Bad Bunny, America, and mestizaje
El mestizaje.
As I reflect on the performance this past Sunday by Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, I think back to an encounter I had with my abuela when I was very young. I made the announcement that there was no difference between Black and white people. That racism was stupid. That I didn't understand it. My abuela's skin was ivory white, her eyes a piercing blue. And this woman who I loved told me I was being silly. Black people had different hair, big noses, dark skin. They were nothing like "us".
Fast forward a few decades. I eagerly open up my 23&Me results. And it was just as I expected. About 75% of my genetics came from Spain. And 25%? Everywhere else. Africa. Indigenous. Even a bit of Azekanzi. I was proudly, gloriously mestizo. I was a mix of all the people which make up the Western Hemisphere, lands colonized and exploited, lands enslaved. And yet out of that conflict came this glorious culture, this deep art and literature and music. Choosing phenotypic certainty over genetic fact is a fool's game. Denigrating however much of your ancestry out of a desire for "purity" is like cutting off your hand because it offends you.
I think of Bad Bunny. He is a child of the mestizaje. His music is a mix of African and European. His music would not exist had this melding not occured. We walk the road our ancestors laid out, for both good and ill. From the crime of conquest and slavery came salsa, son, merengue, bachata. From it came Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. From it came Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Old World is addicted to what the New World creates. (Pun intended.) France and England, Spain and Portugal would have remained backwaters without the wealth that colonization brought. And yet we are more than them. We survived the crimes as both victims and perpetrators until we became something new. A new people for a new world.
Almost within hours of the NFL and Jay-Z announcing that Bad Bunny would be the Super Bowl performer, the howls rang out. It was illustrative to watch. The protests were solely xenophobic. The protests were solely against this brown person who sang only in Spanish daring to pollute America's sacred holiday. A segment of White America was suffering another existential slight, another extinction level event.
As I think on this, the answer is glaringly obvious. Black people in the US have a culture. Latinos in the US have a myriad of cultures from the nations from whence they came: nations, provinces, cities, villages. Asian migrants bring their cultures with them. But what is "white" culture? As you get adopted into whiteness, you lose whatever culture you had. You get blended and mashed into this amorphous "whiteness". And you center this whiteness, whatever its parameters, as normative. Anything which doesn't conform to it is suspect, alien, other. Dangerous. Seditious. Treasonous.
If the sad display put on by Robert Ritchie and his trio of talentless hacks is "all American", America—white America—simply won't survive. It has no depth. It has no breadth. It has no soul. America at its best is the melding of the cultures which inhabit the land. To the extent that you deny that you weaken the culture. There is no such thing as "white culture". That would be like saying that the French and Germans are interchangeable. But there is "American" culture. And it springs from its people, from all the places from where they came, from all the lives they had led. But accepting that would mean to accept over whom you've lorded it as equals. And, perhaps, more than equals. Robert Ritchie himself rose to fame by aping Black American culture. Ted Nugent would be playing skiffle music without the existence of the blues. White America has been so homogenized in the service of supremacy that it simply refuses to acknowledge its poverty without those upon whom it looks down. As the title of the book says, America is dying of whiteness. And it doesn't have much time left to take the cure which has always been there: Give up the idea that it is superior, that it by rights should dominate, and revel in the glorious mestizaje of this New World.