{"id":35437,"date":"2014-01-15T23:11:19","date_gmt":"2014-01-15T23:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=35437"},"modified":"2014-01-15T23:11:19","modified_gmt":"2014-01-15T23:11:19","slug":"red-white-and-black-a-personal-essay-on-interracial-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=35437","title":{"rendered":"Red, White, and Black: A Personal Essay on Interracial Marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Red, White, and Black: A Personal Essay on Interracial Marriage<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies<\/a>
\nVolume 29, Numbers 2 & 3<\/a>, 2008
\npages 51-58
\nDOI: 10.1353\/fro.0.0021<\/a><\/p>\n

Jacki Thompson Rand<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of History; American Indian and Native Studies
\nUniversity of Iowa<\/em><\/p>\n

About a month before my father died, a long-held question spilled out of my ten-year-old mouth. \u201cDaddy, why do you hate colored people so much and love Mama?\u201d The silence that filled the kitchen where my mother was cooking blocked out the evening news blaring from the television. It was another nightly report about the blacks\u2019 grim battle for freedom from racial segregation. The March on Washington and rise of black power had energized their struggle, making for significant advances, but the struggle continued. My father\u2019s routine rants against the \u201ccoloreds\u201d had unexpectedly pulled the na\u00efve question from my throat where it had been lodged for some time. My mother began to cry. I looked up into his usually loving face and saw cold silent anger. Somehow, I had intuited that it would be this way. For the first time in my life I was sent to bed without supper and told to stay upstairs until morning. My parents never brought up our exchange and several weeks later my father died of a heart attack in front of me. Some forty years later I asked my mother if she recalled that event and she looked at me levelly, \u201cWhy, yes, I certainly do.\u201d The cold indignation in her eyes and my silence formed an unspoken agreement that we would not revisit the incident that took place in the kitchen in early 1967. In the intervening decades, however, I had given it much thought, peeling away the layers of my confusion about my experiences in a racially mixed household where black, white, and red shaped our familial relations, individual identities, and confused interpretations of how race had come to define us.<\/p>\n

In retrospect it seems that both race and color were at the center of our family relations. My mother\u2019s darkness was the basis of a terrible insecurity that played out in her comments about her children and about other dark-skinned people. Simultaneously, my father\u2019s open racism against blacks contradicted his seeming blindness to my mother\u2019s insecurity-inducing darkness. I recall my father\u2019s special song for my mother. \u201cPortrait of my Love,\u201d a syrupy popular tune suggesting that extraordinary beauty cannot be captured by the artist\u2019s brush. Their romanticized fraught defiance of convention became swept up in the growing momentum of the civil rights movement. Historically invisible dark people filled television screens, as well as white-sheeted Klansmen, water cannons, billy clubs, and jeering white crowds. Under the circumstances, my mother\u2019s insecurity about her darkness intensified. Events taking place outside our family charged the dynamics among us. We all became actors on her stage, which she directed relentlessly to buffer herself against a pervasive racism that could easily and frequently did sweep her up in the net of all denigrated colored peoples.<\/p>\n

My parents\u2019 relationship married my mother\u2019s ever-present awareness of her dark skin to my father\u2019s insecurities about his origins and driven desire to escape them. He sought membership in the American middle class and spent his life accumulating what he believed were the essential requirements: comportment, a steady job, children, a home, and car. My father\u2019s near-obsession with \u201cgood manners\u201d and appropriate appearances was most evident in our relationship. My little brother and ally was a mute, invisible actor throughout our time with both parents, while I received the bounty of attention due a Southern princess. My parents insisted on tightly controlling how I wore my hair and how I was clothed. Trained as an excellent, creative seamstress, my mother made many of my clothes. My occasional effort to follow a fashion trend\u2014one year it was empire waist summer dresses\u2014was usually quashed by my father. (\u201cJean, that thing makes her look pregnant. Take it back.\u201d I was probably all of eight or nine.) White anklets and some version of Mary Janes rounded out my outfits. As the only girl in the family with two brothers I seemed an inescapable target of monitoring and molding into Southern perfection. My mother was uncharacteristically unquestioning and compliant in these matters.<\/p>\n

My parents were a striking, charismatic pair. My mother is the daughter of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Red, White, and Black: A Personal Essay on Interracial Marriage Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies Volume 29, Numbers 2 & 3, 2008 pages 51-58 DOI: 10.1353\/fro.0.0021 Jacki Thompson Rand, Professor of History; American Indian and Native Studies University of Iowa About a month before my father died, a long-held question spilled out of my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,8,3015,20],"tags":[1214,4636],"class_list":["post-35437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","category-usa","tag-frontiers-a-journal-of-women-studies","tag-jacki-thompson-rand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}