
“You’re mixed, Ta-Nehisi,’ Khanata replied, laughing. ‘Look, I understand what Black is in America. I get that you’re Black there, but here you are mixed. That’s how we see most Black Americans.’
Maybe I was seeing my own gospel- the social construction of race- so dispassionately preached back at me. Maybe it was thinking back to Black American friends and all our jokes about DNA tests and who is 100 percent African (none of us) and who is not. And then the humor faded.
Khanata pointed out that in Senegal this ‘mixed’ look is treasured. Black Americans are seen as cool, glamorous, and even beautiful because we are mixed. And many Senegalese women take steps- from straightening hair to lightening skin- to get that ‘Black American/mixed’ look.
And as I sat there with my lost siblings, listening to Khanata, it occurred to me that the ‘mixed’ look they treasure here is itself a marker of the ordeal, an inheritance of the mass rape that shadows those DNA jokes I make with my friends.”
-The Message
Artist: Unknown/ EncyclopediaVirginia


