and it shows that Barry Rukus didn't grow up around Black aunties.
https://mas.to/@obeto/112831328196537950
but on a more serious note: white America thinks we negr@s are interchangeable. @so_treu posted yesterday an article criticizing that very point.
yeah, Barack is the first Black POTUS but he isn't descended of libertos —of African or Afroindigenous people freed of chattel slavery born in the Américas— and it always shows for those of us who are.
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#2024Elections #USpol #DNC2024
Biped Earthling (@obeto@mas.to)
Attached: 1 image Hearing that Barry is calling for an open Democratic primary is rather depressing, quite annoying, and on point for him. It is also very odious. Shame on him.mas.to
yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
in reply to yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 • • •Y'ALL GONNA LEARN
TO PARSE BLACKNESS
i was born in this country, like many Puerto Ricans, but i would never call myself African American; not out of disrespect for African Americans but out of respect for my Afroboricua ancestors.
the chattel slavery is the common bond —especially genetically speaking— that unites Black peoples across the Américas; from Alaska to La Patagonia. but each region and country have their own expression, it's own history of slavery...
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#2024Elections #USpol
yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
in reply to yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 • • •AM 4th GENERATION LIBERTA
that means there are 3 people before me that were born emancipated before me: Papi, abuelo, bisabuela.
that's it.
Spain protracted the emancipation of Puerto Rican slaves until it couldn't anymore. so slavery for some of us is literally 3 people away.
Kamala comes from libertos on her father's side also... and yet, because they're Jamaican libertos, their experience is specific to the island, not the United States...
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#2024Elections #USpol
yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
in reply to yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 • • •IT'S A DIFFERENT BLACKNESS
WHEN YOU COME FROM
A MAJORITY AFRICAN
COUNTRY
all my life i've been told, but Liza you don't look Black. but i grew up in Puerto Rico where the population of Afroboricuas was decimated with the mass migration of the 1940s.
our numbers dwindled en La Isla while they soared here: Neil Degrasse-Tyson, Jean Michel Basquiat, Carmelo Anthony, Kelis are all examples of the Afroboricua diaspora now seen as African Americans
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#2024Elections #USpol
yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
in reply to yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 • • •I GREW UP A MINORITY
IN PUERTO RICO
but Kamala's father wasn't a minority in Jamaica. certainly, Barack's father in Kenya wasn't racially (ethnic minorities are whole other discussion here).
my bff is from Trinidad & Tobago and it absolutely fucking shows she was born & raised in a Black majority country. it's just a different being in time and space when you don't grow up looking behind your back all the time.
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#2024Elections #USpol
yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
in reply to yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 • • •when you get to now Jamaicans, Haitians, Barbadians, Bahamians they just BE differently. they do not have the reflexive constraints of someone who had to learn to little themselves to the point of being invisible because they were the one negr@ not just in the room but in the whole fucking neighborhood or town.
which brings me to the Kamala Harris point of this post:
KAMALA is like a rainbow of intersectionalities ESPECIALLY when it comes to Blackness
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#2024Elections #USpol
yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
in reply to yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 • • •KAMALA
is a daughter of a Jamaican Black man descended of libertos and a Tamil Indian mother. so that means she is:
- a daughter of migrants
- descended of slaves from Jamaica, an Afroindigenous majoritarian country and one of the definers of Carib Negritude
- from Tamil Indian, which has its own state but is a minoritarian ethnic group
- she's bougie, both her parents were academics; throwing one of those unspoken wrenches into the equation of US Blackness...
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#2024Elections #USpol
yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
in reply to yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 • • •KAMALA is made of different, and sometimes at odds, definitions of Blackness.
her dad was from the era (and most certainly the circle of intellectuals) that defined NEGRITUDE as not just a cultural expression of the African diaspora across the Caribbean but an ethos, an ontology, a praxis.
Negritude is by definition at war with USA's white hegemon's definition of Blackness. but sometimes it's at odds even with the pop culture expression of Blackness by black folks
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#2024Elections #USpol
yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
in reply to yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 • • •then add to that her Indian heritage; which btw is super common in the Caribbean.
countries like Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago opened their doors to migrant workers from India to bust unions and make sure sugar plantations never stopped producing the cash crop.
there's a lot of Black Carib folks out there with Indian and other Asian nannas and gdaddies. Naomi Campbell is an example of that. she has a Chinese paternal grandmother.
anyways... back to Kamala...
🧵
#2024Elections #USpol
yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
in reply to yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 • • •THE POINT BEING
with someone like Kamala Harris, you can tell they grew up around Black elders who even if they didn't suffer the penuries of slavery, where entrusted with its memory and with the duty to NEVER FORGET.
it is generational trauma.
just because that inherited trauma was proven to exist with grandchildren of Holocaust survivors it doesn't mean it is not applicable to other groups who've survived other types of genocide.
and yes, slavery IS genocide
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#2024Elections #USpol
yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
in reply to yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 • • •BARACK IS A GOLDEN CHILD
in every single possible way (yes, am using the narc term); but particularly as the only Black child in a tightly knit white family with, apparently, no more Black kin in the mix.
Barack didn't grow up around his father or his father's extended family and it always fucking shows in moments like this, when we have a whole fucking bunch of nazis ready to burn the whole country down and he is so tone deaf as to ask for an open primary at the DNC
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#2024Elections #USpol
yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
in reply to yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 • • •BARACK IS THE KIND OF NEGR@ WHO REALLY DOESN'T UNDERSTAND THE INSIDIOUS VIOLENCE OF RACISM
and am going to extend this to my African kin and all the Black folks who come from majoritarian Black countries.
bless you for not being burdened by the baggage of racism, by having grown up free of the paranoia of having a target on your back just for existing.
Barack lived extremely shielded from that shit and it shows in his lack of urgency in this critical moment...
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#2024Elections #USpol
yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
in reply to yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 • • •KAMALA
NEVER HAD
THAT PRIVILEGE
even in the bougie, extremely insular world of migrant scientists and academics, she had to endure the obscenities and injustices of the American fascist state that used her Black body, as a little girl, to force desegration in the California school system.
NO YOU NEVER GROW OUT OF THAT TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCE
and it's why i bawled like a baby when she described that violence during the 2019 primaries debate:
https://inv.tux.pizza/watch?v=6vG1Tnuvo78
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#2024Elections #USpol
WATCH: 'That little girl was me.' Harris goes after Biden on race | 2019 Democratic Debates
PBS NewsHour | Invidiousyes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
in reply to yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦 • • •KAMALA fascinates me not for her accomplishments but exactly for how she is like a vector, IN THE FLESH, of so many of the issues impacting Americans at all levels: race, ethnicity, migrancy, class, sex, gender, health, ability
and yet, i was not going to vote for her in the primaries (she was the first to bow out). but in spite of the Kamala Cop moniker (or because of it, i come from a family of cops), i've come to respect her the more i know about her background.
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#2024Elections #USpol