I Am the Death of the Black African American

I don’t like when people call me racist.  How is recognizing and accepting one’s identity being racist?  Racism, as much as we hate to admit it, is a core component of our society’s foundation.  So to speak of one’s identity without speaking of race is extraordinarily difficult and frustrating.  When I walk down the street, people see a non-black.  But I was raised to say something to the effect of ‘I identify as African American.’  This is an inherently confusing situation to suffer through, let alone to try and explain to people why I think the way I do about interracial breeding.  Let’s face it, as much as science tries to write off race as a ‘fiction,’ differences between ‘groups of people’ materialize; race happens to be an easily recognizable difference between groups of people.  It is even a part of biological science that race is a trait found in our chromosomes, and it just so happens that the trait of dark skin is a dominant trait, and the trait for light skin is a recessive trait.  All I’m trying to say about interracial breeding is why weaken your bloodline?  If you’re smart enough to know you ‘love’ somebody, then why can’t you be smart enough to know that you’re killing yourself when you ‘love’ outside your race?  We are talking about romantic love too, because let me tell it, and we are all supposed to love one another.  But romantic love is beyond Platonic love; romantic love is the idea people are meant to be together.  What does it mean to be ‘meant for each other?’

I don’t think I’m personally going to find out the answer to that question, but in the meantime, know this:  Every day I look in the mirror I do see the death of the black African American community.  I am no longer black but am African American still, and I feel all the pain of being African American without being black.  I am not considered black by most if not all of society, yet I have to deal with the agonizing forces of privileged versus non-privileged people.  Put me up against a dark skinned person, and it’s all about what they can do better than me.  Put me up against a light skinned person, and it’s all about my shortcomings.  I am never valued just for being myself.  Most people know who or what they are because people tell them.  Not as labels, but just to let them know, so they won’t have to wander around life surrounded by mysteries and secrets.  What a concept.  I, on the other hand, have no idea what I’m good at, have no idea who I am, and what’s worse is that nobody cared to tell me before and they still don’t care to tell me now.  On top of not looking like the race and ethnicity that I am.  So in a racial, capitalist society, I am basically a ghost.  I mean like, literally a ghost, and not just because of my complexion.

So when I rant against interracial breeding, I am pleading for understanding that it’s not about you, it’s about your kids.  You didn’t have to grow up in our society looking one race and actually being another.  You didn’t have to explain to the ever so curious human being ‘what are you mixed with?’  And don’t blame the curiosity.  It’s part of the fabric of our society to be racial and ethnically motivated, and there really isn’t anything wrong with it, if we could have some order about ourselves in our treatment of the subject.  I am not racist, that is my story and I’m sticking to it.  I don’t believe one race or ethnicity is better or worse than others; it is a scientific fact though that dark skin is a dominant gene and light skin is a recessive one.  If you don’t believe me ask my high school biology teacher.  She’s really smart.  And she let me open a pig’s skull and look at its brain too.

About Interracial Breeding in Our Society (please read past the part about Derrida to get to the interracial breeding part)

Not Nae 2Real ...

A couple of weeks ago, I went into an explanation on a post about why I used the pen name Nae 2Real.  I have now decided that using this pen name isn’t one of my better ideas.  So, for the people that know me by my regular name, just know that yeah I’m still JaNae.  But for my blogs, I’m just going to go by Denise.  I think it’s sort of like the same thing with college.  I told a bunch of people my name was a bunch of things because I really didn’t know what to go by.  I wasn’t trying to confuse people, but it’s a sticky situation when you grow up with one name only to find out legally your name is something else.  I didn’t know my first name until … let’s just say I was being bothered and learning new stuff about myself, when I should have already knew this stuff about myself and should not have been bothered. 

I do have to say, though, that I don’t want to just be called anything.  There are choices of what I have to go by.  I don’t really care to have Nae 2Real to be one of the names I go by though.  Times are good, times are bad, but sometimes, there’s no time at all.

My Beautiful Religion ... and Our Impending Destruction

I’d like to try to explain the objective-metaphoric/metaphysical (see Objective Beauty and Structure for more information).  I think for our purposes here I will refer to the objective-metaphoric/metaphysical as the objective-metaphoric, with the implication of the metaphysical inherent in the metaphoric.  It would be one thing to be completely immersed in one cultural institution or another, such as family, school, or church.  Sometimes people are hypnotized by their zeal for self-interest in the name of any of these cultural institutions.  But when within these cultural institutions we are exposed to more than one perspective, form becomes free from force and develops into structure, which structure can then be viewed economically to determine an objective-metaphoric explanation of beauty.

