Tag: race

This Good Earth

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I possess a priceless fact, though I didn’t realize how rare and beautiful it was until recently. Both my grandfathers are deceased—my paternal grandfather (Grandpa) succumbed to cancer on September 25, 2008, and my maternal grandfather (Papaw) died to due complications from Alzheimer’s disease on August 5, 2015. I was close to both and can say that I was well and truly loved by them. And while that is indeed incomparable, it’s not the fact I’m here to talk about.

Both men were farmers, and each drove a pair of mules when working the land. But that’s not all. I know those animals’ names. Grandpa called his Doc and Rodney. Papaw’s were Jim and Adar. Neither set matched because, according to my father, a similarly-colored pair was usually purchased together from a breeder. Very few farmers had enough cash on hand to do so. That’s the kind of detail I keep in my pocket, something to worry with my thumb whenever I’ve lost my bearings.

There’s a certain sturdiness that comes with knowing things like this. Not only were my grandfathers real people I smelled and touched and loved. Men who carried me on their shoulders and did their best to help ensure I never went without. They also had a past; they were connected to a place in a way I, with my limited time working a farm, can never be. But when they told stories, thankfully, I listened. I gobbled their tall tales and humble yarns up like so many plates of beans, and they’ve carried me through the last decade—the one I’ve had to live without my patriarchs, my humble men of great valor.

I’ve never driven mules, never worked land from seed to harvest. However, I like to think the ability to do so is in my genetic code somewhere—like the musical talent I got from Papaw and the knack for words that came from Grandpa. If those traits manifested in me, why not an ability to cultivate life from the earth? I sometimes imagine myself buckling a pair of mules together, picking up the reins, giving a gee or haw, and having the entire thing figured out in just a few passes. And while I know it’s fantasy, the wish of a woman longing for something she’ll never have, I can’t quite bring myself to give up on the idea.

In The Gene: An Intimate History, Siddhartha Mukherjee tells the story of the Hunger Winter (Hongerwinter), which the Dutch endured from 1944-1945. He writes, “Tens of thousands of men, women, and children died of malnourishment; millions survived. The change in nutrition was so acute and abrupt that it created a horrific natural experiment: as the citizens emerged from the winter, researchers could study the effect of a sudden famine on a defined cohort of people. Some features, such as malnourishment and growth retardation, were expected. Children who survived the Hongerwinter also potentially suffered chronic health issues associated with malnourishment: depression, anxiety, heart disease, gum disease, osteoporosis, and diabetes. (Audrey Hepburn, the wafer-thin actress, was one such survivor, and she would be afflicted by a multitude of chronic illnesses throughout her life.)

“In the 1980s, however, a more intriguing pattern emerged: when the children born to women who were pregnant during the famine grew up, they too had higher rates of obesity and heart disease. This finding too might have been anticipated. Exposure to malnourishment in utero is known to cause changes in fetal physiology. Nutrient-starved, a fetus alters its metabolism to sequester high amounts of fat to defend itself against caloric loss, resulting, paradoxically, in late-onset obesity and metabolic disarray. But the oddest result of the Hongerwinter study would take yet another generation to emerge. In the 1990s, when the grandchildren of men and women exposed to the famine were studied, they too had higher rates of obesity and heart disease (some of these health issues are still being evaluated). The acute period of starvation had somehow altered genes not just in those directly exposed to the event; the message had been transmitted to their grandchildren. Some heritable factor, or factors, must have been imprinted into the genomes of the starving men and women and crossed at least two generations. The Hongerwinter had etched itself into national memory, but it had penetrated genetic memory as well.”

Granted, neither branch of my family endured something as stark and horrific as the Hongerwinter, but if it is true that such an event could affect a family for not one but two generations, could a person be shaped by more mundane tasks and habits as well—especially those that have been practiced since time immemorial? Could the hours my grandfathers (and their grandfathers before them) spent behind a plow gently encouraging their animals have, in some small way, cultivated something in me too? It heartens me to think so, especially now that the way I view the world—and my very self—has changed forever.

“Race,” writes the historian Nell Irvin Painter, “is an idea, not a fact.” I have come to a fuller understanding of this truth in recent years as well as the fact that the “white identity” I’ve assumed for most of my life is as flimsy and worthless as a Confederate dollar. According to Dr. Painter in this piece from 2015, “It has become a common observation that blackness, and race more generally, is a social construct. But examining whiteness as a social construct offers more answers. The essential problem is the inadequacy of white identity. We don’t know the history of whiteness, and therefore are ignorant of the many ways it has changed over the years.”

