Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Plight? What Plight? NYT Shoddy Journal on Multiracials

This is from the Mulatto Diaries by Tiffany Jones:

"My jaw dropped.
Then I wrote this…
Mr. Levitt,
I was deeply offended by your “Plight of Mixed-Race Children” blog post. Clearly the “tragic mulatto” was already a joke to you when you set out to determine how the young ones are doing. First of all, the “more attractive” stereotype is becoming as irritating to me as the blacks and fried chicken thing. If you took this seriously you would look beyond that to find out if those “attractive” children perceived themselves that way. Or did they feel physically flawed somehow because they did not fit in easily with either their black or white counterparts. Did their peers regard them as attractive? I believe that this more attractive thing comes in to play after adolescence and should have had no place in your “study”.
You also seem to believe that all of these young black and white people have white mothers and black fathers. Black fathers being absent and poor, generally leaving white mothers on their own to care for their children in lower class surroundings. That’s what I infer from this crappy post. Come the f*** on! Many biracials have a white father and a black mother. Did the possibility of that even cross your mind? I am left to assume that this white man, Steven D. Levitt, wouldn’t dream of procreating with a black woman and that you judge the white men who would as somewhat less than yourself.
Where on Earth did you get your “data”? What questions exactly were you trying to answer? Why not interview biracial adults about their adolescent experience? Why do you even care what it’s like to grow up black and white? Clearly you do not.
I am 32. I have a black mother and a white father. I grew up in the wealthy suburbs of Detroit. I excelled academically and artistically. I earned a full-ride to the University of Michigan without trying very hard. During my adolescent years I did not have sex, a cigarette, a sip of alcohol, or get into a fight. I did not come away from my adolescent experience thinking “That was kind of rough, but as least I am more attractive than all those ‘monoracial’ kids.” I have a vlog on youtube called “mulatto diaries”. Should you someday find that you truly care to know what it is like to grow up in America with a black and a white parent, watch it. You will find the stories of many other biracial people there. You don’t have to take only my word for it.
fyi: I’ll be posting this on my blog mulattodiaries.wordpress.com.
Sincerely,Tiffany Jones"


Why ignore pre-1960's mixing as well, Mr. Leavitt? Your ignorance is showing! Thank you, Tiffany, for exposing his willful ignorance.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Conservative Blogger's Hatefest of Michelle Obama



What's wrong with wanting to look glamourous? Plain old jealousy and resentment.
Michelle Obama is beautiful, inside and out. Their kids, Sasha and Malia, look great too

Mind you, this is not surprising, coming from a man with anti-Black views. Here's a racist/sexist commentary from a conservative blogger regarding Black women he wrote in 2002. He complained that there are too much Black women in the top 100 women of 2002 and not enough Asian women. He also complained about bw/wm IR.

His views mirrors David Yeagley's. I believe David copied his views on multiracial/black beauty from him. He basically wrote that Black women aren't attractive, even multiracial beauties such as Halle Berry. He also wondered why are so many White men are pursuing Black women as if it's not normal. Why should he care?

BLACK CHICKS: I was perusing FHM’s list of the 100 Sexiest Women in the World 2002 in search of a story—the things I do for my readers—when I noticed how white they are. According to our race-obsessed Census Bureau, over 12 percent of Americans are black, but the mostly-US readership of FHM selected only 8 black women:

#3: Halle Berry—Actress #21: Beyoncé Knowles—Singer #23: Tyra Banks—Model #34: Janet Jackson—Singer #36: Mariah Carey—Singer, Weirdo #80: Alicia Keys—Singer #82: Aaliyah—Singer, Corpse (alas) #85: Samantha Mumba—Singer

Even the above list is a little misleading, because a quick visit to MixedFolks.com revealed that four of these women (Halle, Mariah, Alicia, and Samantha) are decidedly biracial, having one African and one European parent. I use the phrase decidedly biracial after having seen this article that discusses DNA testing.

A study of the genetic makeup of 3,000 Americans reveals how racially mixed we really are:

Among self-identified whites in Shriver’s sample, the average black admixture is only 0.7 percent. That’s the equivalent of having among your 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents (who lived around two centuries ago), 127 whites and one black.

It appears that 70 percent of whites have no African ancestors. Among the 30 percent who do, the black admixture is around 2.3 percent, which would be like having about three black ancestors out of those 128.

In contrast, African-Americans are much more racially mixed than European-Americans. Yet, Shriver’s study shows that they are less European that was previously believed.

Earlier, cruder studies, done before direct genetic testing was feasible, suggested that African-Americans were 25 or even 30 percent white. Shriver’s project is not complete, but with data from 25 sites already in, he is coming up with 17-18 percent white ancestry among African-Americans. That’s the equivalent of 106 of those 128 of your ancestors from seven generations ago having been Africans and 22 Europeans.

According to Shriver, only about 10 percent of African-Americans are over 50 percent white.

