Are mixed people snitches?

My brother recently took offense to one of my posts, Regarding Stuff White People Like, where I wrote that being mixed is "part Donnie Brasco." I sat in the room while he read, hoping he would approve and maybe even chuckle. But before reaching the second paragraph, he threw up his hands as if scalded by the keyboard, swiveled his chair authoritatively and informed me quite seriously that I was mistaken.

I don't know what kind of mixed you are, he said, but I'm no snitch.

Ouch.

I tried to explain. I meant racial informants, not the rats that our favorite rappers taught us to despise. I meant unofficial spokespeople, like when back in the day my bad ass friends elected me the pale and innocent-looking ambassador to calm the respective parents/teachers/police officers and assure them we weren't up to any trouble. Stool pigeon in the sense that us mixed folk have been on both sides of the interrogation room glass, translating and being translated. In other words, we are cultural double agents allowed special access to information usually reserved for insiders. Definitely not snitches.

But then I started to think... There have certainly been times when white people let me in on a secret, usually unknowingly, and I've practically sprinted to share this insight with everyone else. (Someone remind me to write a post about the white people I overheard discussing why they won't vote for Obama). But isn't this more like telling the hoppers that the boys in blue are planning a bust of their corner? Given black/white power dynamics, this can hardly classify as snitching. We'd be crooked cops, maybe. Even those torturous afternoons in college when I was forced to tediously e-x-p-l-a-i-n some feature of black culture to white students wouldn't make me a narc per se. Snitches get stitches, everyone knows that.

Despite my arguments, my brother is demanding a retraction. He knows that I never watched the second tape of Scarface, that I know all the words to Carlito's Way, and that I would spit on that guy from Goodfellas. He even remembers how I used to threaten to fight Diane Keaton in the second Godfather movie. Nonetheless, my brother looks at me funny now and only talks to me in the car with the radio on. I'm definitely not retracting my analogy, but it certainly leaves something to think about...

In the case that mixed people are indeed snitches, the rest of you might want to think twice before divulging guarded racial secrets in our presence. Or simply move to Maine and avoid California, Alaska, Oklahoma (wtf?), northern Michigan, and all Hawaiian islands. Fucking forget about it.