Thread by @GuyEmersonMount

A very nice critique by @TonyaWithAPen. I was just writing to @THEWILLTHOMAS today about the need to always think in both/and terms as it relates to mixed race Black people and interracial sexuality. But, beyond that, even the both/and (i.e. binaries) need to be interrogated...

'Privilege and 'oppression are themselves fluid categories that mixed people not only vacillate between but also experience simultaneously when the distinctions between the two become fuzzy (which is often). For example, in Cayton and Drake's seminal study of Black Chicago...

they found that light skinned Black men would experience employment discrimination when applying for physically demanding manual labor jobs. White employers reasoned they weren't as strong as their dark skinned brethren. Oppression/privilege just doesn't work here as a framework.

It's also a nice intersectional example where gender is playing into notions of how Black bodies are racialized via both race, gender, class and to a certain extent sexuality at the same time. Light skin Black women faced different, yet related, questions to their embodied self..

While often presumed to be more sexually desirable because of their bodies proximity to whiteness, this actually often worked (and continues to work) against them in certain circumstances. Why? Cayton and Drake found both by inference and explicit qualitative data

that Black relationship marketplaces don't easily map onto a light skinned privilege matrix/continuum. Most Black people consciously and/or unconsciously chose a partner that complimented their own body in one way or another.

This might mean choosing someone dark skinned OVER someone light-skinned for fear of being labeled 'inauthentically Black' by association. Light skinned people themselves, they found, rarely sought out light skinned partners for this reason, preferring instead...

a dark skinned partner with the hopes of having a child that would not be deemed too dark OR too light. Most Black people, consciously or subconsciously, they found, preferred brown skin medium tone partners and children. (see Malcolm X's rendering of his mom for more on this).

All told, this kind of complicating of @CMRSmixedrace by @TonyaWithAPen is exactly the kind of smart analysis that is necessary to build the kind of broad intra-racial Black solidarity and POC alliances that Tonya is calling for. #BlkTwitterstorians @mixed_race @OurMixedStories