Black White Man

So, after this horrible travesty which is the Trayvon Martin shooting, my well-intentioned, Black mom sends me this weird email telling me that she’s glad that I and my sons don’t have to worry about being targeted for these kinds of attacks.

Now, I certainly don’t want to make it seem that I think the racism I encounter is anything close to what a dark-skinned Black person encounters. It’s not, and I know that. But, there’s a big gap between realizing I’m getting off a little easy to thinking that I’m completely off the hook! It makes me sad to think that my mom doesn’t realize that I’ve been called the n-word, I’ve had swastikas drawn on my door, I’ve had my life threatened, and I’ve been accosted in public. I’ve actually caught just as much flak for *looking* Jewish as I’ve caught for *being* Black. So, yeah, when I’m out in public I do worry about someone doing something to me. Being light-skinned doesn’t, unfortunately, make me not a target.

Since I first became a father five years ago, I’ve struggled with how to explain issues around race and ethnicity to my little boy. He takes after his mother. He’s fair skinned, blond and blue eyed. But, he knows that his Grandma is her whole side of the family (aunts, uncles, cousins) are Black.

Now he’s in Kindergarten and he’s getting exposed to a lot more multiracial kids. Three of the kids in the class, out of thirty-two, are half-Black and half-White. Several more or different kinds of mixed-race folk. So, he’s just now starting to “get it” a little bit more. Last week, adorably, he told me that he is “one slice of chocolate pie and three slices of vanilla.” I’m glad that he feels some connection to my family’s heritage.

http://www.witness.co.za/index.php?showcontent&global[_id]=31431

I’ve always had a great affinity for South Africa and its history. I feel that its similar to America in many ways. But it’s also different in many ways. Sometimes its too tempting to draw parallels.

Since I don’t know that much about South Africa, I will give Mr. Manyi the benefit of the doubt and assume he is right that everything in South Africa is ultimately seen through the filter of racism.

Is that true of the United States? I often feel that way. But, I worry that I am biased by my experiences — that I’ve been hurt too many times, and I’ve become cynical. To a man with a hammer, as they say, everything looks like a nail.

President Obama’s election was world-altering for me, and not just for the ways that people usually articulate. On top of being moved that we had finally elected a Black man as president, I was also humbled by my lack of faith in us as a culture. I had expressed early on that we weren’t ready for a Black president, and that if we did elect one, he wouldn’t have a weird name. I had also expressed that if he were elected, he’d be assassinated in short time. I didn’t take my son to the rally here in Chicago after he won, because I was worried about bombs. I was too obsessed with racism in this country to see what was possible. And so now, I often doubt myself when it comes to seeing racism everywhere. It certainly still exists, but maybe it’s not as universal as we sometimes make it out to be.

So, I’ve been watching the new sketch comedy show “Key & Peele”. It’s great. Very entertaining. A recurring theme is that both comedians are multiracial. I find myself shocked by how surprised I am. I am not at all surprised that either of them is multiracial. I am very shocked by how much they identify as multiracial, rather than Black.

I think deep down inside I consider myself Black more than multiracial. I think that Black Americans are by their very nature mixed — none of us are “pure” Africans. So, I’m mixed more recently than others. But, I think of myself as basically being the same tribe.

But, my skin is undeniably white. So, I often describe myself as multiracial because I have to explain to people where my “Blackness” comes from. But, here you’ve got two guys who look Black, and so, in my ignorant mind at least, don’t have explain themselves to anyone. So, it boggles me a little bit that they do, anyway.

When I think about it a little more deeply, though, it makes more sense. Part of the reason that I think of myself as Black, and spend so much time explaining my background to people, is that my mom is Black, and I can’t help but think of myself as being part of what she is. She’s my mom. I imagine that the same might be true of darker skinned multiracial folk as well. Both Key & Peele have white moms. They might simply have a deep drive, as I do, to identify with the tribe their mothers come from. And that makes sense.

I’ve always been a fan of sketch comedy, all the way back to watching “Kids in the Hall” and “The State” as a kid. I was a huge fan of “Mad TV” when it was on. So, I was super-excited about “Key & Peele”. I’ve been looking forward to the first episode for months.

It was funny as hell. Very funny, good stuff. But, the real treat for me was that they opened with jokes about them both being multiracial. I had no idea. I assumed they were both Black. It was nice to hear some jokes about my situation.

And it got me to thinking… I spend a lot of time musing about people like me who are multiracial but look white. Despite some of my best friends being multiracial and having darker skin, I haven’t spent a lot of time really thinking about that as a reality. How that feels, and how it’s different from my experience. If anyone visiting this page wants to comment, I’d love to hear your perspective.

