We're supposedly living in a post-racial
society, but these days, "black" is being defined much more
narrowly--and it has nothing to do with one's actual racial heritage. To
sell out or keep it real? That is the question.
I'm the son of a black father and a white mother. As a child coming up in the 1980s and '90s, I immersed myself in hip-hop style and culture, excelled at sports, rocked aerodynamic hairstyles, and spoke in the same florid body language that the older brothers at the local black barbershop were fluent in.
I played basketball fiendishly, and on the asphalt, other black players addressed me without thinking as nigga. Once or twice, some white person referred to me (also without thinking) as a nigger. I was black back then, period.
As I've gotten older, however, my clothes have started to fit slimmer and my interests have widened. And I can't help but notice that I've become less black to others. Even before Barack Obama's election made ours a supposedly "post-racial" society (the one-drop rule is so 20th century), the truth is that the criteria we use to designate someone as acting, or even being black in the post-civil rights/hip-hop-era often has little, sometimes even nothing at all, to do with a person's actual racial heritage or physical characteristics. Rather, this particular designation is often an assessment of behavioral traits, a judgment of cultural values and a subjective projection of what is "real."
The more I've thought about it, the more I've found it's at the very margins of race, in the shadowy figure of the mulatto, that the notion of blackness can be most poignantly illuminated. This is because mixed-race blacks--while occupying a position in the culture that is at once privileged and cursed--are the physical incarnation of a racial dilemma that all blacks inevitably must confront: To sell out or keep it real? That is the question.
Consider, for example, two of the most visible mulattoes living and working today: the president himself and the rapper Drake. Both of these men are the direct offspring of black fathers and white mothers. They both proudly define themselves as black. And they both have benefited in large and tangible ways from the fact that much of the rest of the world sees them as such--despite the fact that both were raised mostly by the white sides of their families and in staggeringly un-black settings (Honolulu and Toronto, respectively). SOURCE: THE ROOTS.COM
