A little bit in the context of the Meghan Markle thing, I found this article about a black woman married to a white man whose baby daughter looked white to be really sad. She was just so wrapped up in all the “race” shit and worried about what people she didn’t even know thought about her. She’s going to have a tough time if she can’t tune all of that shit out.
On a happier note, this article about Sister Souljah in The Atlantic is full of post-racial wisdom. Speaking of a run-in with Bill Clinton and his full-on racist politics, she says:
“If you obsess over that, it’s like you’re losing your life force, your energy. You’re losing your time, you’re losing your focus, you’re losing your ability to build, to connect and do things with other people,” she said after citing the theory of double consciousness outlined by W. E. B. Du Bois. “So I try not to live my life in reaction to the power structure or live my life in reaction to racism.”
Yea, I say, that’s the spirit. There are so many people who have had their lives devastated, not to mention ended, by virulent racism. For people nowadays to obsess about some random guy staring at you in the supermarket really shouldn’t get you down. Maybe he was a racist, so what? Maybe he thought you and the kid were beautiful? Maybe he just wanted to fuck you? Again, so what?
One of my best friends from childhood married a Vietnamese woman and when they had a kid he was obsessed with whether or not the kid looked like him. I got so sick of it I made some kind of joke about the kid looking more like Ho Chi Minh and he whipped out baby pictures of himself and the kid to show they looked alike. Their marriage and his fatherhood didn’t work out well, to put it mildly. The point isn’t that people like me an him are cretins, or even that we grew up in a cretinous society, but that the “looks like me” thing is cancerous.
