#mixed girls

Duchess Meghan

I fully expect this to be the one and only post I ever do about Amber Rose.

Occasionally, Amber Rose surfaces in pop-culture as a trending topic. I don’t look into her often, but when I do usually I understand where she’s coming from, if not agree with the point she’s trying to make.

Recently, Kanye West called her into a twitter-fight between himself and Wiz Khalifa–and she shut it down entirely. And as amusing as that is and no matter how much I identify with the things she said and does – there’s one thing about her that bothers me.

Amber Rose has repeatedly denied being a black woman. “Portuguese, Scottish, Italian and Irish“ or more often, “Cape Verdean.”

Yet she clearly appears to have features heavily associated with blackness: full lips, an olive complexion (relatively common in black people), a thick, very curvy body, and a large round butt. The icing on the cake: she has an African mom. She still says, “I’m not black.”

Many of the descriptors she uses for herself are nationalities that do not define her race. It’s as if stating countries which a possess white populations and/or have substantial European influence is a free pass on blackness – As if black people didn’t live in Portugal, Scotland, Ireland or Cape Verde. As if her mom didn’t wasn’t African.

But rest assured: her mother is African and she is brown-skinned.

Cape Verde, where Amber Rose’s mother is from, is an island off the coast of Western Africa. It’s an African Country. Africans have been there since the Portuguese trafficked African (black) slaves from the African continent in 1456.

And because of the heavy European influence and racial mixing in Cape Verde, they’re considered a mixed people – And According to Amber Rose, she views herself as Creole:

“With my family, they feel like they’re more superior or better than an African American because we’re Creole and we have culture and that’s something I battle with most of my life.” (source)

Amber Rose was born and raised in America. Her mother is a brown-skinned (black) African woman, she has a white father (Irish and Italian descent), and because she has light skin, she has people defending her as non-black.

“I do not consider myself a black women, absolutely not. [I consider myself] biracial.”

In the United States (and many other places), any black ancestry easily qualifies a person as black – especially if that person is not white passing and especially if that person has an African mother. Amber Rose is not white passing. Her mother is African. She openly participates in black culture. And still, she hesitates to even use the descriptor “black” in reference to herself. In every interview I’ve found and every quote, she is quick to claim her white ancestry but does not even utter “black” or “African.”

She denies it.