Nate Livingston BANNED From Blogger!!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, a legend of the Cincinnati blogosphere, my old Aiken High School buddy, Nate Livingston, has been BANNED from Blogger - presumably for publishing the names, dates of birth, addresses, and various other personal information associated with several individuals he was mad at for, as he explains it, posting personal information about his daughter.

I just found out about this myself from a comment over at the Cincinnati Beacon.

My guess is that it won't take more than a couple of days for Nate to be back up and running on Wordpress or somewhere of that sort.

Now, onto the rest of the comment from "Urbanists II is Dead" - he doesn't seem to get the point on my latest riff in response to a comment that someone made that "Nate Livingston is a racist".

A few months back, The Dean posted a considerable diatribe taking umbrage with the fact that the media calls Barack Obama "Black", whereas, so far as we know, Obama's Anestry-By-DNA test would come back almost exactly 1/2 African and 1/2 European, or, in conventional terms, almost exactly 1/2 "Black" and 1/2 "White".

However, somewhere in the last couple of generations, it stopped working like this. When I was in high school, occasionally a few people would be called "mixed", but, by the time I got to high school this practice had pretty much stopped and the term became "light-skinned black".

And then of course sometime in the last 20 years it seems that pretty much so long as there are any visible African traits left in a person at all, even if they are 1/4 or even 1/8 African agains 3/4 or 7/8 European, they tend to still be called "Black".

This change in procedure I remember being articulated the most specifically by Halle Berry's mother, who, in an interview said that she, if I remember the words correctly, "raised Halle exclusively Black". I imagine this may have been to avoid confusion or something of the sort.

Then The Dean comes along and somehow takes great umbrage with the fact that, if you can follow this logic, the fact that the media calls Obama "Black" negates the White ancestry of his own children.

Get with the program, dude.

Henry Louis Gates: "Does it upset you that we found this much European ancestry in your background?"

Maya Angelou: "Why? It's who I am."

Yes, you can be absolutely, 100%, unabasedly, unashamedly (reviewing the Trinity United Church of Christ web site quickly) Black and STILL have a European-linked Y-chromosome, European linked mitochondria and maybe pushing 7/8 European nuclear DNA.

The truly enlightened (and here's where I start an argument :) ) would get hip to the fact that having European ancestry and coming into contact with people of European ancestry is an inalienable element of BEING Black in America.

My comments of course were more about THE DEAN than about Nate.

You see - I knew Nate's family in high school.

In fact, I was in the motorcade with his sister when she was picked up by her prom date - a young man of considerable European and Native American ancestry who called himself "White". This was considered just slightly scandalous at the time, but I remember her mother saying something to the effect, "Oh, that's not so bad - I mean - goodness gracious - my grandmother married a White man."

Presuming that Nate and his sister had both parents in common, this makes Nate at least 1/8th European. According to The Dean, it sounds like if you have more than 1/8th of your ancestry different from your "primary" ethnic identity, you lose your ethnic identity privileges altogether. This would mean that Nate is neither White nor Black, and, if that were the case, I'd say it would be pretty difficult to be racist.

But of course Nate considers himself Black.

And maybe a little like Malcolm X, perhaps his knowledge of his European ancestry makes him even meaner?

Maybe we should just have Nate sit down with Maya Angelou for a heart-to-heart and he could at least keep himself out of trouble for a while ...

Related:
Nate Livingston– Get a Grip, Man! - Cincy Report