The Happy Bantu and His Light-Skinned Children
/“Image BLACK MAN and son in Black & White - ODT, B&W Portrait by jfinnirwin is licensed under CC BY 2.0.”
For quite some time, I’ve noticed a familiar occurrence in my neighborhood that typically happens every Saturday at the food market on the corner of 110th Street near the park. This phenomenon is the peculiar sight of dark-skinned Black American men, Bantus, pushing their lighter-skinned children in strollers or carrying them on their shoulders while speaking in a loving and affectionate fatherly manner. “Oh, look over there, that’s a duck, ducks make quacking sounds, quack, quack, quack.” The children laugh and imitate their daddies. The mothers, whom I seldom see with them, are likely light-skinned Negroid or Caucasian.
These Bantu men always observe me with bug-eyed curiosity; perhaps I’m a reminder of what their mixed-race children might look like in the future. They particularly want white people to see them as good, responsible, loving black fathers, fully capable of supporting a family, even though I suspect their absent wives are the real breadwinners, paying the rent or mortgage and working long hours to provide for a comfortable New York lifestyle. When these wives and mothers finally emerge from the shadows, they’re often out of shape and quite ordinary. But to the Bantus, they are the standard of beauty, more exquisite than any black woman who has ever walked the planet.
What bothers me is not who or what these people are, but the hypocrisy of their behaviour. Many of these same Bantu men will eventually go online and talk shit about mulattoes, especially mulatto males, which I am one, although their own children resemble the very people they seem to have a problem with. Also, it makes me wonder why so many American black men never show the same degree of parental love or responsibility for all the dark skin babies they produce.
Unfortunately, when an American Bantu is forced to pay child support and spend time with his black children, you won’t hear any tender, loving words about ducks or see him goofing around with his kids on the playground. Instead, all you’ll witness is verbal cruelty and impatience. Why is there a difference? Because Bantu men despise their own color and, as a result, the color of their offspring. They long to be white or mulatto, but they never will be.
Black women, keenly aware of the Bantu preference for white or lighter-skinned women, seldom protest, and many will continue to have more children with the same men who want nothing to do with them. Crazy, right?
As a result, an alarming number of black American women—over eighty percent—struggle to raise two, sometimes three, young children alone, without a man present for financial and emotional support. Yet, the majority of these women still refuse to partner with men of other races or even lighter-skinned black men or mulattos. Why?
If this trend continues, I believe that African Americans will remain at the bottom of the social and economic ladder for generations to come.