in my u-boat era

i usually block people who say these things to me, but since i have nothing else on tonight, i will explain for the billionth time why saying this to me or any other Aboriginal person is at best inappropriate and at worst wildly racist and disrespectful because that is how i choose to use my various privileges, including my fair appearence.

in so-called Australia, Aboriginal peoples (Blakfellas) do not practice blood quantum. you either are Aboriginal or you aren't. no matter how much milk you add to coffee, it is still coffee, and all that jazz.

Blakness, for us, is not defined by how someone looks. For someone to be Aboriginal, they must a) identify as Aboriginal b) have Aboriginal ancestry, and c) be accepted as such by their mob/nation

you'll notice none of that is about appearance. this is because us Blakfellas were subjected to several genocidal eugenics policies, including legislation to "breed the Black out". the Stolen Generations were the result of a series of government interventions whereby Blak children were forcibly removed from our homelands and placed into domestic slavery and servitude. often the Stolen Generations were sterilised (as were Aborginal women in poor and remote communities) and/or had no way of knowing how to get back to their families. Aboriginal people who were removed were often forbidden by law from marrying other Aboriginal people, were raised without knowledge of their heritage, and were forced to marry into white families who abused them, etc.

the only way for Aboriginal people to gain social mobility for many decades was to either refuse or hide their identity and/or marry non-Aboriginal people. Aboriginal peoples in many parts of their own lands could not even be citizens until the 1970s. as a group, we were not even included in the national census as people until 1967; before that, we were classified as flora and fauna.

At least 10,000 Aboriginal people were killed in the initial Frontier Wars by colonial forces out of an original pre-colonial population estimated to be about 750,000.

Those that remained, and their descendants like my mother, my grandfather, my great grandparents were and still are subjected to endless legislation that was built with the intention to genocide us; to either kill us or force us to give up our identity and culture.

for all those reasons, and many more, Blakfellas are not solely identified by our looks. In part because how we look was subjected to a generations-long eugenics campaign by the federal government that claimed our lands as their own as a means by which to deny us our culture, our families, and our humanity.

the reason USAmerican racialisation of Blackness doesn't apply is because 1) why would it? this is a completely different place, and 2) because in the USA, racial Blackness was defined heavily by the one-drop rule. In so-called Australia, the colonial racialisation policy was closer to the opposite. As soon as us Blakfellas were removed from our communities or had mixed heritage, or married a non-Aboriginal person, this was viewed as grounds to erase our identity under the colony's law - which was the goal! Of course, Blakfellas still suffered racism under this rule because, yk, it was genocide.

I will not share my family's own history wrt these genocidal policies. i do not owe you, or any stranger being so condescending as to think that mine or anyone else's Blakness is a matter of appearance only, the stories that explain how my family survived genocide.

this kind of anonymous comment, which likens us to Black Americans? you have so little regard for Aboriginal peoples that you wouldn't even take 10 seconds to have a google why Aboriginal peoples call ourselves Blak, why Australia's colonial racial history is not like America, and why this fuckass question is incredibly racist.

Do you assume all Black people are interchangeable?? That we do not have our own histories, cultures all over the world???? the anti-Blackness you show both me as a Blak person and Black Americans in your assumption that we *should* be thought of the same because we are both Black is shameful.

finally, no one is "Black passing" because passing in a racial context is about Black people passing for white or non-Black. people who use the term passing like this, with no respect for what that word means, or the history behind it should pay a fucking fine.

Snowed In