Amerika

Furthest Right

You Cannot Change What You Are

Since Amerika specializes in heretical realism, here is a blasphemy against illusion for today: you cannot change what you are.

Biracial actress Meghan Markle is discovering this in her own life, which is why she is writing screeds against it in precious-snowflake magazines for bored lonely white women like Elle:

‘Right, but what are you? Where are your parents from?’ I knew it was coming, I always do. While I could say Pennsylvania and Ohio, and continue this proverbial two-step, I instead give them what they’re after: ‘My dad is Caucasian and my mom is African American. I’m half black and half white.’

To describe something as being black and white means it is clearly defined. Yet when your ethnicity is black and white, the dichotomy is not that clear. In fact, it creates a grey area. Being biracial paints a blurred line that is equal parts staggering and illuminating…

When I was about seven, I had been fawning over a boxed set of Barbie dolls. It was called The Heart Family and included a mom doll, a dad doll, and two children. This perfect nuclear family was only sold in sets of white dolls or black dolls. I don’t remember coveting one over the other, I just wanted one. On Christmas morning, swathed in glitter-flecked wrapping paper, there I found my Heart Family: a black mom doll, a white dad doll, and a child in each colour. My dad had taken the sets apart and customised my family.

There is much to appreciate about the deluge of neurotic chaos that is this article, but it takes us back to an old Leftist trope. Leftists are constantly trying to demonstrate that the exception breaks the rule, when by reflection in the eyes of those outside of the individual, the converse is true: the exception proves the rule.

And thus, the harder they try to show us that “biracial” is an identity, the more clearly they illustrate how it is not because the need for ethnic identity is strong. Take the divided Barbie family: it can have a black mother and white father, but as would be consistent with the thesis of Markle’s article, it should have not white or black children, but grey ones.

She writes about how race is a grey area, but that means we need to add on to the end of that sentence “to her,” or perhaps, “she hopes.” The fact is that she is reminded every day that she is between tribes, and therefore has allegiance from neither. As she writes later in the article:

Being ‘ethnically ambiguous’, as I was pegged in the industry, meant I could audition for virtually any role. Morphing from Latina when I was dressed in red, to African American when in mustard yellow; my closet filled with fashionable frocks to make me look as racially varied as an Eighties Benetton poster. Sadly, it didn’t matter: I wasn’t black enough for the black roles and I wasn’t white enough for the white ones, leaving me somewhere in the middle as the ethnic chameleon who couldn’t book a job.

Markle finds herself belonging to the tribe of no-tribe, and she is crafting this victimhood narrative to — in the usual Leftist way — bully us into accepting her new category as important even though all of us are proud of our tribes. She wants to tell us of her suffering, and then have us accept her, when in fact we are threatened in our identity by her because she represents entryism into two groups.

Later in the article, however, the full story is told. Witness the picture of Markle’s mother:

We are seeing not a black woman, but a mulatto, someone who is half-white (or more; it is hard to estimate). This means that Markle is likely not half-black, but a quarter-black, making her a lot like the people from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and South America who have gone a similar ethnic path. This gives her a new identity, and suggests that, indeed, she should consider those ‘Latina’ roles instead.

Race has been with us from the dawn of time. For some reason, the human race branched into four directions, and all that exists are those and hybrids between them, some of which turn out better than others, but none of which have as much promise as the original undiluted race. As the basis of identity, it is important, because it gives us a culture and thus immutable guidance and security from doubt as far as what we should be doing. Those who argue against race seem to exist, like Markle, in a perpetual miasma of doubt and confusion, and we do not want that for ourselves or our children.

Understood in the transcendental sense that appreciates the wisdom of the universe, race is a gift and a birthright, as is ethnicity. To be born a German means to never be faulted for doing German things; those constitute “the good life” and set the soul’s endless agitation for self-importance to rest, which is a blessing like the obliteration of pain by opiates in time of injury. It also gives that person a set of values to strive for, knowing that whether they succeed or fail in that ambition, they are victorious in the attempt as they have done right by their people.

Modernity has run away from you are what you are into “be what you want to be” (US Army slogan from the 1980s) or “have it your way” (Burger King slogan from the 1990s). The idea is that your intent rules over reality; you formulate a vision of what you desire to be, and then you act like you are that thing, and in the eyes of the herd, you are it. In reality, you are what you are, and deviating from this is a path to misery and confusion.

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