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A post I read today raised the issue of race. I'm probably close to being obsessed with race, which is so very odd because it is a concept that I have always maintained is largely artificial. My obsession is with understanding the mechanics of it, the history of its power to separate people who are otherwise so similar. I have read voraciously on the subject. Even now, I am reading A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America by David K. Shipler.
I come from a strange mix of people. Mostly Irish on my mother's side and Dutch/English on my dad's, along with who knows what other genetic contributions. My maternal grandfather was very much a product of his time and the only person I ever heard use the word nigger. This would seem almost funny to you if you could see my grandfather. He looks more like an old black man than many old black men. I never gave this fact much thought until the last year or so; when some casual dabbling in my family's geneaology led to the likelihood that his mother, my great-grandmother, was, in fact, a mulatto woman from Georgia.
My paternal grandparents, on the other hand, never uttered a racist word. When my grandmother was a little girl, two of her best friends (who were black) were killed in the Tulsa race riots in 1921. She never forgot that and she never tolerated a negative word about any person of color as long as I've known her. She'll be ninety-one in August. I never knew her not to have friends of all sorts of colors. I remember going to the grocery store with her once and not really paying attention to the conversation until I heard my grandmother say sharply, in reply to a question I hadn't heard put to her by another woman, "She's not my maid; she's my friend."
This is the background, and I'm going to write about my experiences and thoughts with regard to race over the next few posts only because I feel it is a subject that I've really not written anything about directly. I have always been at a loss for words when it comes to this…unable to even frame what I wanted to express. Given that I have read so much on the subject, I'm amazed that I have not been able to shape my ideas coherently after so many years of pondering the problems of race. My guess is that I will fail, as many have, to explain something that at its core just doesn't make sense. How can it? But I have memories, feelings, and ideas borne of my growing up in the south, in Texas and Louisiana. Some of them are common to many of my gender and generation, but I also have a unique set of eyes for certain experiences. It's time to at least try to sort it all out.
I come from a strange mix of people. Mostly Irish on my mother's side and Dutch/English on my dad's, along with who knows what other genetic contributions. My maternal grandfather was very much a product of his time and the only person I ever heard use the word nigger. This would seem almost funny to you if you could see my grandfather. He looks more like an old black man than many old black men. I never gave this fact much thought until the last year or so; when some casual dabbling in my family's geneaology led to the likelihood that his mother, my great-grandmother, was, in fact, a mulatto woman from Georgia.
My paternal grandparents, on the other hand, never uttered a racist word. When my grandmother was a little girl, two of her best friends (who were black) were killed in the Tulsa race riots in 1921. She never forgot that and she never tolerated a negative word about any person of color as long as I've known her. She'll be ninety-one in August. I never knew her not to have friends of all sorts of colors. I remember going to the grocery store with her once and not really paying attention to the conversation until I heard my grandmother say sharply, in reply to a question I hadn't heard put to her by another woman, "She's not my maid; she's my friend."
This is the background, and I'm going to write about my experiences and thoughts with regard to race over the next few posts only because I feel it is a subject that I've really not written anything about directly. I have always been at a loss for words when it comes to this…unable to even frame what I wanted to express. Given that I have read so much on the subject, I'm amazed that I have not been able to shape my ideas coherently after so many years of pondering the problems of race. My guess is that I will fail, as many have, to explain something that at its core just doesn't make sense. How can it? But I have memories, feelings, and ideas borne of my growing up in the south, in Texas and Louisiana. Some of them are common to many of my gender and generation, but I also have a unique set of eyes for certain experiences. It's time to at least try to sort it all out.