As I have written before, white identity—such as it is—was created via erasure. It is described by virtue of what it isn’t. Hence, I am “white” primarily because I am not black or Asian or Hispanic. “The useful part of white identity’s vagueness,” Dr. Painter says, “is that whites don’t have to shoulder the burden of race in America, which, at the least, is utterly exhausting. A neutral racial identity is blandly uninteresting.”

Blandly uninteresting. Yes. That is what I have always felt about myself, what I have known in way beyond words. Even as a child, I was well aware that some part of me was missing. I’ve never had to grapple with who I am in the larger sense of the word because American culture has always said, “You are white. You are superior. You are normal. No need to think too hard about it. It’s everyone else who is lacking.”

Now, people are starting to speak up about white privilege, and because of the dearth of self created by that erasure, there’s nothing for white people to stand on. The only two options for self-definition open to us are “devoid” and “dreadful.” I’m either nothing or I’m a member of a “race” that has maintained supremacy through rape, murder, theft, chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and systematic mass incarceration.

“We lack more meaningful senses of white identity,” Dr. Painter asserts in her conclusion, but the solution is not to create distinctions or lines. “White identity” can be reinvented by abolishing white privilege and building on other, more positive and inclusive factors. That is why knowing those mules’ names fills me with a sense of joy and contentment. They are a fact from my past that has not been fabricated or co-opted. Jim and Adar and Doc and Rodney are rock solid proof of who I am and where I come from, and they connect me with others as well.

Men and women from all “races” worked the land. Other grandfathers with different skin colors than Papaw and Grandpa also barked a solid gee and haw. They knew the sleepless nights when a cold snap came and threatened their crops. They, too, put in a hard day’s work and got up the next morning to do it all over again. And all of them rejoiced when the harvest came in and there were cans of peas and corn and tomatoes put up for the hard winter to come. This is a piece of my identity that doesn’t cause shame. It is simple and wholly good.

I can work with that.

Who Am I?

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Whenever I go home to Florida, it isn’t my mother’s home cooking I’m starved for, though she is a fine cook in her own right. The minute I hit the state line, I start salivating for a bowl of pozole prepared by Nina, my sister-in-law’s mother. Filled with rich slabs of pork, hominy, and a sauce made from guajillo, piquin, and ancho peppers, it is simple and undeniably genuine. I ladle a serving into my bowl, cover it with onions, radishes, cabbage, avocado, and fresh lime juice, and eat until I can’t hold another bite.

It’s the same reason I love their Día de los Muertos observances. In order to celebrate and remember loved ones who have passed on, families go together to cemeteries to clean and decorate graves. They build altars to welcome the dead back to the world of the living and offer them their favorite food and drink. They dress as calacas (skeletons) and revel in the streets to encourage the dead to linger and party with their loved ones. And marigold petals and blossoms are scattered from altar to graveside to help the dead find their way home after the merriment’s done. It’s colorful, lush, and built on centuries of ritual.

According to David Eagleman in his book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, “There are three deaths: the first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”

Diá de los Muertos prevents the third death because, each year, the living come to remember those who have gone on, to continue including them in communal traditions. Compare that to mainstream American culture where we relegate our elderly to nursing homes and assisted living facilities, effectively “burying” them before they’ve even experienced the first death. We push the very thought of mortality and decay away with both hands, squinching our eyes shut to avoid looking at the eventuality that will come for us all.

There are also words in Mexican culture that I adore. Take sobremesa for instance. It has no English equivalent. Essentially, it means “after-dinner conversation” or “words shared over a table.” It refers to the time spent lingering after a meal, when people speak, relax, and digest together. Another thing we do poorly here in the States.

That’s what I’m missing—words without equivalents, food that fills, traditions that extend back into time immemorial—things that tie me to a people, a place, and a way of life. And there’s nothing to satiate this powerful craving that’s deeper than hunger, somewhere below the belly.

But, here’s the thing, I do have a culture. It’s American. It’s white. And it’s the one shoved down everyone else’s throat.

To be white in America is to be a part of the dominant culture, a member of an obtuse hegemony that doesn’t understand who or what it is.

From what I do know of my family’s history, I am the product of two lines of immigrants—one from Germany and the other from Ireland. (My Irish ancestors were originally from England, but because they were practicing Quakers, they fled to avoid religious persecution.)

But we have no German traditions. No Irish ones either. We speak no second language, eat no distinctly German or Irish meals or celebrate any culturally-specific holidays. No one in my family is a practicing Quaker. Whatever “roots” I had are gone, lost to time and tide. And though I can’t explain why, I feel like I’ve lost some part of myself, some level of singularity, as a result.

