
The Singular Power of Writing - acsillag
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-singular-power-of-writing-a-conversation-with-thomas-chatterton-williams/
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DoreenMichele
My maiden name is Irish in origin. At one time, Irish Americans were an
othered group. Now, they are just a subset of white.

I have a German immigrant mother with very olive skin. Her skin color is very
close to that of some light skinned blacks. But, of course, she's "white"
because she's German.

I have been told my father was 1/16th Cherokee.

I tend to not really fit in with white middle class Americans. I never really
have. I'm too culturally different from them.

Of course, people of color don't want to claim me as one of theirs. Natives
are extremely critical of people like me. I'm not really welcome by them.

I've started checking "decline to answer" the race question when filling out
forms. The options they provide just don't seem to fit my reality and there
isn't enough space to explain it. If I did, no doubt whoever read it would
promptly conclude that I'm white and my discomfort with the question is
neurotic and not legitimate.

~~~
zdragnar
My father's side of the family is Bohemian (western Czech). I was always
curious as to why artsy-hippies use 'bohemian' as an adjective.

Come to find out, French aristocratic youth rebelled and started dressing like
the colorful, poor Romani (getting the label _haute bohème_ ) and the general
stereotype that said poor Eastern Europeans must also obviously be from the
nearest "eastern" country.

So, cultural appropriation and misidentification going back to the 19th
century (an insult to both the Romani and the Bohemians).

Also strangely, I recall my father's older relatives frequently telling
terrible jokes about and referencing others of the same identity as "bohunks"
which I didn't discover until a few years ago was a racial slur. In a way,
their adoptation of it seems to have been similar to the frequent use of the
n-word in black hip-hop, rap and edgier pop culture.

There are similar stories about my mother's side of the family. The world is a
strange, complex place, and somehow boiling that family history down to
"white" just doesn't do it justice.

~~~
DoreenMichele
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_and_the_G....](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_and_the_G.I._Bill)

 _In the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs 67,000 mortgages were
insured by the G.I. Bill, but fewer than 100 were taken out by non-whites._

I grew up in Columbus, Georgia in a house purchased using military benefits.
My part Cherokee father was extremely white-passing, yet spent 18.5 years of
his 26.5 year military career overseas.

He's no longer alive. I can't ask him if he did that to escape racism in
America.

What if he hadn't successfully downplayed his part Native heritage? Would I
have even grown up in a nice house in the suburbs?

After my father died, I tripped across a photo of a full-blooded Iroquois
actor that looked uncannily like my father. I was already not comfortable with
our social construct of race. But I just no longer can comfortably answer that
question with stating "I'm white."

What makes me white? My skin color? If so, why is my darker skinned mother
also white?

My socioeconomic background? I could argue that grows out of my father
successfully downplaying his Native heritage. So does that make my _whiteness_
a fiction? Perhaps even a lie?

My father made his own constructs. Which constructs are more "real" or more
valid? His? Those of a nebulous racist thing we call society? Where is this
thing we call society? Can I go talk to it?

No, society is just a sum total of something that grows out of a group of
individuals. Individuals like my father.

My father chose to protect himself and his family. I can't find moral defect
in that decision.

But I also find it increasingly offensive to even try to answer a question
about my heritage with an answer from a canned list of arbitrary answers
rooted in a long history of social BS where none of those answers remotely
fits anything I would identify as.

I have long association with American military culture. Military dependent is
not an option.

I was born and raised in The Deep South. Southerner is not an option.

I'm part German. German American is not an option.

I'm part Cherokee, but only a very small part. I don't even know what to call
that. Mixed race doesn't really seem to fit this case. But why not? I look
part Native to my German relatives. How many generations does it take to
"erase" my Native blood so it no longer counts?

I'm not interested in trying to officially join the Cherokee Nation. I'm not
interested in trying to qualify for scholarship money reserved for Natives.
But isn't calling me white just another way of saying "those people" don't
count?

