"Mulatto instability lies not in their blood but in their intermediate position in society."
"They divided the offspring of white and black and intermediate shades into 128 divisions. The true mulatto was the child of the pure black and the pure white. The child of the white and the mulatto woman was a quarteron with 96 parts white and 32 parts black. But the quarteron could be produced by the white and the marabou in the proportion of 88 to 40, or by the white and the sacatra, in the proportion of 72 to 56 and so on all through the 128 varieties. But the sang-m?l? with 127 white parts and 1 black part was still a man of color."
I was talking recently to an older relative of mine, and we entered into a discussion of blackness. I had always seen him as someone moving freely amongst black people in Belize, but he told me he did not see himself as being black. His is the dilemma of those mulattos (for lack of a better word) who grew up in British Honduras before the time of UBAD.
There was a notable difference between the slavery systems run by the British in the Caribbean and the slavery system run by the white Americans in the United States. I don?t know about the slavery systems run by the Spanish, but I know that the slavery system run by the French, in Haiti specifically, was like the British system in that there were mulattos and quadroons and octoroons and so on and so forth. In other words, there were conscious, almost institutional efforts in the British and French systems to differentiate among non-white people on the basis of how much so-called white blood they had.
The slavery system in the United States was different from the British one. Legally, if you had the tiniest drop of African blood, in the United States you were black. The vast majority of American slaveowners treated their own children, those they fathered with black women, as one hundred percent slaves.
The result of the American system is that black Americans spend relatively little time discriminating amongst themselves on the basis of hair, color, and so on. All black people were in the same boat in the racist societal reality of the United States. A nigger was a nigger was a nigger.
Not so in British Honduras. "Brown blacks," those with white blood, that is, generally got a ?jump start? in slavery and colonial Belize. White fathers generally (*) recognized their black children and gave them opportunities. As time went along, color and features were important considerations in Belizean society. It appeared that the whiter you looked, the easier your lot was likely to be in life.
This was also the case in various parts of the United States. Opportunities were based on appearance. But, to repeat, in America a nigger was a nigger was a nigger – black, brown, yellow or otherwise.
We can see that after Hurricane Hattie in 1961 and self-government for Belize in 1964, Belize began to move quickly from the British orbit to the American galaxy. By 1969, when UBAD exploded on the scene here, there was a generation of Belizeans who were brown but considered themselves black, in fact embraced their blackness. This was because their generation of Belizeans had become Americanized.
In the UBAD days it was difficult, perhaps it was actually impossible, to explain to older Belizeans how a brown person could consider himself/herself as black. Such a concept went against everything older Belizeans had been taught, the way they were raised, and how they had come to think. It was for real in colonial Belize that people were trying to ?raise their colour,? which is to say, have children with someone lighter skinned than themselves. (This was done all over the Caribbean, and indeed, in parts of the United States.) Marcus Garvey was the first regional and international leader to fire a cannonball across the bow of the established racial beliefs and declare that black was beautiful.
Technically, if it were possible to find someone of pure white blood and someone of pure black blood (the anthropologists will tell you that there are no such people), and these people would have a child, how could you say, technically, if that child was white or that child was black" Legally and socio-politically, however, all of us who live in the real world automatically will categorize such a child as black. The definition is one which is prepared for us by the white rulers of the world. (Smokey Joe has pointed out that no blood is "white" or "black.")
In a sense, then, older Belizeans are right when they question us closely about our generation?s definition of ourselves as "black." If all things were equal, this would be a long and confusing debate. But all things are not equal. White supremacy rules our world, and in reaction to white supremacy’s racist prescriptions, we children of mixed ancestry have defined ourselves as, and declared ourselves, "black."
Nowadays we go even further. We call ourselves Africans. We seek that very aspect of our being which our white rulers have spent centuries defiling and despising. We seek out the African aspect of ourselves because we want to glorify that very aspect our ancestors were taught to be ashamed of. This is how our generation has reacted to white supremacy.
It is not a step our older relatives are able to take. We have grown to accept their position and perspective. The victimization of older Belizeans makes us hate racism and white supremacy and institutionalized ignorance even more. We weep at how our people have been lied to about our African origins and about the true history of our ancestral continent. Our ancestors were taught to hate themselves, and yet today, after the centuries of brainwashing, we say this to Belize and to the world, despite all this and despite all that, we love ourselves. Black to the bone.
Power to the people.