Black Folks are Irish Too

If I get one more crack about the ‘black Irish’ this week I’ll scream. People here in Louisville, must have all failed history class or they were all taught from the same racist, revisionist history book. First thing: Black people in America are a mixed race. No one of slave descent (most non-immigrant Black folks in the USA) is of FULL African blood. Most of us have Y-chromosome DNA which passes from the father which traces back to Europe and most of our mitochondrial DNA which passes from the mother is from Africa. This is the reality of slavery. Something we like to forget. Something people are not taught. Something people don’t want to talk about. My family history is a little different but not uncommon: we have Irish blood through a marriage of choice between an Irish man (great-great-grandfather) and a Native American-Black woman (great-great-grandmother). And that’s just on my mother’s side. So, yes I’m Irish, Native American, African, and what I hear on my daddy’s side Arab as well. So, listen up, Black Folks are Black because just like the color black absorbs all the colors of the spectrum we absorb all the racial groups of the world to make one rainbow race.

Harlem Sweeties
by Langston Hughes

Have you dug the spill
Of Sugar Hill?
Cast your gims
On this sepia thrill:
Brown sugar lassie,
Caramel treat,
Honey-gold baby
Sweet enough to eat.
Peach-skinned girlie,
Coffee and cream,
Chocolate darling
Out of a dream.
Walnut tinted
Or cocoa brown,
Pomegranate-lipped
Pride of the town.
Rich cream-colored
To plum-tinted black,
Feminine sweetness
In Harlem’s no lack.
Glow of the quince
To blush of the rose.
Persimmon bronze
To cinnamon toes.
Blackberry cordial,
Virginia Dare wine—
All those sweet colors
Flavor Harlem of mine!
Walnut or cocoa,
Let me repeat:
Caramel, brown sugar,
A chocolate treat.
Molasses taffy,
Coffee and cream,
Licorice, clove, cinnamon
To a honey-brown dream.
Ginger, wine-gold,
Persimmon, blackberry,
All through the spectrum
Harlem girls vary—
So if you want to know beauty’s
Rainbow-sweet thrill,
Stroll down luscious,
Delicious, fine Sugar Hill.