If you aren't full-blooded Native, your Native ancestors don't count? Doesn't
that further deepen a history of genocide? Many Natives were murdered by
European settlers. Do we also need to murder any memory of them? Any trace
that survived in mixed bloodlines?

Do we need to deny that "those people" are a part of _us_ people, even if only
a small part?

Why?

~~~
zdragnar
I'm a second generation American, and acknowledge that I am a legacy of my
heritage. However, I do not really _define_ myself as such, as I am more than
just the sum product of genes.

My brother was in Czechia on a recent business trip, and between his looks and
last name, _everyone_ there assumed he was a local... until he opened his
mouth, at least.

If I am asked on a form, I'll typically put decline to answer or other.

However, I also acknowledge that how to reconcile the history of your family
with your own identity as an individual is a difficult and personal
decision... especially when the law is involved, such as / for example around
tribal memberships.

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spookybones
This author is a voice we really need as a counterpoint to the current train
of thought running through American politics. I will definitely check out his
books.

As a side-note, I couldn't help but think of Kayne declaring that 'he's not
black, he's Kanye' as an attempt to get across what Williams is talking about
here. Of course, it tremendously backfired. I'm also reminded of some of Moran
Freeman interviews, in which he cooly refuses to be pigeonholed.

~~~
jamrawk24
I think it's hard for people to stomach the notion of deconstructing race when
we've designed society in such a way that has hamstringed groups for
generations. I'm all for forgetting 'race' as a social construct, but I think
there's a few things we'll need to atone for first.

~~~
rdlecler1
The challenge is that race and culture are often tied together. In 1920 New
York the Irish and the Italians would have effectively treated each other as
different races. As culture homogenized, those ‘racial’ differences also faded
away—now everyone is just European. It’s a challenge to maintain your culture
within a dominant culture while not suffering socio-economically.

------
xrd
This is a fantastic interview.

I was so excited to share this with everyone I know. I think about a great
friend with a black father, now deceased. I always imagined what his father he
might have related to life during a time when his marriage was illegal. This
article really stimulated ideas like the way I imagined it was for him might
not at all have been the case, which is wonderful to think about. And how my
friend's relatives might have lost so much in their bigotry.

Then, I was left with this harrowing thought: what's the payoff for anyone to
give up their identities (including racial identities, but also every other
identity that binds us). I mean, it's a wonderful idea and wonderful
documented here, but not everyone will move to France and investigate their
thoughts. That made me sad. I'm doubtful that most people will read this
interview, and doubtful most people that do read it will radically change
their belief systems. I must include myself in that assessment to be honest.

------
oska
> I think that you need to have this kind of childlike way of looking at
> things, as the writer Albert Murray described, and which you see with
> children before they’ve been conditioned into race-thinking, which is that
> the color of your skin is not white. The color of my skin isn’t black. Those
> colors don’t even manifest on human flesh. We don’t even describe ourselves
> in words that are actually accurate to flesh tones. Any fool can see that
> white people are not actually white and black people are not black.

I agree with this. I think calling people 'white' or 'black' is stupid and I
don't do it (and not just for this reason). But Williams does use these words
to refer to people elsewhere through the interview. I wonder why he does it,
after making this explicit point?

~~~
mcbonkus
He calls this out in a later paragraph, mentioning that in the modern
discourse it's too difficult to not. "(It’s almost impossible to actually have
a conversation where you stop using the term “black.” So I hope, you know,
when I say black and white, I’m not implying that I believe those terms are
true. I’m just using it because that’s the way we speak about people.)"

~~~
oska
Thank you for pointing that out. I did read a good part of the interview but
obviously missed that bit.

But I disagree with him here (while finding a lot of the rest of what I read
insightful). How we speak about people is not fixed and change can come from
us choosing to speak differently. Not that I'm suggesting we force others to
speak differently, but we can make the change ourselves (which will be heard
by others and perhaps picked up).

