“The recent reemergence of mulatto identity isn’t about race, it’s about actively acknowledging a multiethnic reality in a simplistically racialized world.”
Maritsa Patrinos / BuzzFeed
Yo, I'm a mulatto. And I have to tell you, it's great. I was black for most of my life, which is also great, but the thing is I look white and, coincidentally, my dad's also white (he's great too), and after a while I needed a word that offered me a better fit, and acknowledge my father and his whole family's impact on my life, which was also a big part of my identity. So I converted to mulatto, which I see as a subset of the larger African American experience.
I actually love the word mulatto. I love it for its rolling linguistic sound — moo-lah-toe — sliding off my tongue the way Lolita did for Humbert Humbert. But I also love mulatto for the illicit pleasure of watching the uncomfortable cringe the word sometimes elicits from others, even when I say it to describe myself: an African American novelist who just happens to look like a washed-up Latvian rugby player. The discomfort is a response I've encountered from black people, from white people, and even sometimes from many mulattoes — or rather, I should say, "first-generation mixed people of black and white ancestry." That inelegant mouthful is what mulatto means, but I can't shorten it without saying "mulatto," because there is no other word in the English language that captures that meaning while connecting it with the larger sociopolitical history of North America.
The word mulatto is at some level absurd: Of course it's absurd; it's an antiquated relic of a racist past. Just like the reductive racial classifications of black and white, which are equally absurd in the face of the overwhelming complexity of ethnicity, caste, and historical context.
Maritsa Patrinos / BuzzFeed
I know that many people, they hear mulatto, and they think of the word mule. This is often the first complaint I hear about mulatto: that it derives from the hybrid product of breeding a donkey with a horse. Yeah, mules, smelly, brute, beasts of burdens. I get it. This is extremely offensive, I agree, sure. Thing is, it's also probably not true. Mulatto most likely finds its roots in an Arabic word, muwallad, meaning person of mixed ancestry; the word mule came later. Which means, instead of mulattoes being named after mules, mules may be named after us. While this is still offensive, I've met a few mules, and I found them to be quite pleasant, and am willing to forgive them.
Still, one could argue that, erroneous or not, this negative perception still hangs over the word mulatto. That the stank of history demands that it be abandoned. Fine, but it's not like the two other words commonly used in America instead of mulatto, mixed and biracial, are devoid of wackness. Mixed, as in mixed-up, confused, disoriented, crazy. Mixed emotions, as in: displeased, unhappy. Biracial is based around the word race, which of course doesn't truly exist. Racially, mulattoes in America are considered black, but the recent reemergence of mulatto identity isn't about race, it's about actively acknowledging a multiethnic reality in a simplistically racialized world. Instead of a person of black and white parentage simply accepting the racial classification of black as their self-identification — and thereby shoving their white parent into the closet — mulatto identity is an attempt to move beyond black and white. Which is why the "bi-" in biracial is as jacked up as the "racial" part. Many African Americans also have some Native American ancestry, making the word "biracial" insufficient, even on its own terms.
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