Color Me Fascinated
There are many fascinating aspects to being Black. That opening sentence barely captures the weight of the experience in my life. One fascinating aspect is that I know some of you will likely interpret that as negative, while others may not. I can’t say conclusively that it is one or the other, although I can say that I would not change it for myself. So, I am rather stuck with fascinating.
The condition of Blackness before I became aware of it. I can remember thoughts about it at the age of 3, and not really having a handle on the concept. I also remember conversations around me by multiple generations of my family, and not comprehending what they were talking about…or caring. I’m not sure when I began to grasp the concept of race. It was probably around the age of five. Even then, it was far from complete. I don’t think it is now.
Between the ages of 5 and 18, the idea is relatively stable. In fact, by the age of 18, I probably began to believe that my knowledge and awareness of the concept and the reality was fairly complete…like I thought about most things. But, like most things at that age, the understanding of the concept was far from complete. Going off to college just before the age of 18 was the beginning of seeing how little being Black was understood by people generally. In college I began to encounter numerous people who told me that they had never “actually met a Black person” before. (In their heads when they were saying it to me, they probably did not capitalize the word “Black”. I did it for them…and for you). The farther I travelled from home, the more people communicated to me their odd assumptions about Blackness. People ruminated on everything from my ability to swim, the manner of my expression, or my place of origin. When I travelled overseas, people wanted to touch me as if to prove to themselves that I was real. Yeah, that happened. A lot. I have travelled to where I was “exotic.”
When I came home, some years later, I met the woman who would become my mother-in-law. When she saw a picture of my mother, she described her as “exotic.” My mother was beautiful, yes. But, she was not exotic. My mother was from Ohio, and so is my mother-in-law. Incidentally, my mother in law is a writer, and a very good one. Her word choice represents a specific lack of understanding about something, rather than a lack of specificity about something understood. Understand?
Adult life being Black adds further complexities. The knowledge and sophistication about myself has advanced, and it is blended with knowledge and experience of my country, and the world. The context of being Black expands into society. The significance tends to be as it applies to social realities more than it does with objective science. Race after all is a social construct. Among the myriad issues of adult experience Blackness are things like the issues of the history of slavery, and racist oppression, etc. These things tend not to have a great deal of significance or cause conflict among children, or even young adults when contemplated. However, when one enters the adult context, issues of money and power attach. The fascination with Blackness continues to evolve.
As a child in a racially diverse environment, being Black tends to be a ‘you’ thing. In the adult context, Blackness becomes an ‘us’ thing. It is not that non-Black people tend to claim Blackness. I have rarely seen that. What I tend to see is non-Black people declaring what Blackness is and is not. One truly fascinating aspect to this is that living it and experiencing it is complicated enough. Given that it is an invented thing, and not truly organic, it takes some experience to handle and understand. One’s sophistication with it evolves over a lifetime. And in the course of that, one sees people having the least experience with it proclaiming expertise over it.
In 2008, Rush Limbaugh referred to Barack Obama as “Half-rican American”. Rush is one of our national experts on Blackness. When Sherrod Brown ran for the Senate, Rush reached into his deep well of expertise about as Blackness and declared Sherrod Brown to be Black. You know, the name Sherrod must be a Black man. (Rush pronounced it sher-ROD). And now some of our national experts on Blackness are declaring Kamala Harris to be “phony”, not Black, and not a citizen. There is also discussion of how she may be Black, but she is not African American because her father, being Jamaican, has no historical association with American slavery. Fascinating! The concept of being African American is acquiring a quality of historical association with slavery…by necessity. As you see, Blackness is constantly evolving…if you ask White people. For those of you who are curious, or fascinated like me, Jamaica does have an association with slavery, and with Africans, and Kamala Harris was born in Oakland California…which is in America.
There was a time when Blackness in America involved an internal psychological struggle with personal connections to the condition of slavery. Some felt shame. I am not judging that, but I don’t agree with it. People can’t be blamed for the condition of slavery, in my view. But, the fascinating thing arising in our national culture now is the elevation of a connection to slavery as some sort of credit or positive status. Although still hovering around the outer edge of propriety, the arrow seems to be pointing inward to the center of appropriate status to be able to claim an association to enslaved ancestors for the purpose of validating standing atop a pillar of Blackness in American politics. I find this change truly…fascinating.
