themselves up in the garments, we brought with us.

Then there were the descendants of those who were on this continent before there even was a United States. Their ancestors worked the fields, paved the roads and built the buildings that dotted the landscape. They fought in the wars to earn the freedom for a nation who would not see them as free, who would not see them as equals, who thought progress was considering them 3/5 of a human being. Their ancestors also had a name change just as the Europeans who emigrated during the time of the Israel Zang will play two centuries later. Their name change was not of their own volition, it was the names given to them by the owners of the plantations which they worked. Their last names given to them by the men who would brutalize their bodies and dilute their bloodline with the evil of their acts. They did not try to hide their ancestry, their ancestry was stolen, beaten, and bred out of them. At the end of all that torment, at the end of the evilness that was slavery, the sons and daughters of those that built a nation, did not blend in.

Slavery gave way to Jim Crow and segregation as the sons and daughters of slaves fought for the very rights their ancestors bled and died for in wars to make this nation free, rich and powerful.

While the often disputed 1619 date highlights in part the codification of slavery in what would be later called the United States, this date ignores the slave trade as it existed in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. The horrors associated with the American slave trade also took place on the small islands and countries that lined the Atlantic Ocean. The European slave trade has evidence of the earliest Africans being taken against their will some time in the 1400s. Even those who had the audacity to indicate they had “discovered” already inhabited land, documented seeing Black people in North America. Most famously Vasco De Balboa made mention of seeing Black people when he reached the “New” world.

So Black people have inhabited parts of North America for almost 600 years (that we know of) in various forms from slave to explorer and still, we do not blend in.

Me: "folks are saying that Kamala Harris isn’t Black".

My Cousin: "I can’t deal with the nonsense".

The folks who are saying this range from far-right nut jobs to “woke” individuals who feel that Blackness only extends from their block to the next. Kamala Harris has a father from Jamaica and a mother from India. To those of us with Caribbean ancestry, pairings such as this were not new or unusual. When I was young people like Kamala were referred to by some as “Dougla”. It was a slur that essentially meant mutt. I have also heard the word “Zambo” which has a similar meaning. Within our own cultural construct, there are racial slurs used to disparage members of our own Caribbean family. I don’t care if you grew up hearing that, it’s not right.

So, when the potential Vice President’s “Blackness” was questioned, I wasn’t surprised, but I was angry and annoyed. There were ignorant people who said she didn’t “look” Black or she wasn’t Black she was “Caribbean”. Man, if only Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and Shirley Chisolm knew they weren’t Black.

There are those in the year of our Lord 2020, that STILL don’t know the difference between culture and race and incorrectly use those terms synonymously. Culture is language, customs, beliefs, food etc. Even within the Caribbean culture, there are variations based on location, think “Curry chicken” vs “Chicken Curry” or “Guinep” vs “Chinet”. Other folks questioning who she was, I understood. I expected this call to question her precise melanin calculation to come from racists and fake allies. My frustrations were mostly with the caramel, café au lait, gingerbread & mocha hues on the colour variance chart. I was frustrated that some of us were falling into that trap. The trap that separates us by location and culture and creates petty arguments regarding insignificant idiosyncrasies which have little to do with the overall big picture. The right to live, prosper and set your own course. The right to have a say in your own government and be allowed to have a seat at the table or own your own damn table if you so choose. The right to not feel or be treated like an outsider in your own country of birth. The right to matter.

The definition of race is loaded with minefields and pitfalls. It has often been used throughout history to oppress people of colour and elevate their European counterparts. The idea of “race” being applied to people first started in the 17^th century and was used to categorize people geographically. There was the African, European and Asian Race. Designations by language and religion soon followed. Today It is most widely used to identify physical characteristics between people, but that by itself can be problematic. If physical attributes were the only factor in the definition of race, then my conversations with Dominican acquaintances who proudly proclaim “Soy Indio” wouldn’t be so heated. Part of the confusion occurs with the idea behind the so-called “One drop” rule, but is that even a factor anymore?

The “One Drop” rule was a racial classification that existed mostly in the United States. It stated that any person with a traceable Black ancestor was considered Black. A single drop of Black blood was enough in the Jim Crow South to treat you with all the marginalization associated with the distinction. The categorization went even further to designate the “unmixed Negro” from the “mulatto” which was first described as “Pure Negro” mixed with a “Pure White”. No, really…I’m serious. This way of thinking may have existed in other parts of the globe, but the United States worked the hell out of it. Take for instance Act 320 passed in the state of Arkansas in 1911. It made interracial marriage a felony and classified the "Negro” as anyone who has any “Negro” blood whatsoever. Black people remained in a state of second-class citizenship not as an idea but as the law. The mere hint of African ancestry was enough to relegate you to the lowest rung in the caste system for life.

The notion that a person’s Blackness can be quantified as a percentage based on some formula & designation created by slave owners and racists should not even be up for discussion, but this argument is ripe, and peak 2020.

My family is foreign. From birth, I spent summers and holidays out of the states visiting relatives hither and yon. You can’t tell me that I am anything else but Blackitty Black Black Black. I know and LOVE the diverseness of my culture. Have ignorant people in my neighbourhood growing up try to tell me I wasn’t Black? Yes. It wasn’t my job as a 10-year-old to explain the intricacies of the diaspora during a game of freeze tag, but as an adult, I have time for it and this is the perfect time to continue these battles.

A person can be a native Spanish speaker and still be Black. French? Oui. Portuguese? Sim. We speak different languages have different cultural affiliations AND are also Black. We can be more than one thing. This is one reason I wish the term African American can be respectfully retired. It excludes too many people and paints a narrow view of what a Black person is.

My husband had a friend he went to college with. His Father was from India and his Mother was from Jamaica. One day after classes, he met up with some other kids from India and they started to hang out. He mentioned which area his Father was from in India during a conversation. He received this response: “You know you’re still not one of us right?” “You’re not an Indian.”

First off, as he tells it, he wasn’t trying to be “Indian” he was just trying to share part of his history with some people whom he thought could connect with it. Needless to say he never hung out with them again and has never considered himself anything other than what he was before and after that conversation, a Black Jamaican man and dare anyone else say he is anything other than that to his face. The tribalism associated with race and culture can cut deep and I laugh at those folks who believe in the “purity” of who they are as if they are an uncut diamond, when the reality is, that even the purest diamond is made from Carbon; an element with the most compounds of any other. Even the purest diamond is mixed.

Kamala Harris has always referred to herself as a Black woman. That should really be the end of it. That is who she is and how she has lived. That has been her life experience. It should end there but it won’t. There are those who prefer to say “Woman of Color” or “Mixed Race” there are people more comfortable with the label they give her than the identity she has defined for herself.

So, who determines if you’re Black. The government? the folks on Twitter? all those DNA testing companies? the mirror?

I’m Black. Always have been, always will be. My Blackness is not defined by a racist purity test or by the ignorance associated with the patchouli stained minds of the woke crowd. No one gets to tell you that you are not “Black” enough because of the language you speak, the clothes you wear, or the country your parents hailed from. When you look in the mirror, you know who you are, and you are enough. There is no such thing as a cultural loupe to determine the authenticity of Blackness and anyone who says otherwise isn’t worth listening to.

By Susanna Elata 

The Article image "Kamala Harris" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0