I have Rape-Colored Skin
Here is the author:
Here is the article.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/opinion/confederate-monuments-racism.html
I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.
I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.
According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.
It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.
What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?
You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.
I look like this woman. I know my family's history very well. I know who was white, who was black, who was a slave, who was an overseer, who was native American. When my sister posted this article, it hit home so completely. Only the fact that I don't live in towns and states with these monuments is the difference between us.
Nobody likes to think of Thomas Jefferson as a rapist. But did Sally Hemmings really have a choice?
= new reply since forum marked as read
Just so you know
Like many African American families, mine is pale as hell. Always has been, going back over a century. Most of my ancestors passed the notorious “brown paper bag test,” used by social clubs within the black community to discriminate against any person darker than a literal brown paper bag. My relatives were pale enough that, to people outside the black community, they might be confused for Latino or Native or mixed. But while genetically they were mixed with a combination of mostly African and European ancestry, ethnically and racially, they were black. It’s just that some didn’t look it. Because they were all descendants of generations of nonconsensual sex between the slave-owning class and their slave captives.
With the energetic discussion of mixed-race identity in the modern era, it’s important to point out that there’s not a damn thing new about mixing between black and white people. Not only is it not a new phenomenon, it was a primary feature of American slavery. As a result, on average, African Americans have up to 24 percent European ancestry. By the end of America’s 246 years of slavery (1619–1865), there was so much generational intermixing, that there were a small minority of black slaves who, in all appearance, who looked 100 percent European.
[link:https://www.topic.com/passing-in-moments|
I found some paternal cousins of "mixed race" while doing genealogy research, and I automatically assumed the worst. Even told my siblings about how those ancestors were "obviously" slave-owning rapists at some point in the past, despite how I hadn't found evidence yet of them having slaves going back to the 1700's.
After further digging, it turned out that one of my distant uncles married a black woman despite how it was illegal in Virginia at the time. Also learned that the family were abolitionists while living among Quakers in "Loudoun Valley" of Virginia.
It's true that a very high percentage of African Americans have European ancestry, though. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has talked about the statistics on "Finding Your Roots" and elsewhere. Many are the descendants of white slave owners. 
Mankind and their phony social hierarchies. 
The first time I saw this, it was just too much for me to post. This hits too close to home for me. I will only say, bravo! I thank you for your post. 
I am the same complexion as the author. Most people would say we look alike because they can't tell light skinned people apart...
My family's history is so complicated, with so much whiteness, and so much consensual lightening, I sometimes just feel very lost. I am light enough to benefit from white privilege. I have always been amused that I and most of my light friends have ended up with significantly darker husbands and wives. Kind of "forcing" the identity.
I'm in Maryland, and those statues and flags aren't in my face 24/7.
At any rate, I am REALLY glad that she wrote it, and I'm REALLY glad that so many white people are reading it, and having to examine hard truths. We were murdered and raped by so-called "heroes". And many who didn't do it, watched. When it comes to Washington, Jefferson, etc., they can stay up, but dammit, tell the whole story.
Slave owners enslaved their own offspring from the rapes.
SICK.
