MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
My father was raised under Jim Crow. My children could pass for white. Where does that leave me?
By Thomas Chatterton Williams for New York Times Sunday Magazine, Sept. 17; excerpt from the long-form piece:
[....] To speak about a thing clearly you must first be able to name it. To speak about yourself, you must first be able to assemble a sense of origin. For descendants of slaves, this has proved one of the most precious losses of self-knowledge we’ve endured. The black experience in the South is tantamount to the biblical flood; we’ve stumbled off the ark without an inkling of what things were like before it. As I write this, a tab on my laptop displays a pastel pie chart of my ancestral-geographical makeup. I scrutinize the color-coded slices for meaning. That fuchsia “sub-Saharan” segment is markedly less than half — 40.1 percent of the pie — though that is where my received social identity comes from. The marine-blue “European” section, on the other hand, which I always understood existed but nonetheless thought of as existing somehow outside me, makes up 59.2 percent of the circle. This lopsided ratio surprised me, though it should not have. Millions of “white” Americans have sufficient African ancestry — often a result of some wily predecessor’s successfully having slipped the yoke — to theoretically have been enslaved in the Southern states that enforced racial-purity laws most fanatically. But that is not the case in my mother’s family. My aunt came back 99.9 percent European. Presuming she and my mother share all ancestors, that would put my father around 80 percent sub-Saharan African — right on average, according to some estimates, for the (often forcibly) mixed, Afro-European population of Americans we refer to as “black.”
I am well aware that my situation is not yet, and may not ever be, a terribly common one, and that I have experienced a specific set of breaks and good fortune outside my own control that have contributed powerfully to my own sense of autonomy in the world. Growing up, I understood myself to be black, and yet I was also exposed to whiteness through my mother and most (though certainly not all) members of her family in nonantagonistic, positively nurturing ways. Today, my children, who are roughly a fifth West African descended, are so blond-haired and fair-skinned that they can blend in with the locals when we travel in Sweden. All this and more has forced me to wrestle with the particulars of my family’s story — its painful past as well as its unwritten future — and reflect on what these specific contradictions might imply about the broader color categories we are all forced into. My family’s multigenerational transformation from what is called “black” toward what is assumed to be “white” has led me to yearn for ways of seeing and relating to one another that operate somewhere between the poles of tribal identitarianism and Panglossian utopianism. People will always look different from one another in ways we can’t control. What we can control is what we make of those differences.
It has become commonplace to acknowledge the following point, but it bears repeating anyway: The idea of racial classification, as we understand it now, stretches back only to Enlightenment Europe [....]
note on author: This article is adapted from “Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race,” to be published next month by W.W. Norton & Company. Thomas Chatterton Williams is a contributing writer for the magazine and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. His last feature was about the director Jacques Audiard.
Comments
fellow NY'rs: wow, Tuesday night in Soho, two great writers in convo, free of charge:
by artappraiser on Fri, 10/25/2019 - 9:14pm
by artappraiser on Sat, 10/26/2019 - 11:39am
Nice Oedipus line.
by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 10/26/2019 - 12:35pm
Myself I really really dug Yang pointing this out:
And a tweet I just ran across clarified why for me:
Tevye from Fiddler is of course the inspiration of the tweet, but it's all the same fucking thing: conservatism is always for conserving the old ways. You've got to shake what happened to your great grandparents, they are not you. This links to two of my favorite topics lately:
Then my brain went further to how sex and evolution is all about finding genes and partners outside the tribe who can contribute something new and different that might help improve things...
On another note, doesn't this end phrase of his ring a very strong bell?
by artappraiser on Sat, 10/26/2019 - 2:11pm
by artappraiser on Mon, 01/06/2020 - 11:44am
above graphs from this Pew report, May, 2017
and from June 2017:
by artappraiser on Mon, 01/06/2020 - 9:58pm