Take, for example, my perspective of the Catholic religion.  I was born Catholic but was not fully immersed in it, or at least not as much as most parishioners.  In the course of time though, I had attended a bunch of different churches outside the Catholic Church, and studied a lot of religions through life experience and school.  Ultimately I came to the conclusion that the Catholic religion is the religion that makes the most sense, principally and philosophically.  I had especially started to develop this observation after I learned about the Protestant Reformation in a Western art class.  I actually understand the argument that rich people should not receive greater favor from being able to ‘buy indulgences.’  It’s the same way in our society today; the rich shouldn’t be able to be rich while the greater majority of people are poor or disenfranchised.  But in rebuttal for the Church, it could have been a marketing strategy, not only to get more people into mass, but to get more people to help financially support the church.  Of course the church will ask for money, but it’s not the money that is evil, it depends on who has the money and what they do with the money that is either good or evil.  Because ‘for the love of money is the root of all evil.’  It doesn’t say ‘money is the root of all evil.’  So when the church asks for tithes, it is for the maintenance of the church, and not because the pope is evil.

What I disagree with Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation about is that the Church’s selling indulgences is a bad thing.  Bad thing perhaps being an understatement, seeing how Martin Luther broke the Catholic Church up into Protestantism, and then Protestantism further broke itself down into denominations.  So there was a concerted effort to show people that the Catholic Church was wrong, and that people should abscond from it.  Like I said a few moments ago, finding ways to finance the Church and its maintenance is not a crime or a sin, and even if it was a sin, surely it is not a mortal one because God understands we are here to work and toil in order to survive.  The Church has to survive like everybody else; the Church is the house for God, and God intends on leading the parishioners, but the Church is still maintained by man.  The human body is a finite and fallible structure, and while the Holy Spirit can reach through the smallest crevices, man is still prone to screwing up, so to speak, since ‘to err is human, to forgive is divine.’

If the human body is a finite and fallible structure, then the body of the Church should be an infinite and infallible structure.  And to address the problems with the priests in the past, all priests are not pedophiles, just like all pedophiles are not priests.  Further, priests are expected to have the Holy Spirit in their hearts, but if they don’t truly possess the Spirit, even though they might say they do, delinquencies will happen.  When these delinquencies happen, the most we can do is support the victim and overwhelm the victim with well wishes and wishes for recovery.  The Church performs a very important service to society by telling people about God’s will for forgiveness and peace.  These are the two tenets of Catholicism that are the most beautiful to me.  It just seems a lot less complicated and a lot more comforting knowing that it’s okay to be a flawed human and God will still forgive us, as long as we truly let the Holy Spirit in our hearts.  Other religions make claims for forgiveness, but in practice, these other religions are mostly fire and brimstone principally, and extraordinarily oppressive philosophically. 

I can say that my views of the Catholic Church are not indoctrinated, because of my experiences with so many churches and religions.  I wasn’t looking for flaws with the other churches, I was looking for a church to go to, because for some reason or another, it was hard for me to get into a Catholic church.  But after going to all those churches, the only church I could still really believe in was the Catholic Church. 

I could go into how being Catholic can seem oppressive (but not extraordinarily so), and how violence underlies the whole religion, but why should I do that if when I think about it, life in general is oppressive and violent?  Even if there were no religions, life would be oppressive and violent, purely scientifically speaking.  So yes, to me it makes sense that Catholicism is oppressive and violent, but to me that only speaks to the forgiveness and peace that is taught in mass.  Life is bad, we are bad, but God isn’t bad, so put your faith in Him, and He will forgive you and bless you with peace.  What can be more beautiful than that?

Life isn’t easy.  We all need a break, whether it’s now or later.  Call God an invisible sky person if you want, I won’t worry about it.  You are just a man, part of mankind, just like myself.

"He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”  John 3:18 

My view of the Catholic Church surpasses the subjective-metaphoric and leads into the objective-metaphoric because I use the site/force standard on a structure with form and meaning.  The site is the Church and the force is spiritual, while the structure’s form is the religion and its meaning is its tenets.  Because of my experiences with the other churches, I was and am able to observe the function of the Catholic Church from the inside enough to know what it’s about and from the outside enough to know how it’s different from other churches.  My description of its beauty, the tenets of forgiveness and peace, are objective-metaphoric and not subjective.  The objective-metaphoric is a logical deduction based on actual facts of presence, as opposed to the subjective-metaphoric, which is purely speculative.  Therefore, if for nobody but myself, a greater weight of truth can be lent to my own view of the Catholic Church.

One way or another, we are being punished for destroying Earth.  Whether we see it scientifically or spiritually, we are being destroyed, right along with Earth, by forces outside mankind.  It is possible that we are destroying ourselves, but does it occur to anybody that our self-destruction is a result of our response to outside forces that are invading us?  We are all only human, and part of the human condition is that we are finite and flawed.  We have a definite physical presence that begins and ends, and we are not perfect.  These qualities don’t have to be weaknesses, but the force of our destruction makes them like that.

As a matter of fact, science and religion are not all that different.  Science and religion are both structural systems we use to deal with existence on Earth.  They both aspire to and are inspired by forces greater than themselves; these aspirations and inspirations are what drive us, in the name of progress, to destroy ourselves.  So whether we see life scientifically or spiritually, these outside forces that are greater than us are driving us to destroy ourselves.  And the sources of these forces are one and the same.  These forces have just been labeled differently by different people.  Eventually, our desires for greatness will fail us all.

'There Is No Place for Myself in Society with This Knowledge'