More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
As I created my identity, it became a patchwork quilt, a mosaic of irregular shards and pieces I meticulously tried to meld together into Jason Michael Bosak Diakité.
I was never American, never Swedish, never white but never black either. I was a no-man’s-land in the world.
came from and were shipped to in chains. I am all the colors and shades of their skin. I am their rage and their longing, their hardships, successes, and dreams. I am the intersection of Slovakia, Germany, France, Africa, South Carolina. Of white, black, and Cherokee.
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?
I’ve wondered who I really am, or rather, what I am. I’m not white or black; I’m not American or Swedish. I’m rootless. It hurts me that Dad doesn’t want to, or can’t, see how complex the question of identity has been in my life.
We’ve forgotten how important silence can be. It’s room to let our thoughts settle. Usually, we talk our way through everything and think about it later. Maybe that’s why we so often say things we come to regret.
“Why not focus on the positive things African Americans do today?” he argued. “The problem with hip-hop is that it holds up a magnifying glass to the most dysfunctional parts of the ghetto, and African Americans’ complete lack of a chance in life. They inherit hopelessness. The hopelessness that’s forged into the bricks and concrete of the ghetto, that drips down the facades of the buildings, impregnating everything and everyone that lives there.
People ought to tell the stories of what African Americans have managed to accomplish despite slavery.”
Just like some of the sweetest forms of expression the human race has ever invented, like jazz and blues. They were born out of misery
I didn’t set foot in South Carolina again until 2002, and to be perfectly honest, I still felt uncomfortable entering the state. Some things have changed, but that goddamn racism in the South—it lives on.”
“It was during those days I started to identify with black people,” Mom says. “For a while, I even believed I was black. I was fascinated by black skin, and I often looked in the mirror, surprised to find that I wasn’t black. That’s how much I wanted to take part in Madubuko’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences.”
My metamorphosis is unstoppable.
In Louisiana, according to a law in place until 1983, a person was black if their blood was one-thirty-second or more black.
Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, that both the enslaved and the enslavers were ruined by this cruel system. Blacks were treated like animals and whites turned into animals.
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.
