“...scorn injustice to other selves"
W.E.B. Du Bois
I believe in pride of race and lineage and self; in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves.
I am a professional. I went to good solid schools--nothing Ivy--but I went, learned how to study and pulled out each morsel from every shell. Undergraduate. Graduate. Post-graduate--and the hits keep coming with certifications — ok, maybe a sprig of Ivy--thank you Columbia Fu School of Engineering.
I need to establish myself as an informed critical thinker before I share something with you.
I have been black for 15 years. I am not talking about labels or perceptions placed on me by others. I accepted the “Oreo” when it landed on me in a school playground. In all honesty, and I don’t think this is unique to biracial or people of different ethnic groups, I never felt anything until I was forced to reckon with the zebra in the room.
My dad was black and my mom is white. I have sporadic memories of my mother feeling a certain way about my dad trying to sport an afro or wear a dashiki but all in all the kitchen smelled freely of pigs feet, chitlins, and collards in a way that seemed to be a Faustian bargain albeit with a fashion forward mephistopheles 12 years his younger.
That’s me being held in the frame but not inclined to cooperate--things are settled in family dynamics at a young age I suppose. My little brother was soon on the horizon.
We lived in an ethnically diverse neighborhood that felt like home until it didn’t. Crime rates slowly ticked up and my parents felt that we needed a better option for my oldest sister once she left middle school, so we moved.
Ironically, we were destined for a Levitt development built in the 1960s. I don’t know what my parent’s house purchase was like but I do know (all these years later) that the original Levitt properties--not ours to my understanding based on 1964 being the building record -- included clause 25 (until about 1948):
“The tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race. But the employment and maintenance of other than Caucasian domestic servants shall be permitted.”
Teased and taunted in our new middle-class white suburban neighborhood school yards about being “black or white” I didn’t understand the question but certainly knew what the only acceptable answer was--it required my sister to secretly hide a hat pin in the hem of her dress.
When you pull tightly enough things tend to stay put so I didn’t create much of a fuss and left New Jersey for graduate school in California. At this point, people were either my friends or they weren’t--the race bits were only discerned in the rear view mirror. I learned about not looking in that particular mirror--why bother, that wasn’t the direction I was headed.
Years later working as a data analyst I was reviewing census records for a book idea and decided to see if I could paint a narrative picture of the world I was born into. The closest census to my birth year recorded mixed race births but what really caught my attention was the classification of “negro”, a word that seems many lifetimes away was still walking in mine. I am not sure why but it made me emotional. I believe I wept. But more importantly, I became curious. I sent the swab into one of those genetic tests and what I discovered illuminated my life in a way I don’t think I can communicate.
I went from a binary classification to the richness of someone with a powerful history there to be claimed, honored, and celebrated.
My professional work also began to challenge ideas of race in medicine. I read Angela Saini’s beautiful book Superior: The Return of Race Science digging through the references and researching the data.
I can honestly say that my visit to The National Museum of African American History of Culture (NMAAHC) in all of its multi-media glory was like coming home. Understanding what I had no idea I didn’t know until listening and reading about the 1619 Project.
Reckoning Protest. Defiance. Resilience. is a new exhibit at the NMAAHC.
Today I was part of a group of media that were able to preview the collection and the stories it holds. I will explore these themes in later posts but I wanted to leave you with the beauty of how exhibits use the gallery to tell a story. Paintings are chosen to be close to others or to be displayed in another room entirely. These decisions are powerful ones made carefully by curators and museum teams.
This one will haunt me. Because of its timelessness beauty and grace. Bisa Butler’s tapestry of Harriet Tubman fixes her gaze upon you as you examine the details and meaning woven into the fabric.
But make no mistake. She is looking beyond you directly in her line of vision.
