Perhaps Jennifer Beals has friends and boyfriends (now a husband) who are mostly Caucasian because those are the people who were in the environment she grew up in and exist in today. I am African American and before college I worked at hospital where there were hardly any other African Americans, my friends and colleagues were Caucasian and other groups. I attended a private university and my friends, classmates, and eventually sorority sisters were Caucasian, only 1 other African American besides myself. These people were my friends, sometimes by boyfriends, not because I am hiding from and denying my African American identity but because these were the people around me. I’m not going to deny their friendship or my attractions to them because they don’t look like me or fit some mold that others might expect for me. Perhaps Jennifer Beals lives by similar standards.

Since her involvement in The L Word, I have read more comments about Jennifer Beals’ race and people trying to impose the “white” or “black” label on her as like a point for their team. I cannot understand why a biracial person cannot identify with whatever label they feel accurately describes them, especially “other” or “neither black or white” or “both black and white” if that is what they are without the world putting them under a microscope and dissecting their lives, who they are friends with, what they do, and however else they choose to live their lives.

It’s sad really.

I do agree with you that multiracials, Amerindians, Arabs lack power and influence on certain levels than the monoracial identifiers like Whites, Blacks or Latinos have.

I disagree that people who are “less blackish” have less discrimination from non-blacks. I think arabs, latinos, multiracials, and Amerindians for example face discrimination that is at least equal to discrimination faced by black folks. In fact, there’s an element of subordination of brown & beige folks to describe our looks as either “blackish” or “whitish”. We can be described on our own terms, not relative either black or white.

So much information shows people who are less blackish have had less discrimination from non-blacks.

So it’s easy not be suspicious or angry when your phenotype isn’t so racially apparent, and viewed as socially attractive/acceptable to negrophobes.

Black people know this, and thats why they have these attitudes. This is why prioritizing racial difference over fellow Americanism will always keep us divided.

I’ll repost your article to mulatto.org, to show folks how lucky we are that you are fighting the good fight for the right for white/black biracials to choose our identities ourselves.

Jennifer Beal just happens to have closer ties with her mother’s culture, just like an Anglo-Italian might be closer to the British culture and not the Italian. So why make such a fuss about it?

I guess that according to these critics, mixed individuals should choose to relate to only one of the “races inherited” from their parents or grandparents… and one should preferably pick the lowest/inferior “race” on the “arian/darwinian” scale to avoid being accused of being ashamed of it.