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Must I have just one home? Must I have just one origin? Is that to make it easier for those around me, or to flat out appease them? To make it simpler for them to put a label on me, measure me, place me, fence me in, and judge me?
All those hours I spent, as a nine-year-old, staring at the white flecks on the back of my right hand, thinking maybe there was something white under my brown skin. Maybe the white spots would grow and make me into who I wanted to be. White?
The question is, what happens faster—the wind eroding a cliff, or cultures and attitudes shifting in the rural South?”
“For the thousandth time, Dad, that attitude is so antiquated I can’t even handle it.”
an impatient tone that’s almost exclusively reserved for my father.
Some things have changed, but that goddamn racism in the South—it lives on.”
“Their shape, the texture of the skin, the web of veins across their backs, the slenderness of the fingers . . . I can’t put my finger on what makes a nice hand so nice, but when I see a pair of nice hands, I know it right away.
One day, I’m playing with my tormentors; the next day, we fight after one of them throws those words in my face.
Besides having nonwhite skin at Tunaskolan, it’s not exactly a plus if your parents are or seem poor.
Rule number one is that black people greet each other. The brother nod.
Today, my skin color does not automatically make me someone who can be bought and sold, like my grandfather’s grandmother, Myla Miller, or her husband, Jack.
In Louisiana, according to a law in place until 1983, a person was black if their blood was one-thirty-second or more black.
I think of them as a quiet warning to the white world that soon, soon the whole world will be brown.
It’s like I’ve tried to dog-ear all the places I feel the need to bring home with me in the form of artifacts;
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. calls “the value gap” in his book Democracy in Black: race relations in the US are built upon a chronic undervaluation of black bodies in comparison to white ones,
You don’t seem to understand the amount of effort life has demanded, his look seems to say. Once again, my chest is full of a nagging conscience, that familiar feeling that I’m not grateful enough, not a good son.
We humans may have endless plans, schedules, ideas, and desires, but death can step right in and put an end to everything. In the middle of a sentence.
Perhaps suffering isn’t just a fate; maybe it’s an identity. Maybe you’re in greater social danger if you read books and dream of getting an education than if you just stand around a street corner all day in a size-XXXL T-shirt, without any plans or any hope for a brighter tomorrow.
Micro-steps of progress.
I don’t understand his need to revise the truth and his history, his tendency to sanitize things that happened. It makes me doubt the honesty with which he talks about himself and his emotions.
“If you constantly tell a child it’s good-for-nothing, lazy, thieving, and ugly. If you hit that child and treat it without respect its whole life. What kind of person will it become? What do you think that child will do? We are that child. Four hundred years of abuse, pain, and murder have made us what we are today. Beautiful, terrible, dysfunctional, and strong.”
Especially considering that it’s always the same race rioting, and always for similar reasons: rage at the incessant pressure people are forced to endure, brought forth by slavery, government oppression, and systematic terror that continues century after century.
Of the nearly 2.2 million prisoners in the US, almost 40 percent are black. Nowhere is structural racism more evident than in the US prison system. Black people are five times more likely to end up behind bars than white people are.
How can you survive as a black person in the United States? How can you bear being constantly slapped in the face by the hand of society, being held in its stranglehold, without wanting to grab the first weapon you find and strike back full force?
As the old men chat, I think about the human need to experience life with others. The joy in Earl’s and Dad’s faces, because each can bear witness to the other’s past.
It’s easier to dehumanize people if you never sit in the same room or take a meal under the same roof with them.
The yoke of history can never be cast off if you don’t first recognize that history for what it was.
When black people could no longer be considered property with intrinsic value, the lynchings began. Terror as an everyday practice to keep the oppressed in check.
I don’t know if it’s my own talent for self-pity I see in him that makes me feel this mixture of scorn and sadness, or if it’s just my grief at watching Dad waste away before my eyes while nothing and no one, least of all he himself, can do anything to stop it.
Their cynicism has become pathological. In their case, maybe it’s just easier to hope as much of the white world burns up as possible, the world that has oppressed them, their families, their forefathers.
I can’t live with the idea that I will bear that guilt, that chafing conscience, for the rest of my life. The chain of guilt and dysfunction that has run through our family for generations and centuries must be broken. I don’t want to pass this on to my future children. I must find a way to transform the guilt I carry in my chest into sympathy and empathy.
Until today, I’ve thought I must defend myself against Dad’s guilt-trips to keep myself from becoming like him. But now I realize that empathy might be the key that unlocks the chain of guilt once and for all.
It’s what strangers’ eyes notice first, what may prompt them to form preconceived notions about who I am and what I’m like.
But many people still observe, analyze, and explain the world and themselves through the lens of whiteness. Myself included, for so long. My blackness was hard to love. I spent a lot of time being ashamed of it.
For most of my life, I have proclaimed myself half American, half Swedish, half white, half black. But now I choose to say I’m both white and black, both Swedish and American. German, French, Slovak, African, Cherokee. All these identities belong to me. I’ve gone from being half to double, and in that seemingly tiny semantic shift lies one of my greatest strides of identity. Doubleness is infinitely better than halfness.
