The Singular Power of Writing
lareviewofbooks.org
lareviewofbooks.org
I have a German immigrant mother with very olive skin. Her skin color is very close to that of some light skinned blacks. But, of course, she's "white" because she's German.
I have been told my father was 1/16th Cherokee.
I tend to not really fit in with white middle class Americans. I never really have. I'm too culturally different from them.
Of course, people of color don't want to claim me as one of theirs. Natives are extremely critical of people like me. I'm not really welcome by them.
I've started checking "decline to answer" the race question when filling out forms. The options they provide just don't seem to fit my reality and there isn't enough space to explain it. If I did, no doubt whoever read it would promptly conclude that I'm white and my discomfort with the question is neurotic and not legitimate.
Come to find out, French aristocratic youth rebelled and started dressing like the colorful, poor Romani (getting the label haute bohème) and the general stereotype that said poor Eastern Europeans must also obviously be from the nearest "eastern" country.
So, cultural appropriation and misidentification going back to the 19th century (an insult to both the Romani and the Bohemians).
Also strangely, I recall my father's older relatives frequently telling terrible jokes about and referencing others of the same identity as "bohunks" which I didn't discover until a few years ago was a racial slur. In a way, their adoptation of it seems to have been similar to the frequent use of the n-word in black hip-hop, rap and edgier pop culture.
There are similar stories about my mother's side of the family. The world is a strange, complex place, and somehow boiling that family history down to "white" just doesn't do it justice.
In the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs 67,000 mortgages were insured by the G.I. Bill, but fewer than 100 were taken out by non-whites.
I grew up in Columbus, Georgia in a house purchased using military benefits. My part Cherokee father was extremely white-passing, yet spent 18.5 years of his 26.5 year military career overseas.
He's no longer alive. I can't ask him if he did that to escape racism in America.
What if he hadn't successfully downplayed his part Native heritage? Would I have even grown up in a nice house in the suburbs?
After my father died, I tripped across a photo of a full-blooded Iroquois actor that looked uncannily like my father. I was already not comfortable with our social construct of race. But I just no longer can comfortably answer that question with stating "I'm white."
What makes me white? My skin color? If so, why is my darker skinned mother also white?
My socioeconomic background? I could argue that grows out of my father successfully downplaying his Native heritage. So does that make my whiteness a fiction? Perhaps even a lie?
My father made his own constructs. Which constructs are more "real" or more valid? His? Those of a nebulous racist thing we call society? Where is this thing we call society? Can I go talk to it?
No, society is just a sum total of something that grows out of a group of individuals. Individuals like my father.
My father chose to protect himself and his family. I can't find moral defect in that decision.
But I also find it increasingly offensive to even try to answer a question about my heritage with an answer from a canned list of arbitrary answers rooted in a long history of social BS where none of those answers remotely fits anything I would identify as.
I have long association with American military culture. Military dependent is not an option.
I was born and raised in The Deep South. Southerner is not an option.
I'm part German. German American is not an option.
I'm part Cherokee, but only a very small part. I don't even know what to call that. Mixed race doesn't really seem to fit this case. But why not? I look part Native to my German relatives. How many generations does it take to "erase" my Native blood so it no longer counts?
I'm not interested in trying to officially join the Cherokee Nation. I'm not interested in trying to qualify for scholarship money reserved for Natives. But isn't calling me white just another way of saying "those people" don't count?
If you aren't full-blooded Native, your Native ancestors don't count? Doesn't that further deepen a history of genocide? Many Natives were murdered by European settlers. Do we also need to murder any memory of them? Any trace that survived in mixed bloodlines?
Do we need to deny that "those people" are a part of us people, even if only a small part?
Why?
My brother was in Czechia on a recent business trip, and between his looks and last name, everyone there assumed he was a local... until he opened his mouth, at least.
If I am asked on a form, I'll typically put decline to answer or other.
However, I also acknowledge that how to reconcile the history of your family with your own identity as an individual is a difficult and personal decision... especially when the law is involved, such as / for example around tribal memberships.
As a side-note, I couldn't help but think of Kayne declaring that 'he's not black, he's Kanye' as an attempt to get across what Williams is talking about here. Of course, it tremendously backfired. I'm also reminded of some of Moran Freeman interviews, in which he cooly refuses to be pigeonholed.
I really appreciated this interview, including his assessment of Ta-Nehisi Coates. I'll have to pick up his book.
I was so excited to share this with everyone I know. I think about a great friend with a black father, now deceased. I always imagined what his father he might have related to life during a time when his marriage was illegal. This article really stimulated ideas like the way I imagined it was for him might not at all have been the case, which is wonderful to think about. And how my friend's relatives might have lost so much in their bigotry.
Then, I was left with this harrowing thought: what's the payoff for anyone to give up their identities (including racial identities, but also every other identity that binds us). I mean, it's a wonderful idea and wonderful documented here, but not everyone will move to France and investigate their thoughts. That made me sad. I'm doubtful that most people will read this interview, and doubtful most people that do read it will radically change their belief systems. I must include myself in that assessment to be honest.
I agree with this. I think calling people 'white' or 'black' is stupid and I don't do it (and not just for this reason). But Williams does use these words to refer to people elsewhere through the interview. I wonder why he does it, after making this explicit point?
But I disagree with him here (while finding a lot of the rest of what I read insightful). How we speak about people is not fixed and change can come from us choosing to speak differently. Not that I'm suggesting we force others to speak differently, but we can make the change ourselves (which will be heard by others and perhaps picked up).
He does it because those are realities. Instead of ignoring reality (people have different skin colors and ancestral lines), we should fix our racist perception (that the colors mater regarding people's worth and merit). Blacks or whatever should be able to claim their colors AND the rest be fine with it. Neither blacks nor whites should be asked to erase their colors (or other aspects of their identity).
Btw, the part about children not seeing color is not true either: several studies suggests that babies prefer their own colors when shown pictures of people.
Before modern "scientific" theory of races emerged (circa 18th century) to justify the slave trade and colonialism, and especially in the ancient world (Hellenistic, Roman, etc), you could be whatever color and nobody cared (they might still consider an african tribe primitive, but for the same reasons we consider them, e.g. hunter-gathered like living, no education, etc, and not for their color. The would not consider Ethiopians -- which were equally black-- for example primitive).
Someone like Herodotus could wander all around the middle east, Africa, etc and not consider the people "inferior" for being of different skins, just different. Even slavery wasn't based on race or color (slaves where just people from places who lost a war, or had debts).