The Generations of Pain I Felt in One Racist Moment

By Ahna Fleming, New York Times

What it means to be both Black and white, and neither, in a polarized United States.

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My skin is light, but my curls reveal my Blackness. It only takes one drop. Being half Black and half white means I cannot easily check off one box or another. And I’m not alone — the number of people identifying as multiracial in the United States has surged in recent years.

I am too Black to be white and too white to be Black.

I rarely feel as though I belong in places like the one my friends and I were at on July 5: An overcrowded New Jersey bar decorated in red, white and blue, where I could count the number of Black people on one hand. That night, though, I felt indignant.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “mulatto,” as many of my friends were before the holiday weekend, it is an offensive, archaic term to describe a person with white and Black parents. Derived from the Spanish word for mule, or “mulo,” it was used during slavery to liken biracial people to the hybrid animal and to justify their legal and social oppression.

A white guy came up to me in the bar and tapped my shoulder. He didn’t greet me before asking, “Are you half white, half Black?” I rolled my eyes without responding.

Then: “I love mulattos,” he said, before doubling down and going even further, saying in vulgar sexual terms what he’d love to do to “a mulatto.”

Excuse me? What era are we in? I felt like I was being mocked, sexualized and dehumanized.

“For somebody to use it today, it really is an especially derogatory use, because it’s really going back to the era of slavery in the U.S.,” said Ann J. Morning, a sociology professor at New York University whose research focuses on racial classification and multiracial identity.

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