Ron Powell
08/14/2020 @ 9:01 am
Well said!
Jonna Connelly
08/14/2020 @ 12:36 pm
If I understand kosher at all, I am flat out Minnesotan American. Apart from wearing green on March 17 nothing else cultural from my ancestors has fastened itself to me. And the green thing even came from no farther back than my father.
2. I’m listening to Barber’s Adagio for Strings, was going to go back and re-read kosher’s post with it but I couldn’t. It made my head race.
Jonna Connelly
08/14/2020 @ 12:37 pm
* Is Catholic-American a thing?
Bitey
08/14/2020 @ 1:20 pm
Jonna, to you specifically, I say…27th Ave South 55406. I suspect you know where that is. Just don’t ask me.
Jonna Connelly
08/14/2020 @ 1:36 pm
Bitey, I know it well. It’s only about a mile long, the southern third or fourth of it burned out now, mostly, including the 55406 post office.
But once again, you’re over my head I fear.
Koshersalaami
08/14/2020 @ 11:46 pm
Is Catholic-American a thing? Yes, it’s a thing, but I wouldn’t call it an ethnicity, even though it is integral to ethnic identities in a few cases such as the Irish.
Koshersalaami
08/14/2020 @ 10:18 am
This is a really cool piece.
I’ve noticed for a long time that the terminology colors perception. Black and White in race are not strictly descriptive, but the fact that we use those terms has related it to what else the terms signify. They signify both symmetry and being opposites of each other. Races can’t be opposite. This terminology hasn’t done us any favors.
The terminology also conflates two things that shouldn’t be conflated and this conflation addresses the Jamaican variable. White in the US is a race. It can also be an ethnicity but in a way more limited sense. Where White becomes an ethnicity is when those who are White have ancestry that’s distant enough and in many cases mixed enough that their original ethnicities no longer affect them in obvious ways and so there is a sort of homogenized default ethnicity that is called White. Ethnicity is important because ethnicity is where culture lies. Race per se is not cultural. Using myself as an example, I am racially White but I am not ethnically White, I am ethnically Jewish, specifically Ashkenaz Jewish. This distinction has caused a lot of confusion, particularly when writers talk about White racial identity.
Up until major Caribbean immigration, the Black population of the US overwhelmingly functioned as a single ethnicity. It makes much more sense to identify ethnically, but when the racial and ethnic lines are close to congruent, race is chosen because it’s so much more obvious. But that leads to misperceptions. The most obvious of these to me is the concept of Black Power. It is not analogous to White Power, it is more analogous to Irish Power, but because of the racial misperception and the language of opposition, Black Power made a lot of Whites defensive. This is kind of similar to what’s happened more recently with Black Lives Matter. What about White lives? White doesn’t mean the same thing here.
Because of primarily Caribbean immigration, the concept of Black has gotten a lot more confused. Though the vast majority of Black people in the US are of a single homogenized Black ethnicity analogous to the default White ethnicity I discussed earlier, there is now more than one Black ethnicity here in significant numbers. Here is where the confusion about Kamala Harris appears. Actually, the confusion is similar about Barack Obama, though in his case he married someone from the majority Black ethnicity in the US.
In terms of slavery, and I don’t know that much about Jamaican history, Jamaica has been majority Black for a long time. There is a difference between growing up where your ethnicity is normative and where it is not. Yours is not normative here, nor is mine. The combination of non-normativity (?) and intense long-term abuse has had very serious consequences, and there are definite advantages to not having endured it and in not continuing to endure it, though Black immigrants endure a lot of it now in terms of areas like police relations.
