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joetheman

(1,450 posts)
Sat Jul 24, 2021, 04:48 PM Jul 2021

About Osaka lighting the Olympic flame.

I woke up in the middle of the morning around 3 A.M. And like some crazy dream the thought raged in my brain: "Look at your family. Look good at your family. Things to come."
Now. O don't usually dream, or at least, I do not remember dreaming. But this was a special feeling different that I do not know really how to describe. Bear with me.

I did begin to think about my family...immediate and extended. What seemed to pass through my thoughts was an array of faces belonging to aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins and even their offspring. Here is the deal:

My parents and their siblings were all born and raised in Pennsylvania, mostly Philly and surrounding area. They were hard working African Americans (blacks) from generations of slaves and slave owners but officially identified as Negro, black or now African American and back to black.

I hadn't really given any thought to our racial or ethnic make up until just reading about Osaka lighting the Olympic flame.
Among us, my siblings and first cousins we number 59 children. NOT ONE SINGLE ONE OF OUR GRANDCHILDREN or their children are married to or partnered with a person, male or female, that is legally identified as BLACK ore AFRICAN AMERICAN. Their offspring are all married to or partnered with (and this includes our LBGTQ members) either Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Tiwanese) Hispanic. White, British, Swedish, Native American, Jamaican, Nigerian, Egyptian. So you can imagine what that next generational line will be. One thing remains, tho is that they ALL will be labeled as "black" by society...just like Obama is. And these are only the families of my siblings and first cousins. I am certain that the other branches of my family are similar.

Maybe we will be left with just family feuds instead of racism?? Any other families out there like mine? Personally I think it is a good thing and we have some hellava cute kids running around during our last family reunion in 2016.

5 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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About Osaka lighting the Olympic flame. (Original Post) joetheman Jul 2021 OP
My goddaughter, the daughter of my first cousin, is half Chinese Glorfindel Jul 2021 #1
Then the world stands a better chance of getting along...maybe?? joetheman Jul 2021 #2
Oh, I hope so! Glorfindel Jul 2021 #3
I'm good with that Jilly_in_VA Jul 2021 #4
Great family. LOVE IS THE KEY. We will probably be long gone before these kids take over. joetheman Jul 2021 #5

Glorfindel

(9,714 posts)
1. My goddaughter, the daughter of my first cousin, is half Chinese
Sat Jul 24, 2021, 05:27 PM
Jul 2021

I couldn't love her more if she were mine. I also have second cousins who are half Black and other cousins who are half Jewish. My niece is married to an Ecuadoran and a cousin is married to a Venezuelan woman. We have a big gathering/reunion every Thanksgiving, and I can't wait. There were only 21 of us last year because of COVID-19, but there should be many more this year. As far as I know, we're all fully vaccinated. You're right about the cute kids!

Shorter answer: Yes, there are other families like yours.

Jilly_in_VA

(9,940 posts)
4. I'm good with that
Sat Jul 24, 2021, 05:59 PM
Jul 2021

My family of origin is so WASP it would make your teeth hurt, though I recently discovered that I have Black cousins thanks to Ancestry DNA (not clear about the degree, I think they're about third cousins, doesn't really matter but I'm delighted). My children's father's family is about the same, mostly German on one side, Scottish and English on the other with some mysteries about his mother's dad (she was born out of wedlock). His sister's first husband was a native of Guam, though, so he did have two pretty nieces with that racial mixture.

Which brings me to my grandkids. My first grandson (not the oldest, which I will explain in a moment) is as WASP as the rest of us, blonde, blue-eyed, and all that. Then my daughter had a liaison with a Black man who she chose, for reasons of her own, not to marry, which produced a son. Later on she married a Puerto Rican guy with whom she had another son. Here's where it gets interesting. He was wild in his younger days and had two sons with an Anglo woman who he did not marry, and then he married a Black woman who he got pregnant and had 4 more kids, two of each. (This was before he even met my daughter.) They divorced and he kind of ran wild for awhile before meeting my daughter, settling down with her, and producing the aforementioned youngest grandson with her. About 4 years ago he learned that during that wild spell between his divorce and meeting my daughter he had fathered another son with a woman in another county so he set out looking for that boy. (He's always been responsible about his kids and supported them so I can't fuss about it.) It took him awhile but he finally located him under some pretty rough circumstances. The boy's mother is not responsible, he was in foster care and he had run away. Once he was found, his father went to court and got guardianship. In the last 5 years, because of a variety of circumstances, he and my daughter had gotten custody of all of his minor children, so this one was one more of "yours, mine, and ours". They are a great bunch of kids who really all look like they belong in the same family....as his sister says, the various shades of Puerto Rico. They all call me Grandma and their dad's mom "Lita" (short for "abuelita&quot . My daughter is a green-eyed brunette who jokes that she can "pass" too! And that brings me to the last grandchild, who isn't really "blood". I adopted her mother informally after she had lost both of her parents. She was then a young adult and was going through some awful stuff. She'd been a friend of my daughter's and had been in and out of my house forever. When she got pregnant unexpectedly it was my kid who helped her figure out how to deal with it and who went down to Florida where she lives now and was effectively her doula. So naturally I am Grandma J to baby P (well, "Grandy J" is what she calls me and I like that better!). P"s mom calls herself "the whitest Black person you ever met" (she is!) and her dad is an enrolled member of the Muscokee Creek nation but his dad is white. Baby P is a brown-eyed blonde. One of my grandsons is about to make me a great-grandma to a little girl whose dad is Black and Puerto Rican and whose mom is blonde. So here we are in one little family, all shades and colors.

And meanwhile, one of my brother's boys is married to a lovely lady who is Ukrainian. They live in Kyiv and have a baby girl who is already babbling in two languages. The other married a woman from Mexico but they don't have children. Yet anyway.

The next generation could be anything. Anything at all. I just want them to love each other.

 

joetheman

(1,450 posts)
5. Great family. LOVE IS THE KEY. We will probably be long gone before these kids take over.
Sat Jul 24, 2021, 09:13 PM
Jul 2021

But I wish them all a civil unprejudiced lifetime. The stress of American racism is just really tough on all of us.

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