Barack ObamaAmsterdam - say cheese

Three things have prompted me to write this quick essay.

Over the weekened Micah Sifry pinged with a link to CBSNews published decision to close all comments on articles pertaining to Barack Obama because, "stories about Obama have been attracting too many racist comments".

The week before I had read Spencer Overton's A Significant Development for the Blackroots with a bit of amusement. I know some of the people involved in the push to have have the Congressional Black Caucus Institute cancel their sponsorship of the presidential debates that FOXNews was going to telecast. Somehow, I never received an email or a memo from them --and that even includes my friend Chris Rabb.

Then I got an email from a BBC editor through my personal website. They wanted to know if I was an Israeli blogger writing from Jerusalem. That prompted me to write a post about the presumably Jewish origin of my last name.

Which takes me to heart of this post --how immigration an miscegenation are pushing a lot of blacks in the United States to narrow the definition of blackness to the confines of descendants of US African slaves.

This would be outrageous south of the border.

For one, not all Afrolatinos were slaves. Actually, quite a lot of Europeans ended up in indentured servitude situations that were worse than slavery, exactly because they were not from Africa (hence, under the law, they were not slaves).

Second, Spain and Portugal have their own histories of impureza de la sangre or mixed blood heritage. Sure, it is frowned upon (even to this day), but just because Spaniards don't want to acknowledge their Jewish or Moorish ancestors it doesn't mean they don't have them.

Third, the Civil Right Movement could have never happened not just without Mexicans in the West. It is unthinkable to have had a CRM without that most perfect of mixed-race people, Puerto Ricans. You had black ones like my dad on one side and my mom, all blue/green eyes and white skin, on the other. They had stories of how they'd deliberately infiltrate places were Blacks were not allowed (my dad) or Browns were not allowed (my mom) and thwak them with their puertorriqueñidad.

You see, the minute my dad would get to a place and they'd say "No Blacks Allowed", he'd say, "But I'm Puerto Rican". The minute my mom was invited to places were blacks and browns were not allowed she'd accept the invitation then drop the bomb, "But I'm Puerto Rican". And this was not just them. Many, many Puerto Rican civil rights workers from the 40s, 50s and 60s have similar stories.

Unfortunately, the contributions of Puerto Ricans are almost invisible when we talk about the Civil Rights Movement and the 1960s.

Whatever the case, it is time for "African Americans" to put an accent on the "E" because, when it comes down to it, US-born blacks have more things in common with us people south of the border than anybody from continental Africa. Yes, venerate the ancestry but don't forget that your next door Spanish-speaking vecino has more in common with you than the banker in Cote d'Ivoire.

I hope for the day I don't have to explain to people how it is possible to be a Puerto Rican BLACK woman. It's just too depressing to think the message our own kids (let alone adults) get about blackness --as if it only were the realm of people born of slaves in the US.

That's one of the reasons why I found blogging so liberating. Because discussing my blackness was not about limiting its definition but about opening it to many other people's interpretations. And because it gave me an opportunity to express that blackness without the "blessing" of people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who insist in excluding anybody not from the US from their parameters of blackness.

Some may think of it as defining a constituency. But I'd like to think of it as a regressive cultural imperialism in which the opressed becomes the opressor by resegregating their sphere of political influence and limiting it to a 'strict' definition of blackness.

In other words, I believe too many blacks in the United States have an imperialist notion of blackness based on a false dialectics of race. At one end the false assumption of a pure African race. At the other end, its opposite : the dream of an absolutely devoid of melanin Europe.

So race, even within African Americans, has become an absolute in which, even the 1/10 rule helps define "Black" as something separate and not equal to "Not-Black". Hence, the discussions around Barack's blackness.

Some like Debra Dickerson hold Obama's blackness as false because, not only is it mixed but it has not been certified by the slave-master's branding iron. Here refrain in that infamous Stephen Colbert moment could be summarized as : "You can't be Black unless it is our kind of 'black'".

Well ... tough Ms. Dickerson; 'cause you don't get to define negritude.

Barack Obama will not make it to the presidency in 2008. I am certain of that. What I am certain is how he has re-written history.

If there is something for which he will forever be remembered how he just messes up the United States' historical parameters of negritude ... and for that, he will always be a winner in my book.