This loss is due, in part, to the “racial bribe” offered to people like mine after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, which pitted the poor (white and black, bond laborers and free men) against the wealthy planter class. According to Michelle Alexander, after the rebellion was suppressed and Bacon had died, “White settlers were allowed greater access to Native American lands, white servants were allowed to police slaves through slave patrols and militias, and barriers were created so that free labor would not be placed in competition with slave labor. These measures effectively eliminated the risk of future alliances between black slaves and poor whites.”

Essentially, people from Ireland, Italy, Greece, and other “lesser” nations—once thought of as “sub-human”—were integrated into “whiteness” when it was politically advantageous to the ruling class, when they needed to boost their numbers for political or economic reasons. (If you want to know more, there’s a fascinating two-part piece on this topic by Quinn Norton that I highly recommend. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg is also a winner.)

The impact of all this is still felt today. And it’s still going on. Don’t believe me? Look at the way Asian Americans are embraced by mainstream culture today or how many people of Hispanic descent now choose to label themselves as “white” when surveyed.

This is where the dissonance I feel comes from; it’s the reason I long for something authentic and gritty and tangible I can never seem to find. Somewhere deep down, in a place beyond words, I’ve always known that I’ve been sold a lie. That my “culture” is a construct, my “race” is nothing more than a box to check on legal and medical forms.

Perhaps racism, a hatred of the “other,” stems, in part, from jealousy. White people, whether we know it or not, our birthright was sold for a bowl of stew. To get a scrap of power and a wafer-thin portion of respectability, our ancestors submitted themselves (and us) to erasure. Hence, we’ve lost all sense of who we are. And to keep this flimsy social upgrade, all they had to do was harden their hearts and participate in atrocities that terrorized generations of people of color. And we continue adding to this problem by denying it ever happened.

I didn’t make that choice all those years ago, but I feel it. I have profited from it. But it has cost me something as well, though I could never put my finger on it until recently. I now understand that I have been handed an empty bag labeled “American culture” and told to protect it at all costs because it is precious. I was told I’m a denizen of a “Shining City on a Hill,” plunked in front of a flag in kindergarten and told to pledge my allegiance to it, to stand at attention with hat off and hand over heart to sing the national anthem with gusto.

And if someone takes a knee in order to draw attention to the fact that the flag and anthem don’t represent all Americans? If someone has what Atticus Finch calls the “unmitigated temerity” to speak up, to say that there is a deep racial divide that needs addressing in order to make the United States home for everyone? I’m told not to listen, to unequivocally shun him and his ilk, to protest the sport that gave them a platform to speak from in the first place. It’s not patriotism that motivates such a thought process, it’s nationalism—the shifty, drunk uncle that patriotism is often saddled with. And I ain’t buying.

Let’s be honest. A flag has no power of its own. It’s a few strips of cloth and a handful of fabric stars, an abstract representation of what America is supposed to mean. If we truly love it, we must be willing to lay it down and listen when a citizen speaks up and says that all isn’t well in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” When we can love and respect people of all colors and nationalities more than the narrative we’ve been sold, the one that flag promotes, we can do precisely what Langston Hughes encourages in his poem “Let America Be America Again”:

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain—

All, all the stretch of these great green states—

And make America again!

Notice the word “great” is nowhere to be found that last line. Why? America has never been great the way we think, never lived up to her potential. She hasn’t been America for all the people who call her home. But she could. She is rife with glorious possibility, power, and potential, but unleashing it will require some hard conversations and realizations on the part of white Americans. Things have to change if we are to make her again.

I cannot regain a sense of my own culture, but I can reject the ersatz one. I can point out what’s wrong with the nation I cherish and help heal what’s broken. I can lay down the lie and free up my hands to help create something better. Something more nourishing. Something more real.

At the Root

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It’s easy to get spoiled when you live in a city with a great museum, which is precisely what I have with the High Museum here in Atlanta, Georgia. The latest special exhibition, which closed May 7th, was Cross Country: The Power of Place in American Art, 1915-1950. Comprised of 200 works, the exhibit was broad in scope and filled with artists both well-known (Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Grandma Moses, N.C. and Andrew Wyeth) and obscure.

Organized by region, the artworks depict the South, Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1915 to 1950—a period spanning Prohibition, the Great Depression, and industrialization. The pieces share a common theme, though, according to Stephanie Heydt, the High’s American art curator: “All of this work is about memory and the history of a place as experienced across time.”

That’s the thing that struck me as I toured this exhibit–the feeling that I was seeing “memory and history of a place across time.” Each of the five sections of the exhibit were painted a different color and arranged to tell the story of the region, so it was clear when you moved from one to the next.

