What Race?

I don’t remember ever having asked myself what race I belonged to. I was born advantaged in a society that discriminated against non-whites.

So, am I white? The answer isn’t so simple. On my identity card, it says my skin color is white. So, am I white? Let’s have a look at my genealogical tree; since racial classifications don’t work with me.

Contemporary science has penetrated the substance of the human genome, and it turns out that the theory of racial differences has been thrown out, because there’s only one race: the human race, and people of all colors belong to it.

Leaving the genome aside, I’ll continue with my genealogy.

What I know about my family

The first trunk: a daughter of Africans, brought -we now know how- to this Caribbean land. She would end up with others like her in a group of slaves in the sugarcane fields in the eastern part of the island.

What I know about my family

The first trunk: a daughter of Africans, brought -we now know how- to this Caribbean land. She would end up with others like her in a group of slaves in the sugarcane fields in the eastern part of the island.

This black woman had sex with another black person -we don’t know who- and gave birth to a Cuban girl. The child grew up and crossed with no other than a Chinese man! He was also swindled into coming here, but from the Yucatan, and he too was semi-enslaved on the cane plantation.

There is a historical parenthesis: blacks, whites, Chinese, Moors, all went to war so that the Spanish settlers would be made to leave their homeland.

After thirty years of fighting, they won the war and freedom came – not as free as they wanted, but hey…we won’t talk about that now.

Let me return to my great-great-grandmother, because that black woman who married a Chinese man was my great-grandmother’s mother, who I actually met.

Named Alfonsa, though they called her Focha, there was my great-grandmother, an Afro-Chinese mulatta who died at 108, blind and strong, and who asked for coffee in the mornings without getting out of the bed because she had a “cold head.”

I also met my great-grandfather, who passed for white but wasn’t; this was because he descended from Canary Islanders.

Read the Full article>>

Related posts:

1. Black Canadians – An overview Black Canadians in Canada: Total Population of Canada: 30+,000,000 Number...
2. Caribbean Women Face Double Discrimination MANAGUA, Mar 20 (IPS) – The first criminal prosecution for...
3. Letter to a young black man Walter Backstrom | Letter to a young black man By...
4. The slaughter of the Black Woman: No longer recognising ourselves among the rubble. Daniella Maison is the edgy, unswerving, soulful writer been best...
5. Hitler’s Forgotten Holocaust Victims Like many West European nations, Germany established colonies in Africa...