Barack is, like I am, like many others of us are–for lack of a more graceful word– we are Bi-racial. Cross-racial is probably a slightly better, but still awkward term. That is, we are born twinned: one of each of two or more races is inside us. The blood of often opposing groups, runs in our cells, our bloodlines. Barack’s mother was Caucasian. His father was an African from Kenya.
People who are bi-racial are never without their twin. Never. Our twin is both ‘other’ and ‘I” at the same time. It’s a potentially tempestuous but also often transformative situation… if we give ourselves to working out its puzzle over our lifetimes.
Above is a painting by the master of brushwork and figurative art, Lucien Freud. It speaks to me and to many others who are bi-racial, because as you see in the two men on the bed, we are in “a relationship we cannot leave,” a lifelong relationship with our, often historically adversarial, bloodlines.
Sometimes the ‘other twin,’ at least to the over-culture, is seen as ‘the enemy’ born right into us as babies. Black/white for Obama. For Latinos, we carry the blood of the conquered and the Conquerors inside a single body; Native American and Spanish European. Long standing opprobriums on all sides.
There is often much work to come to terms for a bi-racial child, for these oppositions cannot be talked away; they are both gifted and unhealed bloodlines in many ways:
psychic, spiritual and cultural all at once. A bi-racial person has a journey of descent ahead of them. In our 21st century cultures, one will be driven to seek to understand, unite and transform these diverse and sometimes hostile twins within.
Yet, strive as we might, in our odd over-culture the bi-racial are often squashed into pre- designated categories by scientific minds that have divided the world and all those in it, not by our deeds or character, but by physical characteristics of our faces and bodies.
Thus by externals we have no control over, we are told who we are for life… instead of being able to stand before an undistorted cultural mirror and see who we are by the gifts we carry, the ones we’ve often striven so hard to literally make show above ground in this needful world.
The oddity is that most any soul, regardless of heritage or race(s), faces this wrongful categorization… just by virtue of being born onto this list-making earth. Yet there seems to be something about being bi-racial and being pressured to choose one twin over the other, and let the unchosen one waste away and die….
There is little support from outside ourselves, whether in culture, or in family, to choose both. To be both. To especially, belong to both sides. For if we try to, we are suspect suddenly. And if we cling only to one side we are rewarded by that side, and so go forward in life identified with that side, but not free…. freedom being what everyone says we want after being so long oppressed.
However, it becomes clear that there are often familial and racial oppressions within each family and race, as well as from outside forces.
I remember how words can open flesh like a rapier when my father said more than once in a fit of anger, ‘You don’t act like our blood.’ Not a week later, a relative from ‘the other side’ of the family said, ‘I don’t know where you get that viewpoint, it’s certainly not from us.’ These words heard by a child who has no war between families of different heritages, may hear them benignly.
But, given the push and shove of the sides of my family toward one another, what I heard some from each side say clearly instead, was this: ‘You are not us. Because you do not purely ally with us, you are not us. Because you think of ‘them,’ and ask their opinions too, because you do not take up our old and bloody rivalries, because you love them and not just us, you are not really one of us.’
To crush a child. ‘Where’d you get hair like that? We don’t have hair like that. How come your this and that don’t look like our thises and thats?’ A child who is bi-racial, strongly bi- or tri-ethnic, or often too, adopted… that child who carries characteristics of the racial or natal families is sometimes found not acceptable by the close-in family… Then, the child has to find or create a temenos in the wasteland, a place where he or she can crawl to shelter and heal. This may take many years.
The Paroxysm lyrics in a song called “Addiction to Illusion” go like this in part:
Feed by perfection
not by revolution
path of the mass
production chain of society
you bleed I bleed but that doesn’t hurt…
crushed by the hammer
of the supreme master
white is white, black is black
say what you have to say…
the highway is without exit
…addiction to illusion.
These lyrics, like the painting of the dark man and the light man above, say it. ‘You bleed, I bleed, but we say it doesn’t hurt’…. living in the divided world where the only choices are ‘white is white, black is black,’ no matter what we say: it’s all an addiction to a farce, a wrongful fantasy that oppresses rather than liberates.
Thus, by our features, our skin colors, our country of origin, our ancestral blood, we are solely defined every few years by the government man who asks us to stick his cards into the slot in our heads, and verify Caucasian, Asian Pacific, Hawaiian, Native American, Hispanic, African American.
If only someone at the gov’mint had the sense to print “Arthurian” or “Time Traveler,” “Voudon Queen,” or “Voluptuary” on the census forms, that might be something well worth counting.
So, often, for the bi-racial child, as she grows, as he learns, as they are battered about, told they fit, don’t fit, if only they will think, act, talk look this way or that other way or never act this way or never think that ‘other’ way… the choices boil down to very few:
–be bitter and live within the confines of the most crippled of our race(s), in the martyr quarter, sad forever, repeating only half the stories of our legacy, just the hideous ones, the egregious and horribly unjust ones, and thus we grow into looking like our stories, perpetually pitiable and beyond a point, unlistenable-to-able.
–become infinitely enraged, leaving flames behind in our footprints no matter who tries to help or heal us even a little, for we say, we are so insulted by history and the present world that we will never allow healing, but rather insist on walking around doused in the blood of the past intent on making ‘all the bad people who are not sorry’ look at us, day in and day out… and thus raise a vortex of energy in ourselves that approximates life, but instead is made up of loathing, and being overloud and over-long about telling everyone how they have failed morally to take care of us/ them/ it.
