In the Public Eye…
September 30th, 2012 by admin
Today I have the honor of being featured in a profile story in the Living section of our local Sunday paper, the Asheville Citizen-Times. It’s been an enlightening process. The interviewer read my name in a press release about the new online digital access to slave deeds in Buncombe County. She checked out my website, and thought my story would be a good one to share, so we started to work. After reading a great deal of background about me, my family, hobbies and interests, she sent me 23 questions, and I answered all of them in as much detail as I could. I am comfortable writing and I welcomed the opportunity to share my story. I have considered writing a memoir, so I knew I had to get familiar with this process of bearing my soul in print.
It’s a little unnerving to read about yourself in the newspaper. While our family portraits are usually carefully orchestrated and masterfully photoshopped creations featuring everyone’s best smiles, the photos in the paper feature a group shot where my husband appears to be mildly scowling towards me or my son and a second photo of me holding my dog at a somewhat unflattering angle for both of us. In any case, it’s out there now, and the responses from the public and from my friends and family are coming in.
My very first response was an email from an African American woman I don’t know. She said she was “dumbfounded” by what she read. She said she had “a difficult time digesting and believing your story of hiding your heritage.” She went on to say I didn’t have to explain, but she had a lot of questions about the story, and because she is a fellow genealogist with an interest in mixed race studies I wrote her back a very detailed email attempting to fill in some gaps in the story. I decided to write this blog post to answer some of those questions here, because I’m sure many people will not understand how this happened in “modern times”.
One thing that was left out of the article is the fact that I look back on those years at the Jersey Shore as some of the happiest times of my childhood. Yes, this first experience of racism directed at me was horrible, and as a young girl it affected me tremendously. But it wasn’t a constant thing. Because of that painful time, my family encouraged us to hide our background rather than open ourselves up to the risk of being hurt.
What I didn’t know at the time was that the area where we lived in Wall Township, NJ was once the location of New Jersey’s Klu Klux Klan headquarters. I think several of my classmates must have been descended from those people, many of whom lived in a subdivision near Camp Evans, which was owned from 1925 to 1935 by the Monmouth County Pleasure Club, a Klan summer resort. Some people might think that New Jersey, being in “the North” and certainly including many cities of great diversity and tolerance is full of racially tolerant people. The reality is that it included at least 28 suspected “sundown towns” where black people were not welcome to live for many years long past desegregation. My family sometimes mentioned businesses they avoided because of their treatment of black people. Mixed race children were particularly troubling to some people, so when we were out in a group with my black side of the family I remember drawing curious and often critical looks.
Another aspect of my experience that might be hard for other people to understand is that as a bi-racial person I am in a strange almost invisible position. I have been told many times by black people that it is perfectly obvious to them that I am black, (and they usually don’t say “part black”). At the same time, I have not been exactly welcomed with open arms in the black community. As a college student at the University of Arizona, I joined the Black Student Union, and even there I was brought to tears by outright hateful things some people had to say about my participation in the group and about white people in general. Most people see my tan skin and know I’ve got some kind of different ethnicity, but guesses as to my background include Italian, Greek, Hispanic, Filipino, and east Indian among others.
My ambiguous looks leave many people feeling quite free to express their racist feelings in front of me. I’ve even heard specific comments about mixed race children and how wrong it is to bring them into the world. Although our society has changed a great deal, and mixed race families are much more common and far more acceptable, there is still a lot of work to be done before the United States can call itself “post racial”.
One event from my high school years sticks out in my mind. In 1985 the Daily news featured an article about my father. At the time my history teacher Mr. Baker often sat at his desk with the Daily News and would read it throughout the day. I was proud of my dad being in the article, but at the same time I was terrified that Mr. Baker would look up in class and point me out. I don’t look back at my high school years as a happy time for many reasons. My racial background was just one several troubling secrets I was carrying around. In many regards I was a regular student, and I’m sure most teenagers are unsure and nervous and constantly concerned about what their peers think of them. From the outside it might have looked like everything was rosy. I was an attractive girl (although I didn’t appreciate it at the time), I earned good grades, ran track, had some good friends. But I was also very good at hiding a great deal of personal pain. I can’t imagine being able to share that article with the class. It mentions my dad’s struggles with drugs and alcohol. I can say without hesitation that racial issues aside, no high school student wants to share the fact that their father is a drug addict.
I have come a long way from those days. Still, being comfortable with my life and my past now doesn’t mean I’m completely comfortable with sharing all of it with the world. I hope sharing my story helps foster understanding. Now that the story out is I have to deal with this part of my past more honestly, and now thanks to Facebook and the digital age, the story is now just a mouse-click away from dozens of my old classmates and acquaintances. I guess it might be of some comfort to believe I am my own harshest critic. That remains to be seen.