My lack of ethnic normativity means I understand the concept in ways most American Whites don’t and, in my case, it also means I am highly interested in non-normativity. Not all non-normativity is ethnic. Sexual orientation can be non-normative and share a lot of characteristics with ethnic non-normativity, though there are also a lot of characteristics not shared, the result being that compared to ethnic non-normativity sexual orientation non-normativity is both easier and harder: easier in the respect that it’s way easier to pass (meaning the non-normative variable isn’t constantly obvious like being Black is, nor is it constantly relevant) and harder in the respect that one can be rejected by one’s own family for that kind of non-normativity.
A major problem with pundits like Rush is that though they are interested in pontificating on race they are utterly uninterested in learning about race, and so they introduce and perpetuate myths because they don’t know any better and because they don’t want to know any better, finding it easier to believe their own assumptions than to question them. It is difficult to deal with this kind of intellectual dishonesty, which in many areas has become rampant in the United States. This dishonest approach is dangerous to all non-normative populations. This kind of dishonesty – the dishonesty where the seeking of information from primary sources is avoided – is always scary. In the United States currently, it has been responsible for well over 100,000 deaths. I don’t say over 150,000 because if we’d reacted properly to COVID-19 it’s not like we would have had anything like zero deaths. Trump is responsible for most of those deaths but not all of them. Presumably the vast majority of those who claim COVID-19 is a hoax have family doctors. I can pretty much guarantee that the vast majority of these people have not discussed COVID-19 with their doctors. Trusting their politicians rather than their doctors on the topic of infectious diseases is a classic example of avoiding primary sources.
Bitey
08/14/2020 @ 10:45 am
This reaction may sound a bit obtuse, but indulge me.
While reading your comment I got the sensation of hearing music. The sensation was rather specific. I could hear a tune in my head, and I thought I knew the name, but I had to look it up and play it to be sure. The title I had in mind was accurate, and I played it.
The experience of reading your comment felt like the ascending chords in this particular piece, which gradually resolve. I recommend reading your comment and playing the piece while you do so. The title is “Adagio for Strings.”
Thank you for your indulgence.
Koshersalaami
08/14/2020 @ 11:38 pm
Barber. I think Samuel Barber. If you just paid me the compliment I think you did, thank you. If not, so be it, and elaborate please. I’m always willing to learn.
Bitey
08/15/2020 @ 7:20 am
Let’s see. Honestly, KS, your comments tend to be above my compliments. I don’t want to sound obsequious here.
I’m not sure if any of you have this sort of experience, but sometimes while I am immersed in one sort of experience, I get an overlap sensation. I can be forming an argument and begin to see a geographical shape in my mind. It doesn’t always happen, but it does sometimes, and it has since I was a kid. I also don’t know why these experiences overlap. I just like to make note of them and try them a second or third time to see if they remain consistent. This was the sort of thing happening when I started to read your comment.
Now, I am familiar with reading your writing. I have read them for years. I have mentioned that every time you comment, I learn something. I suspect there is something in my unconscious that had the expectation of this flowing explanation, and the blossoming of ideas, and a familiar soundtrack just began to run. I thought to myself, “that reads to me like Adagio for Strings sounds.” Admittedly, it is not a rational thought, but I wanted someone else to try it to see what their pairing was like.
That’s the best I can do to explain it.
Bitey
08/15/2020 @ 7:23 am
(Incidentally, in other experiences of this sort, an overlap may involve the sensation of smell, imagining a color, or the sensation of taste. All of the senses have been involved, usually not at the same time, and not predictably.)
Koshersalaami
08/15/2020 @ 4:50 pm
There’s a name for that phenomenon, where certain things trigger sensory information like seeing colors. People who don’t have it, which I don’t, tend not to realize you mean it literally. It’s a cool thing to have.
If I had any doubt about being paid a compliment, you just paid me one of the biggest I’ve ever gotten. Thank you.
Koshersalaami
08/15/2020 @ 4:51 pm
It’s a big deal to get that kind of compliment from someone I respect that much.
Koshersalaami
09/12/2020 @ 1:00 pm
I just tried the Samuel Barber thing. It makes my writing feel so significant. I can imagine it being read by a narrator as I listen to this. It occurs to me that if I were the narrator the effect would be spoiled completely. My voice is not resonant, at least not the way I normally use it. I also have a decidedly New York accent, though I probably wouldn’t drop any R’s while reading this you’d still hear it.
