{"id":39271,"date":"2015-01-06T18:21:39","date_gmt":"2015-01-06T18:21:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=39271"},"modified":"2019-05-18T15:36:18","modified_gmt":"2019-05-18T15:36:18","slug":"black-and-blue-and-blond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=39271","title":{"rendered":"Black and Blue and Blond"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black and Blue and Blond<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Virginia Quarterly Review<\/a>
\nVolume 91, Number 1<\/a> (Winter 2015)
\npages 80-87<\/p>\n

Thomas Chatterton Williams<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nThe author and his daughter at her great-grandmother\u2019s house in Normandy<\/a>, 2014.<\/small><\/p>\n

Where does race fit in the construction of modern identity?<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1517, Fray Bartolom\u00e9 de las Casas<\/a>, feeling great pity for the Indians who grew worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean<\/a> gold mines, proposed to Emperor Charles V<\/a> that Negroes be brought to the isles of the Caribbean<\/a>, so that they might grow worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines. To that odd variant on the species <\/em>philanthropist we owe an infinitude of things\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Jorge Luis Borges<\/a>, \u201cThe Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Albert Murray<\/a>, The Omni-Americans<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cOur white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you\u2019d have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn\u2019t white clear through.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Ralph Ellison<\/a>, Invisible Man<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There is a millennia-old philosophical\u00a0experiment that has perplexed minds as fine and diverse as those of Socrates<\/a>, Plutarch<\/a>, and John Locke<\/a>. It\u2019s called Theseus\u2019s Paradox (or the Ship of Theseus<\/a>), and the premise is this: The mythical founding-king of Athens<\/a> kept a thirty-oar ship docked in the Athenian harbor. The vessel was preserved in a sea-worthy state through the continual replacement of old timber planks with new ones, piecemeal, until the question inevitably arose: After all of the original planks have been replaced by new and different planks, is it still, in fact, the same ship?<\/p>\n

For some time now, a recurring vision has put me in mind of Theseus<\/a> and those shuffling pieces of wood. Only, it\u2019s people I see and not boats: a lineage of people distending over time. At the end of the line, there is a teenage boy with fair skin and blond hair and probably light eyes, seated at a caf\u00e9 table somewhere in Europe. It is fifty or sixty years into the future. And this boy, gathered with his friends, is glibly remarking\u2014in the dispassionate tone of one of my old white Catholic school classmates claiming to have Cherokee<\/a> or Iroquois<\/a> blood\u2014that as improbable as it would seem to look at him, apparently he had black ancestors once upon a time in America. He says it all so matter-of-factly, with no visceral aspect to the telling. I imagine his friends\u2019 vague surprise, perhaps a raised eyebrow or two or perhaps not even that\u2014and if I want to torture myself, I can detect an ironic smirk or giggle. Then, to my horror, I see the conversation grow not ugly or embittered or anything like that but simply pass on, giving way to other lesser matters, plans for the weekend or questions about the menu perhaps. And then it\u2019s over. Just like that, in one casual exchange, I see a history, a struggle, a whole vibrant and populated world collapse without a trace. I see an entirely different ship…<\/p>\n

…I realize now that this vision of the boy from the future I\u2019ve had in my head for the past year traces itself much further back into the past. It must necessarily stretch back at least to 1971, in San Diego<\/a>, where my father, who was\u2014having been born in 1937 in Jim Crow<\/a>\u00a0Texas<\/a>\u2014the grandson of a woman wed to a man born before the Emancipation Proclamation<\/a>, met my mother, the native-Californian<\/a> product of European immigrants from places as diverse as Austria-Hungary<\/a>, Germany<\/a>, England<\/a>, and France<\/a>. This unlikely courtship came all of four years after the Loving v. Virginia<\/em><\/a> verdict repealed anti-miscegenation laws throughout the country. In ways that are perhaps still impossible for me to fully appreciate, their romance amounted to a radical political act, though now, some four decades on, it seems a lot less like any form of defiance than like what all successful marriages fundamentally must be: the obvious and undeniable joining of two people who love and understand each other enormously.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not the beginning, either. This trajectory I now find myself on no more starts in San Diego than in Paris<\/a>. Not since it is extremely safe to assume that my father, with his freckles, with his mother\u2019s Irish maiden name, and with his skin a shade of brown between polished teak and red clay, did not arrive from African shores alone. As James Baldwin<\/a>, perspicacious<\/a> as ever, noted of his travels around precisely the kind of segregated Southern towns my father would instantly recognize as home, the line between \u201cwhites\u201d and \u201ccoloreds\u201d in America has always been traversed and logically imprecise: \u201cthe prohibition \u2026 of the social mingling [revealing] the extent of the sexual amalgamation<\/a>.\u201d There were (and still are): \u201cGirls the color of honey, men nearly the color of chalk, hair like silk, hair like cotton, hair like wire, eyes blue, gray, green, hazel, black, like the gypsy\u2019s, brown like the Arab\u2019s, narrow nostrils, thin, wide lips, thin lips, every conceivable variation struck along incredible gamuts…\u201d Indeed, to be black (or white<\/em>) for any significant amount of time in America is fundamentally to occupy a position on the mongrel<\/a> spectrum\u2014strict binaries have always failed spectacularly to contain this elementary truth.<\/p>\n

And yet in spite of that, I\u2019ve spent the past year trying to think my way through the wholly absurd question of what it means for a person to be or not to be black. It\u2019s an existential Rubik\u2019s Cube<\/a> I thought I\u2019d solved and put away in childhood. My parents were never less than adamant on the point that both my older brother and I are black. And the in many ways simpler New Jersey<\/a> world we grew up in\u2014him in the seventies and eighties, me in the eighties and nineties\u2014tended to receive us that way without significant protest, especially when it came to other blacks. This is probably because, on a certain level, every black American knows what, again, Baldwin knew: \u201cWhatever he or anyone else may wish to believe\u2026 his ancestors are both white and black.\u201d Still, in the realm of lived experience, race is nothing if not an improvisational feat, and it would be in terribly bad faith to pretend there is not some fine, unspoken, and impossible-to-spell-out balance to all of this. And so I cannot help but wonder if indeed a threshold\u2014the full consequences of which I may or may not even see in my own lifetime\u2014has been crossed. (It\u2019s not a wholly academic exercise, either, since my father was an only child and in the past year my brother married and had a daughter with a woman from West Siberia<\/a>.)…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where does race fit in the construction of modern identity?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,125,8,6941],"tags":[4725,18988],"class_list":["post-39271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-philosophy","tag-thomas-chatterton-williams","tag-virginia-quarterly-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39271","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=39271"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55179,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39271\/revisions\/55179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}