Light-skinned-ed Girl

Plans for the New Year

I know we're not supposed to make New Year's resolutions anymore, but still I do.  I make long lists of plans and goals to achieve during the new calendar year.  And I really do my best to follow-up with my plans.  This year my plans include finishing a draft of my novel project about Miss Lala, the mulatta strongwoman, AND selling it!  And also I plan to complete the collection of short stories about black Danes for which I have done so much research.

Twisted Curlz is going through a similar process, but I like her "twist" on it better.  She's written as a resolution a  Declaration of Independence.  Whereas my resolutions read like a long to-do list, her resolution/declaration gets to the bottom of what she wishes her life to be.  I'm going to take some time to write one for myself.  What's at the core of what I hope for myself for the new year?

Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People

Are you familiar with the Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People written by Maria P. P. Root?  I haven't looked at the manifesto (first published in 1996) in years.  I remember thinking then how polly-annish it was.  Then it seemed futile to think of my mixed-race heritage as anything that I could define.  Instead, it was an unspoken secret, and sometimes my shame.  Now, I find that I am living by the tenents of the Bill of Rights whether or not others accept those rights as mine.  I share the Maria P. P. Root's Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People here:

"I have the right

• not to justify my existence in this world
• not to keep the races separate within me
• not to be responsible for people's discomfort with my physical ambiguity
• not to justify my ethnic legitimacy
• to identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify
• to identity myself differently than how my parents identity me
• to identify myself differently than my brothers and sisters
• to identify myself differently in different situations
• to create a vocabulary to communicate about being multiracial
• to change my identity over my lifetime--and more than once
• to have loyalties and identify with more than one group of people
• to freely chooose whom I befriend and love"