Having read some of the many passionate and thought provoking messages on this site I cant help but ask myself why there is such obsession with placing each other in boxes and catagories. When I read thing like "black is having two black parents and nothing else" and other such comments, I take offence because I read derogitary sentiment in that, because my mother is white i cantfeel a part ofthe black community, is that the case? I didn't realise being black was such an exclusive thing!!!!

I am incredibly proud and learned with regards to my south african heritage by I will never allow it to define me as a person. I am me. nobdy introduces me as 'black', 'mixed', 'south african','british' etc. they use my name. I refuse to be put into a box and forced to reach the criteria of that particular box or risk being pushed out of it.

Human beings are far to complex and diverse to group and specify, we are not like different breeds of dog for goodness sake. I am quite happy to live in a community of individuals thank you very much.

ed:

We were FORCED to catagorize ourselves after comming into contact with Europeans who enslaved and colonized us.

Ethnic grouping and heirarchies has always existed among our people, we just rarely came into contact with many outside of our cultural and racial group enough to notice the variation.

Ahmaad wrote: clp)

Breadfruit:

Breadfruit let me praise YOU because you've stated what should be obvious to most but obviously isn't to so many; that we can not properly relate and work with other groups until WE have an established idenity ourselves!

How can the AfroJamaican and the AfroPuerto Rican properly work together to defeat white supremacy if one calls himself black/African but the other thinks he's Spanish?

Too many of our people haven't learned to CATAGORIZE themselves and their race separately from their particular nationality and see a connection between their struggle and the struggle of thier brothers elsewhere.

@ahmaad

It's next toimposible to establish an identityina hetrogenous group of people, Ideally it would be nice to categorize ourselfs in one group, but who chooses who's allowed in and who isn't.

Do we apply our own "one drop rule".

Define the category first than you can implement the process of letting people in and outmore effectively without any conflict.
confused3
@edajf

Introduce yourself as you fit, but in the end it's how people introduce youthat matters. Categorization will exist, because just like names it makes things easier.

Taysene:


To be honest, the "one drop rule" would be the ONLY way we could effectively catagorize "our people" on a genetic tip, because our cultures and perceived identities are so varied.


Most of the educated and cosmpolitan leaders among us know that we all aren't pure and even our cultures have been contaminated but they've tried to come up with terms for that catagory that ultimately unites us as a people:


Some people want to call the category AFRICAN.

But I don't agree with this term because probably half of us aren't actually from Africa, and most importantly a great deal of Africa's population has historically been non-black Arabs and Berbers.


Some people want to call us BLACK.

But I don't agree with that either because physically we are actually brown...and various shades of brown at that.


But rest assured, no matter where you go in this world you can always tell "our people" by the way we look, talk, dance, fight, and even laugh.

So the hardest part is actually NAMING the catagory that everyone knows exists.