There is racism in the latin diaspora. Im Afro-Caribbean with a dash of Irish and Asian. I have experienced being mistaken for being a black Latino. People have approached me in the New York City Subway and machine gunned me with Spanish interrogatives. While traveling in Brazil, I experienced a kind of combination of classism and racism mashed together. In Jamaica, W.I., class tends to trump color but colorism is global none the less, follow this link: racerelations.about/od/understandingrac1/g/definitionofcolorism.htm Intra-family colorism exists. Ive experienced it in my family. Im from a mixed family. My great, maternal, grandmother was Irish. My uncles ran the spectrum from high yellow to ebony black. Im a heartbeat away from being blue-black in the summer and cocoa-brown in the winter. My daughter has Native-American cheek bones as her mother and her maternal grandmother are as much Cherokee as they are African-American. Theyre both exotic and beautiful. The mother of my oldest son is Hungarian-American. He identifies as white. My adopted son had an Italian mother and a Jamaican father. He looks Middle-Eastern or latin or Sicilian. He has displayed discomfort, through his actions, about my being black. I have cousins that are half Swiss (That would make them Afro-Swiss-Caribbean? LOL) and another thats half german (That would be Afro-German-Caribbean). My mother-in-law was a light skinned Latina. My step-mother-in-law is white and shes a great human being. My wife is predominantly Latina with African, Flemish, Italian, Native-American and Puerto Rican ancestry (That would make her Afro-Flemish-Italian-Latina-Native-American). As for me Im just an Afro-Irish-Asian-Caribbean-American. Colorism seems to have influenced the life-trajectories of these family members (without going into detail) where the light skinned ones appear to have done better than the darker ones as implied by the link shared below.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 06:31:12 +0000
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