Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Race was never an issue in my life -- until I fell in love.
Feb 17, 2000 | "I just don't like flat noses."
I dropped my knife with a clink. I had been smearing my scone with clotted cream, but now I wanted to take the porcelain tub of the stuff and chuck it at his chest. Here I was, across the table from the man I loved, and he'd just admitted he didn't want our kids to have African noses. I was dumbfounded.
Our earlier discussions had always been about the big bad societal issues -- discrimination, split loyalties, fitting in -- and they usually seemed as surmountable as steeplechase shrubs. When the jumps looked too high Id say: "Look, your own half-black, half-German girlfriend has a scholarship at Oxford and a promising future in politics. Life can be good for a mixed kid!" He'd calm down and wed talk about something else.
But his nose declaration silenced me.
While James (not his real name) was always earnest and eager in his desire to have a family with me, he had unwittingly stated what I'd always feared: That in the end, race would count -- against me. As I solemnly poured more tea, all I could think of was history's Tragic Mulatta: The archetype of the mixed-race woman light enough to "pass," but always rejected once her dark heritage was discovered.
The more we talked family, the more he sounded like a lost Faulkner character obsessed with poisoned bloodlines. It was as if he saw my genes as a ticking time bomb waiting to explode negroidness. He'd already told me stories of white couples giving birth to black babies (because of the sins of an errant ancestor) -- stories that annoyed me because they smacked of cautionary tales. While this wasn't Oxford, Miss., it was Oxford, England. Was he now speaking for his Empire past, giving voice to the collective fear that settler genes would be overrun by those of the natives?
Only the anthropologists know for sure, since James and I have long since broken up and no longer discuss such issues. As patently ridiculous as I found his concerns, I soon worried. Was there any legitimacy whatsoever to his fears? I wondered if "difference" ever undermined a parents ability to love, or be loved.
Im not the only one. My friends Bessie and Joel -- she a 29-year-old Texas Cajun, he a 32-year-old black D.C. native -- are a striking couple, one that would attract gazes even in a hate-free world. Day to day they survive the usual frictions, from the requisite stares in restaurants to the hurts of family disapproval.
One day I talked to Bessie, who expressed fears about one day having children with Joel. She told me about the time they were driving home and a group of black women pulled up and motioned for Joel to roll down the window. "They started yelling at him," Bessie remembered, "asking him why he was turning his back on black women." After that, Bessie became more hesitant about kids. "I didn't know if I wanted to put them through this type of situation," she said.
And she wondered if she would always fit into her children's lives. As a white mom, she worried that one day her kids would "turn their backs" on her. She assumed that her kids would look more black than Cajun, and that a "black" identity would be automatically foisted upon them by society. She worried about the price of acceptance into the black community.
Would they be forced to forsake her as their mother, as if renouncing their matrilineal line could cleanse them of alien whiteness? This angst was only aggravated by what she saw as a black backlash against Tiger Woods. "I became scared," she said, "when [he] said that he wasn't black and there was a huge outcry from the black community."
The more I listened to her worries, the more I wanted to answer her back. I wanted to say, "Hey, I was that kid! I had a white mother and a black father and it's OK!" I wanted to tell her that I could never turn my back on my mom because she's my rock, and that my mom can't help but see herself in my face because her DNA blitzkrieged itself through my genes. While I know that my experience growing up was unique, I wanted to show her that it didn't have to be unmitigated trauma.
I was different -- no question about it. But it was a good thing. We were in Detroit, and, to be blunt, I was a golden girl in a chocolate city. To the adoring brown faces of family and strangers, my color and curls seemed precious.
Then, when I was 6, my father died. We soon headed north for the suburbs -- where my currency was immediately devalued. My light skin was now seen as dark amid the children of the white working class. Unfortunately, my mom made my displacement worse by shearing my hair. When all the girls wanted Barbie manes, I looked like the beige Orphan Annie.
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