My Better Half

I was planning to rush out the door and not write, but I'm feeling energized, and work went well today... and I don't like leaving things blank for quite so long.

And anyway, today being Martin Luther King Day and all, perhaps I should speak to that.

I've said, several times, that race is a complicated subject for me to discuss, in a country where we either don't talk about these things, or try to say things very carefully.  However much I've tried to resist that sort of discomfort, it seems a sad truth that time and experience leads most of us to falling in line with the parameters of discussing race, rather than fighting against them (to her credit, my pal RedStar fights this a lot, especially lately).

I tend to think of myself, and my sister, as literal products of the Civil Rights era; my Mom and Dad met and married when interracial dating and marriage were still very much frowned upon, if not flat out illegal.  We were born to the promise of the Kennedy/Johnson era of liberal hopefulness, integrating a world - suburbia - that had not fully thought through the realities of so much variety.  And we grew up, in the shadow of all that promise, believing that almost everything was possible.  I still, to a large extent, believe this.

So if you ask me about Dr. King and the promise of a dream, I have to say that's what I was raised to believe - that we can all come together, live in a world where black and white exist comfortably, without social, political or economic tensions.  It's not the world we live in.  But it is what I want it to be.

Being multiracial... interracial... there's really no good word (I suppose that's instructive; literally, today, I got "so you're mulatto!" which rarely offends, just amuses me.  I am... but I'm not), you kind of sit in a weird place for the racial discussion, or non-discussion, we have in this country.  Piscean that I am, I can really see both sides of this - I know white people of all racial viewpoints, some who are as urban as their black counterparts, some who have virtually no exposure to urban culture (except, maybe, via me), with all kinds of views.  Similarly, I've known black people who identify more with the majority white culture, and those who very much do not.   Myself, raised in a suburban white community mostly by a white mother, I can seem, as a friend says "the whitest black man ever."

I mention all of this because it doesn't matter that much... and yet it does.  I was fascinated, as I went back to look at what I'd been doing last year about this time, that I'd written this post about Barack Obama well in the early days of the Presidential race, noting a lot of things that I think have simply come to pass: that symbolism alone wouldn't sell his candidacy, that we need more specifics, that his own mixed race background would complicate things.

As I said then, I think younger conservatives (my age and younger) are often too literal about Dr. King's message; the idea that we would have colorblind government and a colorblind society never meant, I think, that we could act as if racial and cultural distinctions don't matter.  They do. At best what I've dreamed of - and still believe in - is a world where difference is celebrated, not resisted, or smoothed out.  All the different things we bring to the table - all the elements of our various cultural and racial heritages - shouldn't be ignored; they just shouldn't be all we are, or all we can be.

It brings me back on this day, to how I feel about being Black in America, because I, too, am part of the black community, whether they see it - or whether I immerse myself in it - or not.  The things Dr. King spoke of, of what our nation could be, of what we could be, were about my Dad, and about me.  And I admire Barack Obama - however I may vote this  Spring - because he's moved the discussion forward, about who I am, who we are, and how we fit into the mosaic.  It's hard, though, when so much of this, for me, is theoretical, and abstract. In life, I have made my way, and made my peace, with who I am, and the things I accept in my culture to be part of, to fit in. That too, is what it means to be black, the way I am.  Not quite one, and never really the other... always in between.

Comments

[JoBiv]

I really like your title for this post. I could speak more to that and ruin it, so I won't. Love your brain (both halves of it).