Count on Steve to kick me into finally doing this post. Let me express love for him…

Anyway- sigh. The alternate title for this post is “A Mutt Speaks” and I have to offer a slightly different take on this issue. As a Mutt, I guess I feel compelled to answer some of the assertions in Steve’s post. Note: I’ve not yet read the comments there yet.

Here’s the difficult passage:

She was also attracted by the idea of a donor of another race. “I believe in multiculturalism,” she said. “I would probably choose somebody with a darker skin color so I don’t have to slather sunblock on my kid all the time. I want it to be a healthy mix. You know how mixed dogs are always the nicest and the friendliest and the healthiest? If you get a clear race, they have all the problems. Mutts are always the friendly ones, the intelligent ones, the ones who don’t bark and have a good character. I want a mutt.” Her African-American friends questioned this strategy, suggesting that her child’s life would be harder if he or she was perceived as nonwhite, but Daniela said: “If that’s what I believe, I have to go by that. And it might help the world also if more people are doing it that way.”

I remember my undergrad workshop days, in which a gay man explain the absurdity of “choosing” to be gay: “Do you think I’d choose to suffer this kind of discrimination?” It’s an angry response, and justified in its own way. Similarly, I think a lot of people of color would choose to be pink, blue eyed and blonde, in more depressed moments. Which happen a lot in today’s Amurka; racism is “fashionable” again.

That said, gosh I’m tired of talking about “race.” Really. I’m in my 30s, and I’m already just sick and fucking tired of blathering on and on about it. Flame away, race-addicts, I mean it and I don’t care what you think. I have to live in this absurd middle space in this country, because other people can’t get over their own nonsense about this silly construction known as “race.” I promise you, I’m not the one making it an issue every time I buy a pack of cigarettes, go to a club with my friends, or apply for a job.

So this woman wants to have a caramel-colored baby. So the Jewess wants to have a Nazi-fantasy child. So the Negress wants to smooth her daughter’s passage into womanhood with slightly less challenging hair. Is that too ugly for you? Should I moderate my tone? I say: let’s all just try to get over it, ok? Let’s let go of the hurt, and deprive mere words of their power. Let’s focus on policies and discourses which will have a real impact on the majority, which is to say, let’s recognize it’s a class war and that the “race war” is a fake one. Ahem, Bandar Bush, ahem.

As progressives, we can take comfort that we’re the smarter ones, most of the time. This country has failed, miserably, to integrate its populations of color into the proper economic and political echelons, mainly due to racism. But let me state plainly that the Civil Rights movement of decades past is dead, and today’s political landscape requires different solutions. Or: we have to build new coalitions, create new languages and establish different dialogues. I speak as someone who has great respect for the accomplishments of past leaders, and who at the same time is really critical of what many of the groups with whom they are associated are doing now. Integration, literally and figuratively, are what is required at this time/political juncture.

When I talk to friends of different races, the stories really do sound all the same. “My mother-in-law hates me because I’m not (fill in religion, race, class, education, location of origin).” Perhaps it’s because I feel no strong investment in “identity,” but sometimes I wonder why people get so upset over various ideological constructs relating to race. Then again, I feel the same way about religion, and I suppose that makes me different from 95% of the world’s population. But from my “mutt’s” perspective, the obsession with race seems often silly to the point of making me want to cry.

I grok Steve’s anger. Just as I understand the anger of a white friend of mine, who is fond of asking me, “why don’t you recognize your white heritage more, why don’t you call yourself ’white’ too?” I say the same thing to both of them: let’s all just try to let it go. Is this “unrealistic?” Does it improperly take into account all the arguments, which require us to pay attention to the role race plays in our day-to-day lives? Would it contribute to the negative conditions of people of some races?

Honestly, at this point, I don’t think so.

The German woman sounds like my German friends, so innocent and naive about American racism. She doesn’t mean any harm, and in fact is trying to “do good.” And fuck- if choice isn’t about buying the sperm you want at the insemination clinic, I don’t know what is! (!!!) So let’s all just butt out and mind our own family’s business, ok? Yes, the overall tone of the article Steve posts reads like “people of color don’t like themselves, nice white women on the other hand are (foolishly) trying to make the world a better place by offering up their sacred White Wombs.” But it also kind of warms my heart. I really hope and pray that 500 years from now, people will look back at this time and wonder what the hell we were all so upset over. Future people who are all various shades of brown.

Steve says:

She’s not buying a dog, she’s going to have a black child in America. There may be biracial people, but they get treated as non-white. I can’t say what’s more horrifying, the woman who wants an Aryan child or the one who wants a “mutt” and ignoring her horrified but tactful African-American friends.

Is this a self-hating thing? “Horrified by tactful?” I don’t believe that her friends were arguing that there is something inherently inferior about black and brown people, right? So perhaps they were just testing her commitment- making sure she was cognizant of the challenges she’d be facing. Which honestly, aren’t so bad. Yes, I perplex people, and when they’re rude, it’s the first question out of their mouths when they meet me, “What are you?” People in all the groups that comprise my racial heritage often treat me as if they know something about what my hue “must mean.” I disabuse people of that really quickly. It’s really just not a big deal, and akin to learning to be taller than most people, or having a birthmark. If you think otherwise, you have the problem.

Short version: talking about race, in this political climate, will get us nowhere. It’s time to accept that we’ve reached a kind of impasse, and the old languages and perceptions aren’t going to help us anymore. Howard Dean “gets it.” My poor, white, Klan-attending brother in the South is getting as screwed as hard as I am. We need to communicate. Rather than castigate him for loving his “Southern Heritage,” it’s time for me to figure out a way to convince him not that the Klan is racist, but that it’s keeping him down. (Obviously, I’m talking about poor people here, not Trent Lott.) When enough of us realize that being poor and oppressed has nothing to do with race and everything about an Establishment that acts only for itself, we’ll make some progress.

Let’s save our anger, our fire, for causes that matter. Let’s take the first step, and learn to really listen to each other, with fresh eyes that see only rainbows. Let’s stop giving the fascists more power over us, and learn to not take hurt at words. I know it sounds very kumbaya, but it’s such a simple truth. Race is only a word, an idea. You can not believe in it any time you choose.

Because in Bush’s America, we’re all niggers now.