I am Latina but pass as White

[BumRushDaShow]

51. You hit on the problem that we have all struggled with for centuries

Some else defining us and having the "power" to enforce those "definitions" despite our battles for this sort of thing to stop.

The one discussion that is endlessly debated within the black community is pointing to other ethnic groups/nationalities "of color" and how they demand that they "not to be defined" by the PTB in the U.S., and how the black community can't seem to do be able to effectively do the same. And it's a multi-pronged problem - mostly because many "black Americans" (as in those who trace ancestry in the U.S. pre-Emancipation), have little or no knowledge of their original ethnic groups. And this is due to the nature of the enslavement and the purposeful mixing of not only African ethnic groups that mostly originated along the 16,000 mile West Coast of Africa (as well as from countries inland from the coast), but the admixtures with the native/indigenous populations here in the U.S. in many locations, and admixtures with the European-descended slaveholders themselves.

The early ("mainstream AA&quot attempts at even embracing the African continent at all, had activists try to pick a nation that may have been known to have provided the most "chattel" in the trade. But this still leaves out those marched to those West African ports from Central Africa, Southern, and sometimes even East Africa, as well as those who were forced to inter-breed (or who out of love or necessity, established a relationship) across ethnicities once on a plantation. So AAs really are in a no-man's land thanks to this system, although recent DNA-genealogical testing has been helping to narrow down those ethnic origins (at least as much as can be ascertained based on the ethnic sampling that is used for comparison).