okay, y'all, this is my last post in the forum, i'm moving to a blog, which is much easier to read.
confessions of a weirdness magnet. please bear in mind that if the eye of sauron were ever to turn on my little art project, it would crush me like a bug. if you've read this, you know that's true. then again, i also say that the realpeople will know each other instinctively, even when they are living as and among the coloredmen. hopefully nothing will get lost in the process. peace, tantric.
confessions of a weirdness magnet, part 43
cause i'm black like dat (play Rebirth of Slick by Digable Planets)
2% sub-Saharan African – that was the surprise when i had my dna done. i was always told my mother’s father was an indian, ‘one of those wild ass indians’ by which i guessed they meant the creeks, not the civilized cherokee. fine, i bought it, he was dark and died when i was a kid. but now i think that was a lie – my grandfather wasn’t indian, he was high yella. hmm, some background. the one drop rule states that if you have one drop of African blood you are black, regardless of what you actually look like, and was the law of the land in the old south. yeah, the old days…there’s a CSI:Miami episode about a guy who has a whirlwind romance and marries a woman, then kills her when he realizes she’s black. wtf?
i’m gone hafta lay this out: race is a lie. a terrible, insidious monster made of other lies, stitched together with a thread of hate. grok the meaning of the one drop rule: black is pollution, white is purity. it’s *obscene*. a white woman can have a black baby, but a black woman can never have a white baby. or rather a caucasian babies…hint: josef stalin was caucasian, the queen of england is not. take one of these people and have a paint matched to the color of their skin, then paint a wall that color and ask them to name it. it ain’t white – milk is white, you ain’t milk colored. where are the words? oh, we have the ‘n-word’. i’m not sure i could say the previous sentence out loud without choking. let me explain:
don’t start trippin and shit and callin me a racist, cause i don’t mean ‘nigga’ in a disrespectful way. i mean it as a general term for ignorant mf, anybody, of any race can be an ignorant mf. -gin rummy, boondocks
read it aloud. do it, dammit. get past it. our language/culture, the way it treats black people as if there were becoming unnamable, every term turns negative eventually. it’s a form of denial, i think. and it’s sick. why can you be half-japanese but not half-black? obama is half-luo, half-‘white’ – i’d guess that obama and the average american black share more distinctly european genes than african ones. i happen to be a huge fan of bantu cultures and mythologies. i took a year of college swahili, kiSwahili, dammit, and last year i refreshed by reading ‘elisi katika nchi ya ajabu/alice in wonderland’. but in kiSwahili, the word ‘mzungu’ mean ‘american/foreign busy body’ and includes black americans. my skin is the color of the sandy loam of the great plains, and i love my african heritage as southerner. my father was a matter of fact racist when i was a kid, but now his best friend is an old black guy, just as country as he is. that’s nusouth – the old confederate battle flag done in the red, gold and green of the motherland.
see how ‘latino’ and ‘hispanic’ were invented to mean ‘yes, you are european americans, just like us, but not pure’. the music of northern mexico, the norteño stuff, is based on german waltzes (listen to Bostich’s
Polaris). how is it that an italian american who grows up in new york, speaking italian, is different racially from a german argentine? indian blood? most ‘white’ americans have some folk myth about being ‘part-indian’ (note, if you don’t speak the language, buzz off). fuck that, it means ‘not-white but brown’. ‘asian’? for one thing, europe isn’t a continent, i think i’ve mentioned that, so eurasians? even if you discount the main peninsulas (arabia, europe, india) there is still no genetic continuity. i’m reasonable sure that most people who actually live in asia don’t have a lot of identity invested in being ‘asian’. 50 years ago you couldn’t put people from east asia, just china, korea and japan, in a small room without bloodshed.
many people label my POV as ‘colorblind’ and dismiss it as denying the validity of ethnic subcultures. do i look like i’m doing that? note that parliament’s chocolate city is playing as i write this. god bless chocolate city and its vanilla suburbs! my religion teaches that one of the causes of suffering is attachment to identity – you confuse your identity construct with your ‘self’ and feel suffering when it is attacked. no, dammit. you are not your label. when you take a can and just look at it, before its labelled, you know you have no idea what’s in it. once you put a label on it, that’s all you see and you trust it, but truth is that the label obscures the real can and what you really know: nothing. but labels are very useful, right? so use good ones. make up your own. for my people, of course, its easy – we’re the realpeople. most names applied to amerind and other pre-industrial cultures stem from words that mean ‘the people’, that’s what it’s like at that technology level, other cultures are often considered cannibals or worse. the only word we have left from our ancestors, the extinct group of orange furred north american pygmies, is that word, ‘realpeople’ or ‘ohsaycanyousea’, sent to me in a vision dream. that shit ain’t gone fly with the usgov, so when they make me fill out forms, i check [x] other: Human. capitalized, dammit.
that element of my identity got me banned from an rpg forum. i asked for reviews of my book, an rpg setting based on bantu mythology. the first problem was with the-people-who-sit-on-their-heels, as the realpeople call them, or baboons, as you might know them. in bantu myths, baboons are often a tribe of people with their own language and customs, so i made a race of sapient mandrills, called the !tsharg. hmm, apparently having talking monkeys in a work that concerns africa is racist. really? wait til the Empire of the Elephant enslaves them and makes them work on corn and cotton plantations. there were slave plantations in the Kongo and in buGanda, though in some ways it was closer to feudalism, which also wasn’t pretty. but then again, i’m presenting a fantasy revisionist version of bantu culture that reaches a magical renaissance and blooms into a world power, and world powers do that shit. fuck, then it was the pygmies….in my setting. i’m realpeople, so you know i’m gonna give my peoples a lift. in bantu culture, a suitor must buy his bride from her father, usually in cattle, and they’re expensive. thus bride-kidnapping, raiding the villages of the realpeople and taking all the women as slaves, which has destroyed many of our cultures. during the rwanda genocide, one third of the total population of pygmies (the twa) were killed. fuck that – so i decided that in my world, the waTwa were a separate species from the bantu invaders and not interfertile, thus no bride kidnapping and less cultural dilution. and i gave them strong magic and generally a better deal than in the realworld. this dutch guy crawled up my ass about – how i was pretending the pygmies were oppressed so i could look like a hero by glorifying them. wtf? yeah, i lost it, told him to back the hell up off the realpeople, he called me ‘white’ and i said that was racist and PERMABAN. what? why the fuck does a forum have rules about respecting transgender people, but i can’t be a fucking pygmy? or, for that matter, i can’t not be ‘white’. the moderator told me, ‘calling you white when you’re white isn’t racist’. i don’t think i’ve ever said much about my skin tone on that forum, okay, calling you an mzungu when you’re an mzungu isn’t an insult.