That piece could make anything sound epic.
Ron Powell
08/14/2020 @ 11:16 am
@Koshersalaami;
Contrary to certain misconceptions, black people are not indigenous to the West Indies but descendents of Africans brought to the Caribbean Islands to work as slaves on island plantations.
As a component of the slave triangle many were brought to the West Indies before being sold and exported to American owners and their plantations.
The Taíno were an Arawak people who were the indigenous people of the Caribbean and Florida. At the time of European contact in the late 15th century, they were the principal inhabitants of most of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti), and Puerto Rico.
In the Caribbean, England colonised the islands of St. Kitts and Barbados in 1623 and 1627 respectively, and later, Jamaica in 1655. These and other Caribbean colonies later became the center of wealth and the focus of the slave trade for the growing British Empire.
As of 1778, the French were importing approximately 13,000 Africans for enslavement to the French West Indies each year.
I’m a descendent of slaves from both theaters of the enslavement of Africans in the. Western Hemisphere or the ‘New World’ the Caribbean and the American South.
I don’t feel or presume to be ethnically ‘authentic’ in any significant way…
Racism, White Privilege, and bigotry give people who identify as black black an element of common and shared cultural experience that is often deemed or perceived as ‘African-American’ whether the appellation is genetically accurate or not…
Kamala Harris is a descendent of African slaves.
Barack Obama is not.
Both are African-American….
Koshersalaami
08/14/2020 @ 11:32 pm
Ron,
Are you under the utterly bizarre impression that I think that people from the West Indies aren’t African? You specifically know better than that given what I wrote in a previous post about perceptions of Black inferiority. Even if I hadn’t written that, you should expect me to know knowledge that basic.
Ron Powell
08/15/2020 @ 7:50 am
@Koshersalaami;
I know that you are not one of the millions who are saddled with the misconception or suffer from the delusion that black West Indians are somehow not descended from African slaves…
My comment is about the people who listen to, and believe, the likes of Rush Limbaugh know less than he does, which is tragic because, as you so aptly observed, he knows nothing at all….
Jonna Connelly
08/14/2020 @ 12:53 pm
I knew a woman from the Bahamas at the Univ of MN. The organizer of such things from her university community carried on a steady campaign to get her to participate in “African-American” activities. This being MN, there was outreach to the Black students, at least in part, to assist them adapting to an environment with a much smaller Black minority than they may have been used to, how to find grooming products and such as well as simple camaraderie and social support.
Kim absolutely refused to get involved because, she said, “I’m not African-American.” She was Bahamian. And one of the most self-confident people I’ve ever known. I pointed out that African-American is often used now as a euphemism for Black but she wasn’t having it.
My point being that African-American is often used now as a euphemism for Black. What we are seeing in the current political discussion is another example of Republican distraction from real issues (the government is twiddling its thumbs while people die, the Post Office is being destroyed intentionally to further the election of the most corrupt president in history and the corruption of the most corrupt president in history rampages on, for starters) and Conservative pretend intellectual hair splitting and it’s my opinion that all the rest of us good folks should just not feed their bullshit.
Thank you.
Bitey
08/14/2020 @ 1:12 pm
Like I said to Ron (on another post), my idea of what should be done with them can’t be said. So…there you have it.
Jonna Connelly
08/14/2020 @ 1:19 pm
Some will say. See my comment on the same post of Ron’s.
Bitey
08/14/2020 @ 2:11 pm
It is happening. Trump’s troops think it is their place to confer Blackness on Kamala Harris…or not.
Alan Milner
08/14/2020 @ 8:04 pm
An excellent thread following an excellent article. I was going to say more but I have just been called to dinner.
Art W. Stone
08/15/2020 @ 10:22 am
Whew.
I picked this and the thread, as the first thing to read after nearly a week under meteor showers next to a lake in high desert country.
Bitey
08/15/2020 @ 11:46 am
Good to have you back. I hope it didn’t make you want to run away to the wilderness.