Of course, another way of looking at these data is that a limited amount of black ancestry is enough to make you “look black” from the standpoint of identification. The “one drop” rule may have been ugly from a social and legal perspective, but perhaps reflected a practical reality.

Getting back to our list: Does the mixing of races create an exotic look that has helped these four women? Perhaps there’s a “best of both worlds” effect that helps set these women apart. But why the shortage of black women overall? One simple explanation would be that the readership of FHM is skewed towards white men and their standards of beauty are rooted in the familiar. But maybe it’s because black women just aren’t as pretty.

Consider another piece written by the author of the DNA article above, Steve Sailer, discussing why interracial marriage shortchanges black women and Asian men. He posits some universal standards of beauty that leaves black women behind because of their physiognomy:

By emphasizing how society encourages us to marry people like ourselves, sociologists miss half the picture: by definition, heterosexual attraction thrives on differences ... Opposites attract. And certain race/sex pairings seem to be more opposite than others. The force driving these skewed husband - wife proportions appears to be differences in perceived sexual attractiveness.

On average, black men tend to appear slightly more and Asian men slightly less masculine than white men, while Asian women are typically seen as slightly more and black women as slightly less feminine than white women. Sailer specifically cites height, hair length, and muscularity as disadvantages for black women—and advantages for Asian women.

The only problem with this theory in our case? The list of 100 contains only two Asian women: Lucy Liu (#19) and Zhang Ziyi (#91).

WHITE GUYS & BLACK CHICKS: The taboo against black women dating white men is breaking down. The growing education gap between black men and women and the cold fact that many black men are incarcerated or murder victims are causal factors. (By using education as a surrogate for wealth, this article skirts the issue that white men are wealthier than black men.

We can’t have black women looking like gold diggers, can we?) One question the article doesn’t fully confront is why white men are going after dark meat, though it acknowledges the “exotic look” factor I attributed to biracial women in a previous post. Black guys still have their fans, though.

Mickey Kaus reports: Then there is the final taboo issue—black male sexuality. Fear of black male sexuality was the psychological engine of Jim Crow, Nicholas Lemann has argued. And respect for it is the unwritten explanation for a lot of the resistance to cross-race dating (between 1960 and 1980, for example). I once asked a multi-degreed, accomplished black woman friend of mine (who dated whites) why so many other black women restricted their “options” to black men. She paused thoughtfully, stroked her chin, and said: “I guess it’s the sex.”

That's disgusting and racist to reduce Black men to sexual objects, Black women as gold diggers, and White men as fetishist who date/marry Black women. Can people find black women and white men loving each other instead of imputing some motive to it? The same goes for black men and women relationships.

Thursday, April 09, 2009

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Welcome to Turkey and Spirit of Ancestry

afroturkAfrosphere

Hat tip to Runoko Rashidi and TheBlackList

ISTANBUL - The black population of Turkey has a message for U.S. President Barack Obama.

Mustafa Olpak, author, activist and president of the Africans’ Culture and Solidarity Foundation in Izmir and other foundation members crave a meeting with Obama Ğ even for just a few minutes. But with Obama’s schedule and the foundation’s lack of funds for the trip, the group realizes it will not happen. Still, Olpak told Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review they were excited about the visit. “The spirits of his African ancestors, who were enslaved and excluded from the white man’s world, are with Obama,” he said.

Black people were not being bought and sold only in Europe and America, but in the Ottoman Empire, too. The island of Crete in the Aegean Sea was the most important center for the slave trade. Olpak comes from a family whose members were sold as slaves on this island. Although the family chose to remain silent on the matter, Opak has broken the silence with his recent book “Kölekıyısı-Kenya’dan Istanbul’a” (Slave Shore Ğ from Kenya to Istanbul). The book, out on Punto Publishing, features photographs and documents. There was also an exhibit at the EU center in Ankara, which opened with the book’s release.

The exhibit, titled “The Blacks of Turkey,” will be reopened in Ankara on the occasion of Obama’s visit with additional photographs from Opak’s family album added. “Maybe Obama cannot visit the foundation to meet us but he should see the exhibit at least,” said Olpak.



Tuesday, April 07, 2009

AP Says It's Going To Sue Aggregators

Techdirt

Given some of the Associated Press's recent actions, this won't come as a surprise, but the AP has now announced that it will start suing any news aggregator that doesn't share its profits with the AP:

"We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories."

I'm a bit curious what those "misguided theories" are... because copyright law and rules concerning fair use seem pretty clear, and search engines aggregating info and sending people to your site has been ruled fair use before. So, perhaps the AP chairman is talking about some other "misguided" legal theory? Another AP person claims: "This is not about defining fair use. There's a bigger economic issue at stake here that we're trying to tackle." But she neglects to say what that is, other than our old business model sucks, and we've got no freaking clue how to adapt to the changing market place, so this is the best we've got...



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