Subject: Re: On interracial relationships, or anything
Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 01:06:22 GMT

Paco Valiente (sweetf@pcfl.net) wrote:

: My family's culture
: is Puerto Rican. Our nationality is native-born citizens of the United
: States of America. Our race, like yours, is the human race (Homo
: Sapiens Sapiens). Within that, our genetic heritage is a mixture of
: African and European (with traces of Asian and Amerind). 

So your culture is Puerto-Rican, *and* you are racially mixed.
The latter allows for the evident social reality of race, even
if you prefer to define your identity by the former.  The two
things are not mutually contradictory.

: "Black" (African-American) culture is a unique blend of triumph,
: tragedy, talent, and self-destructiveness--as, indeed, are all
: cultures. But membership is cultural, not genetic. It includes Colin
: Powell, who (according to his autobiography) is genetically only
: one-eighth African but excludes Geraldo Rivera who proudly introduced
: his black grandfather on camera a few years ago. It includes my
: Bahamian neighbors, because they identify themselves as "black" but
: excludes our Bermudian friends because they choose not to.

: IMHO, as applied to humans, nationality exists, culture exists, genetic
: heritage exists. Race does not.

If race does not exist, then the dominant social reality of 
the last 500 years -- race-based enslavement of African by 
European, and the consequences we still see in myriad ways -- 
did not and does not exist either.  And Puerto Rico is
not exempt.  No doubt PR has developed a unique culture
based on the blend of the races which occurred there, but
that fact cannot cause the notion of race to disappear.

I would add that there is a variant of white supremacy that
we see in Brazil, and I think also in PR, in which Black
people are persuaded that they are anything *but* Black.
This stratagem has succeeded brilliantly up until now.  
Stirrings of Black Consciousness of course threaten the
white supremacist status quo.  Therefore, there will be
attempts to advance the argument that race does not
exist.  After all, if race does not exist, then racial
discrimination and all forms of racial injustice cannot 
exist either, and the white supremacist, racist status quo
may continue undisturbed.  This is the program at work
I think when the same kind of white folk who stood in the
school-house door 35 years ago to prevent Blacks from getting
in, start talking about a "color-blind" society and quoting
Martin Luther King Jr. in an effort to defeat Affirmative
Action.  I think it is the same program at work when 
light-colored Puerto Ricans and Brazilians, among other
Latin American types, assert the primacy of "culture" and
the non-existence of race (especially of the Black sort).

: Paco Valient
: sweetf@pcfl.net


	 

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