Speaking of growing up, this post is one about some oddities of my upbringing that make me uncomfortable. I swear on me mum that it is pure weird coincidence that I am writing this on the first day of black history month. I've been thinking on it for a few months but...you know, "stuff" has been "up."
The first thing you need to know is this: I am a white girl. My mom, a Lehman, is a white lady. Her mom, a Wolff, is a white lady. We're not pure German, like my dad's side, or German-Irish-Polish like Husband. We don't really know fully where we come from, but that's not important. What is important is that I joke, in the summer, about bringing back the "Elizabeth I look," and that I spent my formative years in suburban/rural Wisconsin. I am a white girl.
And yet.
Growing up, my hair was a challenge. Like, a CHALLENGE. It was always thick, but in the 3rd grade, it inexplicably exploded into this mess of curls that nobody in my family knew quite what to do with and no hair stylist in the small town we lived in could really handle. "You have black-girl hair," my mom would say, proudly. She'd grasp one little curly cue from above my brow and pull it down, reciting, "There was a little girl/Who had a little curl/Right in the middle of her forehead..." She'd let it go and it'd spring back. Black girl hair, she called it.
At karaoke, my mom belts out "Respect" by Aretha Franklin. People cheer and applaud. Sometimes she gets a standing ovation. She has a black lady voice. She says it. Other people say it. A black lady voice.
She listens to New Orleans jazz and artists, black and white, with that certain sound and tells me that black people sing better. They have better music, too. I start to wish that I was black, because I love to sing more than anything else, except reading, I guess. I start to realize that I do not have black girl hair, I just have curly hair, and it's not the same. It makes me sad, because I have been raised with this strange reverse-racism (which is actually still racism) that tells me that black people are better than me (because they invented jazz, and have therefore won at life forever). Black women are beautiful and strong. They're allowed to be fat and still on tv. They're allowed to be in charge, respected.
The confusing thing about this is that we do have some black heritage. It's not fully false. Back in the 50s and 60s my mom's dad was not allowed in the public pool. He was "too black." Now, the one time I met him, he looked like this:
That is a white guy. I understand that "Not One Drop" policies meant that a wide variety of skin tones were lumped into the same shit show. It has made the black community pretty accepting, overall. (It's what helped Rachel Dolezal get away with her nonsense. [TBH, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt in that whole thing - if she was fighting for "her people" and really devoting her life to these causes, why not? It was probably because of my own confused racial whatever. Her constant deception and litigiousness make me just really dislike her, though. I don't think she ever had anyone's best interests but her own at heart. Sad])
In family discussions about my hair (seriously - it was a challenge), "Portuguese" and "Melungeon" floated around. Nobody really knew what Melungeon meant, but family lore held that it was a "breed" of slaves, mixed of Portuguese and African - the idea being that horrible people thought racist things and tried to breed the best slaves from certain stock and named them different things. That may well be true, the slave trade was pretty awful, but there was no real confirmation of that. I never thought to look it up, and I certainly didn't know how to spell it. Then in 2012, a study was released on Melungeons and ended up getting passed around the family. It turned out we were half right, and that we were more right than most of the people who called themselves Melungeon! It turns out, we're descended from mixed-race Tennessee hill-people.
Whether my grandpa was allowed to go swimming or not, and despite the poverty that my family comes from, I can't deny having benefited from white privilege throughout my life. I don't think about my skin color, most of the time. I don't have to wonder if a cop pulled me over because of it. I don't have to worry about whether it will prevent me from getting a job (my name might - I have a "black girl name"). Because I married a white boy from a decently well-off family, I have a house and a car - I may be on food stamps, but this institutional wealth thing works in my favor. I see people like me doing whatever they want on tv. I can move pretty much wherever, if I can afford it. My family comes from trash, but it's white trash.
I followed the Michael Brown case (and Eric Garner, and Laquan McDonald, and on and on...) obsessively. I wept. I went to a rally, but it felt empty. My mom asked me, "Why do you care so much?" It was such an odd question. She is the reason I care so much. She raised me to believe that these are my people. Every time I hear another one on the news, that's my thought. They're killing my people.