During this heated Republican Primary campaign, both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have gotten in trouble talking about jobs, welfare and the Black community. I definitely think that both of them are guilty of what in some circles is called “race baiting” — talking in a kind of coded language designed to appeal to the racist elements of the Republic base. But, I also think that we Black liberal types need to be careful when criticizing them, that we don’t end up speaking out of both sides of our mouths.

Many Black intellectual luminaries, from Bill Cosby to Malcolm X himself, have talked about the need to create jobs in the Black community, to escape from the cycle of poverty. And specifically, many have talked about how we need to create these opportunities for ourselves, rather than looking for hand outs from the Establishment. The theory goes–and I see a lot of value in this line of thought–that the Establishment is only going to give enough to bring the poor up a little bit, never enough to bring the poor up all the way.

We also need to be careful of hypocrisy when we jump to the conclusion that the likes of Newt and Santorum are assuming that all Black people are poor. While it’s true that we have a thriving Black Middle Class, plenty of Black people at Harvard, and a Black president; it’s also true that Black people are over-represented among the poor. Not all Black people are poor, and not all poor people are Black. But, there’s certainly a serious problem of poverty in the Black community.

Look at it this way: it may seem racist for conservatives to suggest that Black people are poor because they are lazy. But, they often suggest that poor people of every race are poor because they are lazy. So, perhaps it’s not as racist, per se, as it seems. Similarly, while it may seem racist for Mr. Gingrich to offer to speak at the NAACP on the topic of job creation as a preferable to welfare, he and conservatives like him speak on that topic in lots of places. At least he was offering to open a dialogue with the NAACP.

I actually wish that the NAACP had taken him up on it. I think he was bluffing, personally.

I was tentative to watch this movie. I wasn’t sure whether I was going to be deeply moved, or greatly offended. In the end, I was neither. I was totally surprised by my complete lack of reaction, actually. There were certainly bits that I found to be a bit overblown. The entire movie was populated by problematic caricatures and overacted accents. It was, to me, just as offensive to Southern White folk at it was to Black folk in general. But, these caricatures weren’t so very exaggerated to get my hackles totally raised. In my opinion, they were more indicative of bad writing, than of the overt racism that I was half expecting.

The main drama of the movie seemed to revolve around being surprised about the plight of domestic servants. I wasn’t overly surprised, and so the conflict seemed a bit muted to me. Other than the “pie incident” which seems to be the climax of the film, very little actually happens.

In general, it was kind of weird film because it suffered from the Tarzan complex. It focused on a white writer telling a story, rather than focusing on the story itself. I’m not wholly against white heroes in afro-centric films–there were plenty of real White heroes in the civil rights struggle. But, the conflicts of this particular White character aren’t as interesting or as heightened as the conflicts of the Black characters. In my humble opinion, this movie would have been better off sidelining or omitting the writer and just focusing on the story itself.

In any case, it was horrible and it wasn’t great. Which surprised me.

I was bit by a chimpanzee as a kid, so I’ve always had a fear of all sorts of apes. I’ve been looking forward to that movie “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”. It should be refreshing to see a movie where chimps are scary, instead of funny.

MLK Day is always, of course, very important to me. I like to spend it with family and friends, just enjoying being alive — I figure I owe my life to MLK, since my parents’ marriage was illegal before him.

SO, I suggested we watch “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, yesterday. My wife said she didn’t want to. She pointed out that she’d have a hard time explaining it her coworkers.

Sometimes, you just have to chuckle.

Yesterday, my son was taking some tests held by the public schools here in Chicago. The tests were held at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and conducted by the staff of the Psychology Department there. While my son was inside getting tested, one of the professors entertained us with an anecdote of his about MLK.

It seems that when he was in grad school, he ran into an old college friend who was working as an intern with MLK’s staff. He asked his friend whether she ever saw MLK himself, and she said, oh yes, every day. So, he asked her to tell him something the public doesn’t know about MLK. She said that the surprising think about MLK was his sense of humor. She said he was the funniest man she’d ever met, who kept the whole staff laughing all the time, and that he could have easily been a stand up comic. She also said that he intentionally turned off that part of his personality when he was speaking publicly, since his work was so serious in tone.

It’s interesting to think about MLK’s public persona being intentionally crafted. It makes sense, both that he would be a funny guy, and that he’d be very thoughtful about his stage presence, being as his background was in preaching, and he was very good at it.

Of course, this story is third-hand at this point, so who knows what it’s worth. But, I find it very interesting to think about.

I called this blog “Black White Man” when I first made, years ago. But, since then I’ve been thinking about it, and I believe that grammatically it should be “White Black Man”. I believe that, in America, ethnically “Black” people are, by definition, mixed. Our definition of “Black” encompasses both the “Black” and “Colored” distinction that you find in most of Africa. So I, being mixed European, African and Native American, am an American “Black”. My skin is white. So, in the same way that you would say a “short Black man”, or a “brown-eyed Black man”, you should call me a “white Black man”, rather than a “black White man”.