My nine year old surrounded by old photos on the bed.
My wife and I tell her stories about them; grandparents, great great grandparents, mysterious strangers in hats with ever most excellent posture.
It’s Memorial Day weekend. All of their gravesites are thousands of miles away, so, there is this.
My daughter is English & Irish from her Ma, and African, Native American and (according to my Grandma) a measurable amount of Scottish, French, German and more from me. I haven’t attempted the mail-in genealogy kit thing because the breadth of Grandma’s family records indicate that any document generated from such an exercise would reveal my personal American History as such a greatly enthusiastic cultural recombinant Mr. Nicolas Cage Himself may wish to steal it for national treasure.
Most of the photos on the bed are black and white, and represent a uniqueness of background whose richness is apparent even without a DNA map. My daughter remarks that she is also considered “white” and “black”; yet, while we all agree that she is black, it is kind of difficult to explain why she isn’t white.
Hmn.
Google.
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A person who is White and Black should be free to associate with American history down both (diverging) paths, directly heir to all the glories, disasters, and cultural references of each perspective. I offered the interplay between two phrases as our experiment.
Young, Gifted and Black is the title of a song inspired by the life of playwright and author Loraine Hansberry in the late 1960’s, which became an anthem of the American Civil Rights Movement.
Free, White and 21, while wildly archaic, became an incredibly popular catchphrase from the 1860’s to, not entirely coincidentally, the 1960’s and the Civil Rights Movement (there’s a supercut of film references on YouTube).
By the numbers, my daughter should be all six of these words, and she is, except of course, she isn’t.
* My daughter is 9 years old, and even after a rough year locked indoors learning through technology and family exuberance she still agrees that she is, inside and out, a young woman.
* She holds heritage, pride, clear characteristics and DNA as a black / African-American young woman.
* And I think she qualifies as gifted, but of course I do. She can make anything out of anything. Give her some duct tape, an afternoon, and a couple of empty boxes…boom. Electric car.
* My daughter is also free, as in not married or dating (which the phrase primarily referred to) or even romantically intrigued save for select members of BTS and probably Billie Eilish.
* And she is not yet 21, but, y’know. Any day now.
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We can pause here to emphasize that my I myself have been 21, young, black, free (single), and even described as gifted at one time, so it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to think that my daughter, who is mathematically more genetically light-skinned (if you factor in the crazy quilt of my own DNA) could hit the hexafecta.
Yet, surrounded by photos of relatives which clearly prove that she is of English and Irish descent, my wife and I explain to her that she is never going to be “considered” a “white” person. She represents the languages and histories of many people of such a complexion, but we cannot even give her “white” as a present.
Ultimately, this day is about being proud of where you come from – grateful for the experiences, tales, jokes, recipes, tragedies, and miracles of dozens of people who met and combined their lives to make your own, but nobody is actually from white because it’s not the name of a culture, it’s the name of a color.
While the adjective “black” tends to represent the specific collective societal experience of generations descended from captivity, "white" is not the opposite collective societal experience, as people with lighter skin are from so many different countries and circumstances that one word could never really capture it. White doesn’t represent who certain people are; it’s more about how they expect to be treated. And she’s just not gonna be treated like that ever, which is just... the thing it is.
My kid is a new product of a new nation that some old people started, made not out of different colors, but stories, experiences, and knowledge. Even at 9, she doesn’t consider herself bi-racial as much as Multi-Cultural or…Poly-Heritaged. And like the US, her past matters less than her future, and is NOT what her future is made of, but IS what it’s built upon.
Anyway, when asked “So, what are you?” my daughter ’s first response is usually “A Hufflepuff”.