I grew up in suburban and rural Wisconsin. I went to a tiny private Lutheran college. It wasn't until until I worked at Starbucks that I really had any ongoing interaction with black Americans my own age, and it really confirmed something for me that I had suspected all along: These aren't my people. I don't understand their jokes. I don't recognize their cultural references. I don't appreciate their aesthetics. I have mini culture shock.
It hurt, kind of. I wanted to have an understanding with them, a communion. I want that with everyone, really, I really want to be able to experience people, but moreso in this instance because again, I had been raised to believe that these were my people. But it's just not true.
My mom was on vacation in Atlanta. She went to the mall there in her down time and wandered around in a happy daze. Everything there - everything - seemed made just for her. She was in love. Why was it such a wonderful place? What was different? Then she started looking around and realized that she was the only white lady there.
She, of course, is the one driving all of this. I don't think she's as conflicted about it as I am. Part of it is that she knows she's not black. Part of it is that she accepts that she is black. I don't think she thinks about how those two thoughts don't mesh up. I don't think she's ever thought about cultural appropriation. No one in her family shares her obsession with southern middle-aged black lady culture. Her next-older sister is really into our Cherokee heritage - another thing that is true-but-not-quite-true.
My mom can't ever really truly appreciate what it is to be a southern black lady - southern, especially, I suppose. But I can understand the appeal for her.
My mom is a bigger lady. Big white ladies aren't allowed to be seen. My mom sees Queen Latifah and Aretha Franklin and Ella Fitzgerald and Chandra Wilson and Loretta Devine and she thinks, "Black women are allowed to be fat." I think that means a lot to her, and it's something she says out loud, along with the thing about black women being better singers, but I think there's something deeper than that.
There's this stereotype of the black matriarch - the counterpoint to the false stereotype of crappy black fathers - who's been done wrong, but who holds the family together. My mom comes from a bad family, has been through 2 bad marriages, and through it all, she's been the one holding it all down. At the same time, she's the boss lady. She's climbed the ranks at a couple of different companies until the levels of corruption became too much (and they always became too much), until she started her own business. She's a kicker of asses and taker of names.
When I think of all the things that define her and her life, and the things by which she defines herself, they're all things that are represented in the media almost exclusively by black women. I don't know why this is. The sassy, powerful leader who takes no guff. The strong, resilient matriarch who keeps going no matter what. The Christian woman who refuses to compromise her morals. It's weird, but really, almost every time I see a black character on tv, I think, "That's my mom."
I think this is mostly because of cultural racism and whatnot, and that my mom just happened to latch on to these things because they are really who she is, and she saw herself in these characters. The fact that she happens to have some black heritage is luck. It's all mixed up, but for her, it's natural and it makes a kind of sense, I think. It still makes me a bit uncomfortable.
What's really weird is how her association with these tropes has affected me growing up to the point that I don't really know who I am or where I come from. I have no sense of cultural heritage, because the cultural heritage I do have is one of middle-aged southern black ladies. So the few of those that I've met, I've gotten on well with, I guess. It puts me in a weird limbo.
All of this, of course, is me overthinking things. None of it matters, really. There's nothing wrong with being what your are, it's just that I never really knew what I was, even though it's really obvious. I guess I just want the world to know that I am deeply uncomfortable with how white I am. I feel so ignorant when I encounter people of other races, because despite my mom's interests, I have never had long-term interactions with people from other backgrounds from myself. I went to high school in a small town in rural Wisconsin and a small, private, Lutheran college. I hung out with people who shared my interests - D&D, English literature, and Monty Python. I never branched out. I never reached out. I know there are black nerds, I've just never met any. I hate that.
All of this culminates for me in a knowledge that racial divides do not go away unless people take active steps to end them and also an absolute terror of stepping outside my comfort zone in that regard, for fear of being labeled racist. Like everything else good for me (eating right and exercising, going to church more than once a month, etc), I figure I'll put off making forays into multiculturalism until I have children, who I'll send to a sufficiently multicultural school. In the mean time, I'll just listen to the news and cry every time another unarmed black child is shot, I guess, and try to come to terms with how very, very white I am.
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