When my siblings and I compare birth certificates for the first time, we discover that four of us have “White” listed under “Race,” and one has “Negro.” We’re all interracial children from the same parents, who died before we could ask them about this enigma.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2019-08-20 22:10Z by Steven

When my siblings and I compare birth certificates for the first time, we discover that four of us have “White” listed under “Race,” and one has “Negro.” We’re all interracial children from the same parents, who died before we could ask them about this enigma. I proudly accept being “Negro”—African-American—although I embrace my full heritage and keep a healthy sense of humor whenever anyone asks, “What are you?”

Dr. Ruth L. Baskerville, “They Call Me “Negro”,” Embrace Race: Raising A Brave Generation, August 18, 2019. https://www.embracerace.org/blog/they-call-me-negro.

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They Call Me “Negro”

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2019-08-20 17:35Z by Steven

They Call Me “Negro”

Embrace Race: Raising A Brave Generation
2019-08-18

Dr. Ruth L. Baskerville

Picture
Early family photo in 1951. The author is on the bottom right.

In 1943 in Manhattan, NY, a 46-year old African- and Native-American man who was a renowned band director and jazz composer marries a 19-year old naive European-American woman of Jewish Ukrainian descent, who wants to sing professionally. I’m the second of five children.

At age four, I overhear Mommy telling her Mom she won’t leave Daddy and me in order to come back home with my whiter looking brother. Every year of our growing up, Mommy takes the whitest looking child to find new housing, and our unwanted family moves in the middle of the night. We’re in new schools, too.

There are no “Mulattos” in our neighborhoods, and I’m constantly asked, “Where are you from? I mean, what are you?” The questioners have distorted faces, uncomfortable with their ambivalence about my ethnicity. Even today, they need to fit me into a race category before they can utter their next sentence! “You’re Saudi – Moroccan – Indian – Spanish – Italian – definitely foreign!” I’m from New York!…

Read the entire article here.

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