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You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise. Maya Angelou
The coat. Woven of the same cotton he and all his family before him were forced to pick from dawn to dusk.
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?
Is that why I have spent so much time tormenting myself with these questions of identity? So I can give a simple answer when someone asks where I come from?
I’m not sure I’d ever felt so unwelcome in this place I thought was my homeland.
Yet I have always carried around the nagging feeling that I am only a guest in someone else’s home.
I have to find this last bit of mortar to secure the mosaic of my identity.
the phrase “life is short” is starting to feel inadequate. Life is also long.
Life is too short for me to waste it on sleepless nights and slow winter mornings, and too long not to dream of greater things than writing new lyrics, going to the next gig, and thinking about what sneakers to buy next.
In the South, though, cousins are cousins.
“Here. They’re good. Eat.” It’s his constant mantra.
During the course of one visit, I’m asked if I want a tangerine probably seven times. If I say no to an offer of food or fruit, he just waits and asks me again twenty minutes later. “There’s chicken in the fridge, Jason. Eat.” There’s always chicken in the fridge at Dad’s. Unless it’s already on the table. Chicken and jurisprudence might be the two things Dad loves most in the world, aside from his wife.
Even the grass is browner in the ghetto.
“It’s all about how we present ourselves, it’s all about appearances,” Dad admonishes. “That determines what sort of respect the rest of the world will show you. I thought I was careful to raise you to always dress properly, but your hip-hop generation doesn’t really understand the importance of that.
The hands got cramped from the repetitive motion of picking, the fingers fairly locked in place and callused from the pricks of the barbed, five-pointed cockleburs that cupped each precious boll. The work was not so much hazardous as it was mind-numbing and endless, requiring them to pick from the moment the sun peeked over the tree line to the moment it fell behind the horizon and they could no longer see.
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.
Poverty isn’t just an economic reality in Allendale. Poverty is part of the psychocultural spine that holds the whole place up.
I try to imagine my way into one of these souls. What it would have been like to be born into not questioning the situation I find myself...
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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.
African American author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his article “The Case for Reparations” that in the United States in the nineteenth century, aspiring to be able to afford slaves was as natural as saving up for a house or a condo today.
PTSD, my ass. We’re all suffering from it. It’s become part of our DNA.”
“Urban renewal means Negro removal,” as James Baldwin put it.
Perhaps there’s hope that the presence of white people in this particular part of the city doesn’t have to mean the absence of black people.”
I find the updated version of and role model for what a modern black person can be in people like Marcus Samuelsson. He was adopted from Ethiopia to Sweden and moved to the US at twenty-five. Today he serves Swedish gravlax on a bed of Ethiopian injera at his restaurant at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. Swedes, Harlemers, tourists from all over the world, middle-class Americans, movie stars, rappers, ex-presidents, and Ethiopian immigrants find their way there and dine side by side every evening. Marcus is so used to surfing between his identities that it happens seamlessly.
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.
This means the splitting up of the African American family was done systematically from the start. The dysfunctional situation many children grow up in, in places like South Central in Los Angeles, or the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, with absent fathers and defeated mothers, might have been created or imparted back in the time of slavery.
The great difference between them and me is that I grew up believing that I have certain rights that no one can take away from me, while they grew up with the certainty that society would never lift a finger to help them—in fact, society would destroy them for the tiniest misstep.
“Dick Gregory said it best,” Don continues. “The white man lives in the penthouse, which is why more white people commit suicide than blacks do. You know, if you already live in the basement, there’s nowhere to jump from.”
I don’t know how to explain what my skin color feels like; it’s omnipotent. Beautiful. It encompasses everything.
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.
Blackness is not alien to Americans in the same way it is to Swedes.