–try to fit in and become some vapid shade of what one once was, a perfectly acceptable, adaptable walking vaguery. But inside, ever afraid of being called out as too something; too light, too dark, too not enough, too something else, too ambitious for ‘passing,’ too undemure in talent flashing, too fast, too uncanny, too too. And so squander all one’s God given gifts by tempering and tamping down and remaining tiny and hoping in the end people who are not ‘our people’ will not hurt us, and will instead say we are, well, nice people who wouldn’t hurt a fly… while in fact, we have personally forfeited our own wings, and flying anywhere in mind or spirit altogether, is simply out of the question.
–dig in, go underground and live as though your memory has been surgically excised and you know nothing of your past, of who died for you, who lived for you, who tried to murder you, prevent you from being, helped you through the tanglewood– all within your own family lines— let alone the world. Slowly go more and more mole blind and earless and say God bless everyone but be of no use to evolution, and stay there because you imagine it is safe, and close out the culture and say you were not made for this world, and think you are somehow being virtuous by thus silencing yourself.
Those are common choices for a scarred up person who carries two opposing bloodlines and has been hammered for it. I’ve been in all four places throughout my life, believe me, and more– and that must be a long story of the agonistas for another time.
But, this is how I know to the bone, that any of those four stances eventually confine the mind, inhibit ability to move freely… destroy the soul, corrupt the incredible gift of carrying two or more races, coming to terms… for that coming to terms by the individual, is also the new template for the world to come to new terms with race, as well.
It sounds like a lot to assert, I know. But, it is usual in our world for better changes to come to the culture through those who have changed their own hearts first.
The bi-racial person who gives thought and work to become conscious of these matters of ‘inherited division and reconciliation’ in themselves, often carries a new template for integration of the opposing ends, real integration, meaning love and valuation of both and all, the very template many have been dreaming for the outer culture to integrate for seeming eons now.
And we see this in Freud’s painting. The bi-racial person in our culture is often encouraged, even ordered to lie in the same bed with one’s own twin self of another color, shape, time or nation— and to live with faces turned away from one another, to share the same everything but without looking at, without perceiving, without inquiring of, finding, or loving our own shadow twin that was born with us.
But look, in the painting too, there is a beatific thing; the dark man has placed his hand on the light man’s calf. There is a beginning, a skin to skin communiqué. Read this gesture not from the ego’s eyes, but through the soul’s heart, and then see what there is to see. This gesture is prescient, a symbol that can be read as the beginning of a new and different way of relating about ‘black and white,’ about all divergent ‘colors’ and classes of human beings… a new way that has never before been born alive and well.
It could be, that if a biracial person gave the time to it, delved into the 100 year wars that have gone on in the bloodlines they carry, came to peace with them, carried what scars of them must be, carried what great graces come from each… that there might be poured into our culture rather than just a history of wars and ‘sides’, rather now a new, lived wisdom and sabia, knowing.
For myself, one of the most painful journeys, and most clear places I finally came to after years of some people from each side of my heritages, spurning my other bloodline, and marginalizing my life as a result
… after all that, one day… with my hair that is not ‘right,’ with my stature that is out of the family norm, with my skin color that does not ‘fit,’ with my everything that is so ‘not’ a doppelganger of one side or the other, I finally called a halt to it all. I had been waiting and waiting for them to bless me. Longing and wishing.
Instead I took a deep breath, strapped on my ovarios, and blessed them.
Some angel spoke through me, and I told them something close to this:
I belong to each of you. I love each of you, all of you. I will not be denied that. Love me, or do not care for me– regardless, I am yours, and I will love you because you are my people. You all belong to me. And I belong to you, with you, near you… with or without your say-so, with or without my say so, because we are family. Regardless of where we do not match.
And they? Some remained stand-offish and condemning throughout their lives. But more cried. And I realized some were crying in gratitude. It was puzzling at first. With talking and listening, I came to understand for the first time in my life that ‘the blessing of belonging’ could not have been given to me by many of my kin, for ‘the blessing of belonging’ had never been given to them.
I’d accidentally in my anguished outburst stumbled upon giving them what they’d been longing for too: the blessing of belonging whether everyone has the approved likenesses, skills, ways of speaking, thinking… or not. Belonging because you are loving and lovable. Simple. Direct.
In the end, the stories of the biracial person are not better than others’ stories; they are different only because within one single person the divide in the culture has opportunity to first be settled within. Thus, those so embattled and eventually tempered and thoughtful, might have a tiny key to the future of how to do that within our beloved culture and country also.
I am hoping that in the ensuing days of ongoing discussion started up by Reverend Wright’s story– and Barack’s ‘lineage,’ in more ways than one– that we will speak not only about future presidential nominees, but also about our own nation’s racial stories never yet told.
Though I see some already are wanting to ‘change the subject,” away from racial matters, I believe that would be a grave error. We are at a doorway we’ve never been at before, and I think we need more stories about race rather than less… all the hidden stories, all the forgotten ones, especially all those that bridge the races, hold love and heroics and regard cross-racially, and all those held most precious and funny and wise.
Scheherazade told stories for more than 1001 nights in order to engage the sultan and remain alive day after day, night after night. We too. I would love to replace the tiresome old cultural screed about race that just tires people out ’til everyone is grumpy and angry and just says, ‘Heck with it, a pox on everyone.’ I hope we can, by telling new stories, change that to a blessing that helps us say to each other instead, much more so, ‘Paz to all.’
CODA
Regarding wounding inherent in striving to come to terms with race in modern times, if you would like to see my story, “Massacre of the Dreamers,” about how new life can rise from the bloodshed of dreams lost, I filed it here this morning at The National Catholic Reporter.