To you, perhaps. But take a look at some of my family members:
Grandma
Aunt
Cousin
Uncle
Mom
These are not just distant relatives. They didn't "marry in." I am not adopted. These are my blood relatives.And it's not just one person, nor was the "race" of my family members immediately obvious. This wasn't the typical biracial, "mom's side of my family is white, my dad's side of the family is black" type of situation. I never thought of my family as white, with the exception of one aunt who married into the family (now two, my younger uncle's wife came into the picture after I was an adult). But I didn't think of us as black either. We were--and I stress that this did not seem weird or abnormal to me--just kind of a melange of everyone and everything. We were just people. We were family. We were, in a sense, truly post-racial. (I was quite surprised to learn recently that one of my cousins identifies as white. I don't know why that would surprise me, because she does look white. I didn't expect her to identify as black either. I just never saw my family in such a binary way. I wonder if she had journey like mine?)
My grandparents as I remember them growing up
I grew up in a house with a Chinese grandmother, a half-black, half-Scottish grandfather, one of the daughter's of that union (my mom), her brothers living nearby, and cousins that I guess were white or white-adjacent. The culture was solidly Caribbean since my mother's family hails from Trinidad and Tobago, so while my grandmother didn't know a lick of Chinese she spoke in a strong Trinidadian patois. One summer I drew a picture book and an added an additional, imaginary member to our family, a girl about my age. In my pictures she looked like all of us--racially indistinct, impossible to categorize with her tanned skin like my moms and her straight hair (I wasn't good enough of an artist to get down details of lip thickness and nose broadness). So while I knew what I looked like, I didn't feel black. I didn't feel white either. I just felt like me.
You may wonder about my father's side of the family. They are definitely black. But because my parents divorced when I was seven and I didn't have contact with his side of my family until I was an adult, my mothers side was the family I grew up with. (You can read my account of finally connecting with my dad's side, the definitively black side, in this post from three years ago).
I don't remember when it was that I first knew that other people identified me as black. I'm sure it must have been in school. People outside of my family had no such confusions. They looked at me and they knew. I didn't fight it. I didn't try to correct people; I'm not sure I would have known how. But I don't think I internalized the identification either. I didn't feel a strong connection to my black classmates, yet I also knew I didn't belong with the white kids either. But I never felt a sense of loss or that I "didn't know who I was." I wasn't traumatized or "confused" about my identity as the anti-race mixers always warned would be the case with kids like me. I knew who I was. I just didn't know how to explain it to anyone. When it came to time to identify myself in the standardized testing forms, no designation seemed quite right. Everybody else seemed to know I was black, so I supposed I should put that. Was a I "Other"? Was I "mixed" (they didn't have that choice on the forms, but I'd heard the term before. I felt it applied to someone like my mom, but it didn't seem right for me). In a sense, it was more baffling because I looked more black than anyone else on my mom's side of the family (except for my sister). My brother had straight to wavy hair and one look at him and you knew there was something going on with his family. In some ways, I would have preferred that. I would have preferred people being unsure how to categorize me because that's how I felt. But people looked at me and they knew.
So eventually, I just decided that I knew too. I fully embraced my identity as a black man. I have come to realize that's what race really is anyway for everyone. People look at you, decide "what" you are and that's it. And when they can't decide, they try to figure it out. "What are you?" they might ask. And it's not just skin color. I always have felt that using skin-color as shorthand for discussing race fails to fully describe how we categorize people. There are blonde, blue eyed people who are definitely black (if that hair is tightly curled and the lips and nose are broad there is no confusion). And there are dark-skinned people who are definitely not black. Race is ascribed to people based on a combination of hair texture, lip fullness, and nose width in addition to skin color.
This woman is definitely white. Right?
In the old days people used to talk about the one-drop rule. If you had a black parent, a black grandparent, if you had just one drop of "black blood" you were black. I still hear that formula sometimes, these days, mostly from fellow black people. Make sure your kids know who they are. Don't let them forget they're black. I don't particularly like that sentiment, not least because it stinks of old white ideas about race. But I get it. African-American culture has been stained by colorism--the anti-blackness within black people--since the days of slavery. There have been more than a few people who have tried to deny their blackness, to run away from it, to "pass" and escape the burdens of being black (that's the story of the mother of Gail Lukasik, the woman in the picture above). But that whole way of looking at race only works when you know family history. And in the old days, especially in the agricultural communities of the South where everyone knew everyone and it was in white people's interest to know who everyone's kin was, this was very much possible. But today, it's different. Most people know my kids are black because they know me. But if you ran into my sons as strangers on the street would you automatically know they were black? Or would you think they were Latino? Arabic? Vaguely Mediterranean?
I don't even know the answer to that question (though we personally think our older son looks like he could be Chamorro--the indigenous people of the Marianas Islands where he was born). The answer is not that important to me (though not entirely unimportant. Could my sons be profiled? Probably, even if not specifically as black).
Our oldest son with his godmother and her kids back when he was toddler. Some of the kids are half Filipino, half Chamorro. Others are half Filipino-half white. Good luck sorting them out. Our son fits right in though, doesn't he.
It's not so much about self-identification, as it is about what others decide you are. Race, absolutely, is a social construct.
I'm not ashamed to be black. I don't see it as a misfortune. I don't wish to be anything else. I am black and I am proud. I am not, nor do I endorse being, color-blind (more on that in my next post).
But I also know, with equal certainty, that this part of my identity was given to me by my society and culture. I know that when I watch a movie like The Farewell, I will feel a kinship with Asian people. I will know that sense of connection is authentic and real even as I know that neither they nor anyone else will recognize my claim that these too, are my people.
My grandmother and her sister, my great-aunt Yvonne
Beneath the badge of blackness that I wear with pride and honor is the deep realization that I contain multitudes; that everyone is my people.
Last photo of Grandma with her living children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren at Christmas 2012, two years before Grandma died.
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