The Unbelievable Reality of Racial Ambiguity

May 19, 2018—On this historic day, tradition within the British royal family's monarchy was flipped on its head when American actress Meghan Markle got married to the Duke of Sussex prince Harry. Prior to the marriage, many people were already on board with the idea of Harry, being fully Caucasian, breaking the tradition of marrying in your race by eloping to a mixed-raced woman outside of the UK, and as you can imagine, it was shocking.

This changed everything within the royal family’s history, which caused Mrs. Markle to get some backlash from people even outside the United Kingdom though most was praise for both parties as Harry showed how bold he was to not stick to the traditional marriage inside the United Kingdom, but instead finding love in a woman of mixed race sparking serious conversation regarding traditions and how we treat biracial people in this world

A Tale as Old as Time

Race has always been a huge factor that determined how we as humans are perceived, and even treated since slavery in the 1600s with the lighter slaves being offensively categorized as mulattos, a term used to describe a person of mixed-race originating from the Spanish and Portuguese word mulato. In most cases, you were still enslaved, but had more privileges compared to the darker slaves, basically making you a borderline freeman AKA a free slave at the time, which unfortunately still shows up in certain aspects of the modern world

One of the most infamous but un-talked about cases is the Jefferson-Hemings situation that started in the late-1700s. Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who worked at Jefferson’s primary plantation of Monticello in Albemarle County near Charlottesville, Virginia, negotiated with Jefferson to return to enslavement at Monticello after being a domestic servant in Paris in exchange for “extraordinary privileges” for herself, and freedom for her unborn children which happened decades later. Despite the happy ending, there was always the claim of Jefferson being the father of at least six of Hemings children with only four surviving to adulthood. Even though this became popular in the newspapers, their relationship was kept relatively private, but nonetheless it's still an interesting tale in American biracial history

Race in the 21st Century (it’s not just America)

Imagine you’re in a local drugstore trying to get some foundation that matches your beautiful dark complexion when you get to the aisles and voilà, there’s none, it would be pointless to even go to another one so you go home very confused and a little sad. Yes, race even spreads to other aspects of modern life including but not limited to movies, TV, makeup, books/comics, etc. which can all be simply categorized as different forms of famous media. This alone is a huge issue harboring other potential issues within certain media platforms, which get displayed at a very large scale due to its growth within younger generations by displaying subliminal messages about acceptable standards or “norms” within society

In this video, we have several mixed-raced individuals who give their own thoughts on how they see Mulattos, and what it means to them despite the time they live in today. Some opinions range from positive, negative, and ironic outside the box comments that give you a mini tour of what it’s like for generations of biracial Americans in the modern world, and what certain words or phrases really mean to them as first, second, or even third generation Americans, despite the more cordial time we live in. Overall, this video gives light to discussions about other topics as well, it’s a great example of what our world has become, and what it could potentially be in the near future with properly educated people and their own stories

This video gives a very vivid insight inside the race-crazed world that has generations of mixed people that live in it. It goes into very deep detail on why biracial people often get the other end of the stick in society, and why we as humans seem to put so much emphasis on race, and how it leads into what we know as colorist behaviors among different people in the world

This video demonstrates different types of colorist practices in different forms of media, and in general society through the stories of three different dark-skinned girls, and their own experiences growing up in a race-dominated world

When Past Meets Present

The year is 2014, great year with even better music with politically incorrect messages woven into what's wrong in the world. Before the end of October we got introduced to the biracial socially-cautious rapping machine known asSir Robert "Bobby" Bryson Hall II AKA Logic with his first mainstream success known as Under Pressure, which chronicles Bobby's upbringings of racial profiling and the discriminative bullying by his peers and adults in his life that motivated him to live life and to hope better for other people just like him

While the idea of a biracial rapper wasn't as rare at the time, it did spark a lot of debate about the amount of rights and power artists such as Drake, J. Cole, and even Logic have versus more darker-skinned counterparts such as Kendrick, Kanye, or even past lyricists like Biggie or Tupac when it comes to the art they make. Either way, the ideal type of entertainer today has drastically changed since the 1970s when Hip-Hop was only starting out with a lot of Funk and RnB fused influences involved as well, but now its become a whole competitive industry of people who don’t really have to look the part anymore to make an impact

Here Logic goes into detail about his experiences with racial profiling and growing up not looking like the rest of your family, or even most of your peers. You get an understanding of how hard it is for the biracial community in certain career fields such as music, and other forms of entertainment while still gaining inspiration from his own struggles and setbacks

Biracial west coast rapper Phora shares his own opinions on being mixed in the music industry, and what that means as far as how, what you say or do in your songs could translate to real life causing unneeded problems

To Be Honest...

The biracial community is only getting bigger and bigger as time goes on, but there’s still an underlying problem of favoritism towards them versus the darker community that will mean life or death for the world if we're not careful, because at the end of the day, we’re all human and should treat each other as such to build a better self, and better atmosphere for people like them.