The Flip Medley

If I’d been born in today’s world, I could have just gotten off easy with the “multiracial” tag, but during the 70’s, you had to fit the categorizations of being Black, White, Hispanic, or Asian. When I was a little kid, I remember that almost every new person I met would ask me if I was black or white. But my most memorable question about my “blackness” came when I worked for XDB Systems while I was going to University of Maryland.

I was sitting in the shared office space with some of the other folks working there, and one of the guys had a copy of the Diamondback out. There was an article about the retention rate of black students, which prompted him to make some asinine racist remark (that I don’t remember exactly), but which garnered some giggles from some of the other (white) folks working there. Whatever it was, it pissed me off because we had a little exchange…

Me: “I’m black, and I’m in college, so I guess I don’t fit your stereotype.”

*awkward silence*

White Guy: “Yeah, but you’re not really black… You’re mixed aren’t you?”

Me: “But I’m still black. So I guess you thought there were no black people in the room?”

*really awkward silence*

Anyways, MSN.com posted an article about an exchange between Bill O’Reilly and Marc Lamont Hill that reminded me of that moment, and the futility of trying to determine how “black”or how “white” someone is…

O’Reilly criticized Jackson for “incredible selfishness — spending hundreds of million dollars on himself while singing ‘We Are the World,’” and said that it “should make any clear-thinking American nauseous.”

Speaking to guest analyst Marc Lamont Hill, a black FOX commentator, O’Reilly also addressed race as an issue at the memorial service: “Why are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton making this a racial deal? Jackson bleached his own skin. And then chose white men to provide existence for his in vitro children. Give me a break with all this.”

Hill responded: “You have me baffled in your analysis here, to say this isn’t a racial issue, when this man’s entire career has been marked by the tropes of race… Yes, the black community has embraced him, yes the black community has wrapped its arms around him more in death, but that’s because the media has assaulted him in ways they don’t do with white people of his stature.”

Hill continued: “Now he has passed away. A year or two ago, when Jerry Falwell died, you and I debated this very point. You said, ‘Give him three days to a week and let the people mourn him before you start talking about his racist politics.’ So why are we giving Jerry Falwell something that we won’t give Michael Jackson?”

The two debated for quite some time on whether Jackson had helped in uniting black and White Americans. The debate, however, turned into a shouting match with O’Reilly proclaiming: “If he’s such a black American icon, why did he have his kids with white men!?”

Hill responded: “That’s a personal matter. That doesn’t make him less black — there’s no blackness meter here. You don’t become less black if you have a white kid.”

A quick Google search netted the video…

The funny thing about this is that we could extrapolate from O’Reilly’s logic FAIL to make other horrible extrapolations: For example, if Michael Jackson’s children being sired with a white woman, possibly using a white man’s sperm, make him somehow less black, does that mean Angelina Jolie doesn’t want to be white because she’s adopted Vietnamese and African children? Does it make every white couple that adopted Chinese babies want to be Chinese?

Or maybe we should just stop worrying about race so much and get over it.