I toured the entire display once, beginning with the South and ending with the West, taking my time and using the audio tour to learn more about certain artists and their works, and then went back to the pieces that spoke the loudest. As I walked, I noticed myself growing more and more removed from the work—not because the pieces weren’t lovely or challenging, but because there was no personal connection for me. The art from the American West was like looking at the surface of Mars.

In “The Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost says that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” But I think the opposite is true as well. Home is the place you have to take into you. It’s unavoidable. In the place you call home, the cadence and vocabulary of the people who live there find their way into your mouth. The food they make fills your belly and satiates your spirit. The music they create is the soundtrack of your life, and their traditions mark the rhythms of your days as surely as solstices and cold snaps.

I’m a product of the South (with a dash of Midwest thrown in for good measure). To me, home is fields of cotton and tobacco. Homemade biscuits. Revivals in white clapboard churches. Country stores. Friday night football games. Poke cake. Johnny Cash. Sun tea in Mason jars and backyard gardens filled with tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes.

 

“Tobacco Sorters” by Thomas Hart Benton (1942/44)
I think that’s why “Tobacco Sorters” by Thomas Hart Benton struck me. I only helped harvest tobacco a few times, but brother was it enough. That is disgusting, hard, hot labor. You can tell just how hard it is from the man’s face. Look how the wrinkles and creases in his skin mirror the leaf in his hand. Even his hat and shirt look crumpled and tired. The little girl on the right is still fresh, but she’s new to the trade.

Other workers are working in the background at the drying shed, and I can imagine they are somewhere between these two on the spectrum. These are people I know and have spent time with. Decent, hardworking folks who are trying to scratch a living out of the earth, some years with better results than others.

“Farmers” by Ben Shahn (1943)

The same is true of the men in “Farmers” by Ben Shahn. In this piece, they’re at an auction, buying equipment from a farmer who’d gone bust. They’re looking for a good deal, knowing all the while that, with just one bad harvest, they could be next.

“Hoeing Tobacco” by Robert Gwathmey (1946)

But working land is hardly reserved only for poor, hardscrabble whites. Pieces like “Hoeing Tobacco” by Robert Gwathmey make it clear that black hands planted, tended, and harvested tobacco too.

“The Building of Savery Library” by Hale Woodruff (1942)

And then there are moments when you see blacks and whites working side by side to create something grand like a university library like they are in Hale Woodruff’s beautiful mural, its colors so bright they draw you across the gallery to get a better look. There’s hope here. Beauty. Progress.

But like any exhibit worth its salt, Cross Country contained pieces that shock people out of their complacency, ones that made patrons face something unpleasant or come to terms with something they’d rather not. In moments like these, Lucille Clifton says it best: “it is friday. we have come / to the paying of the bills.”

“Man With Brush” by Frederick C. Flemister (1940)

Frederick C. Flemister provided that moment for me. He was born in Georgia and went to school in Atlanta. He called the South home too, but this is what his South looked like.
“The Mourners” by Frederick C. Flemister (n.d.)

All those lovely Southern things I mentioned earlier? I bet he experienced and loved them too, but Flemister also had to deal with violence, racism, and lynchings like the one depicted in his work.

Though it’s done in a style reminiscent of Renaissance paintings of the Pietà, there’s no mistaking what’s happened. A man has been murdered and, like Christ, lies draped across his mother’s lap. The perpetrator is riding away in the background. The noose, though cut, looks sharp as a blade. The deed is done, and all that’s left is for the mourners to cry to heaven while a blood red scarf billows in the wind. The scene is beautifully rendered, but that doesn’t soften the blow. On the contrary, it highlights how hideous the moment truly is.

As much as it pains me to admit it, this is also part of the place I call home. Like the child in the painting, I want to run away, to turn my head, to pretend it didn’t happen. But there’s no denying it. I’ve been to the place where Mary Turner died. I currently live thirty minutes away from Forsyth County, which remained “White Only” through brute force for most of the 20th century. (Read Blood at the Root by Patrick Phillips if you’d like to know the entire story. It’s gut wrenching.)

Yes, home is a place you take in, but you have to take all of it.

I may never have lifted my hand in violence or knowingly ostracized someone, but oh, so many have…and done so willingly. “The Mourners” depicts something at the root of my South, planted long before my little branch ever came to full flower. But that doesn’t change the fact that it must be recognized, rectified, and resisted from now on if we’re ever to scour such atrocities from this good earth. Removing a monument of Jefferson Davis, while necessary, won’t fully solve the problem. Facing the truth, however hard it may be, and calling it by its right name? That just might.