Mixed Race Kids and the Great Racial Reckoning

“Your children have such an exotic background,” the family friend said at the party.

I am not fond of that adjective, when applied to people. 

I also don’t take offense where none is intended.  I smiled back and said, “Yes, but another way to think of it is that they are just utterly American.”

We are a nation consumed with arguments about race.  It is our “original sin?”  Is it the most pressing issue of our time, or is it a distraction intended to divide?  Do we need reckonings? Reparations?  Are our proposed remedies best targeted to individuals, to groups, or to both?

The battle rages.

When I say my children are particularly American, I refer to the fact that they are descended from slaves and slaveholders; from conquered and dispossessed indigenous peoples; from Jews who perished in the Holocaust; hard-bitten Croatian stonemasons; sharp-eyed and sturdy WASP pioneers.  This is family lore, backed up by DNA tests.   

According to the test they did on his spit, my son David is 25% Ashkenazi Jewish, 12% West African, and 9% indigenous Colombian – the rest is a mix of Eastern European and British.   DNA can’t yet tell us from which particular Colombian tribe his ancestors hail, but most in my ex-wife’s family think their forebears were part of the Arhuaco people.  His great-great-great-grandparents on his mother’s mother’s mother’s side were born into slavery in northern Colombia.  Eira’s grandfather was said to be a witch doctor, and some of those strange folk remedies live on in the family, as do a few vocabulary words we have traced back to the Yoruba people of West Africa.

One of my children’s great-great-grandmothers on my father’s side, Hedwig Nossal, died in Auschwitz along with her siblings.

My great-great-great-grandfather freed his slaves in East Texas in 1850, convinced that it was a grave sin for one man to own another. He brought his family to California in covered wagons.  Here, not long after he arrived, he participated in a lynching, as described by his own daughter in the excerpt from a family memoir attached below.

Ana, my children’s maternal grandmother, worked as a domestic servant when she first emigrated to this country from Colombia.  Employers called Ana a n*gger to her face, and they used the same epithet towards her daughter, who cleaned houses with her mother after school and before soccer practice.

My own mother grew up in multi-generational Bay Area prosperity; mama went to a Swiss boarding school, then Vassar College.

I could go on, but perhaps the point is clear: my children, like countless American children, are directly descended from both the lucky and the unfortunate. If you prefer an ideological cast, they carry in their veins the blood of the oppressed and the enslaved as well as the oppressors and the enslavers.  They are a glorious, riotous, thoroughly American product of global influences, of traumas unimaginable and triumphs astounding.

What is racial reckoning to my children?  They know one grandmother is a Black immigrant, and another a fourth-generation descendant of what some might consider California’s elite.  In the great sorting of relative sufferings and comparative oppressions, how best should my bunnies parse out the past?  Does an ancestor who lynched people cancel out the ancestors who were enslaved?  Does the white grandmother who grew up in comfort cancel out the Black one who grew up in desperate poverty? 

Is it all just about appearance?  A few years ago, a relative on Eira’s side studied Heloise’s then five-year-old face.  “You can just tell,” he said; “there’s still some color there.  White people won’t see it, but Black people are gonna know; she’s gonna look just enough like a sister.”  

One never knows quite what to say at such moments, so I offered a pleasant and encouraging, “It’s certainly possible.”

Does my former mother-in-law deserve reparations?  If someone’s ever paying cash to the descendants of Colombian slaves, you’re damn right. (Thorny question beyond the scope of this essay: do Black Americans whose ancestors arrived here after 1865 deserve reparations, particularly if their families were enslaved in the Caribbean or South America?  The trauma and racism are the same – but do they have a claim?)   Did my daddy deserve reparations from the Austrian government for what the Nazis did to his family?  Jawohl, indeed, and my step-mother, his widow, still gets a small check every month.   Thank you, Vienna, much appreciated.

Are my children white enough?  Black enough?  Hispanic enough?  Native enough?  Jewish enough?  Do they need to “unlearn their privilege,” or is there sufficient suffering and oppression in their heritage that they can at least periodically be among those doing the teaching?   

I do not have recommendations for public policy.  I do not have answers for how best to design a more just pedagogy.  I can barely figure out which boxes to tick on my children’s racial and ethnic census forms. (We just tick them all, darn it, because we will not erase an ancestor.)

A few years ago, a Christian friend of mine, deep in the social justice movement, told me that when Jesus said, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first,” the Lord was describing what must come next as part of America’s reckoning with its dark and troubled past.  The privileged must step back and step down; the hitherto oppressed must be lifted up. 

I confess I laughed.  Who are these “firsts” who do not also have “lasts” in their families?  Who are these “lasts” who are not also firsts?  What are my children and the millions like them supposed to do?  Perform racial mitosis so as to separate their firstness from their lastness?

What I do know is this: race is complicated.  Privilege is complicated.  My children may be more obviously mixed than some, but make no mistake – countless Americans are more or less just like them, or will be in the years to come.  We cannot allow ourselves to buy into simple narratives of light and dark, good and evil, victims and villains.

We must embrace complexity.