Today white supremacy is becoming a visible spectacle that seeks to silence and destroy in the last ditch effort to colonize the U.S. fully. White supremacists groups have become bolder in recent months with the election of the 45th president. While some well-meaning liberal white people are proclaiming shock and awe at the killings, rapes, and harassment, non-whites face if you are a person of color you know that this hate has been festering ever since the founders landed in the U.S.. If you are indigenous or black, you know too well the history and current situations have involved murder, rape, forced sterilization, and general terrorist tactics.
Brilliant people of color like Kimberly Crenshaw[1] has argued that one way to have a more nuanced and productive conversation about our social ills is to use the filter of intersectionality. Social problems are rooted in identity politics and that we need to understand that people take on multiple identities in the course of their day. One can be poor, and white, and a man, and someone with a college degree, and someone who is a homosexual. None of the identity categories fully describe the person, and we much understand all categories to solve problems. While Crenshaw is correct, she also misses a micro reality. Humans are hybrids; you cannot section identity into neat parcels that equate with one social group. The intersectional model still relies on binary categories because it assumes some biological binaries. What is whiteness, what is a woman, what is sexuality are categories we never question, and we assume that people can fit nicely within these categories? Lots of work is being done in the black community to fight back against white supremacy, to expose the brilliance and beauty that lies at the heart of blackness. This work is absolutely necessary. At the same time, it seems that we need to attack the premise of white superiority, the ideation of white supremacy also. Liberation from oppression involves an examination of how whiteness is simulacra just as much as any racial category, and that most of our ideas about whiteness are propaganda.
The realities of DNA:
One of the biggest problems with the notion of white supremacy is that there is a purity of ancestry that makes white people superior to everyone else and that the “naturally more intelligent, resourceful, and ethical” characteristics associated with white skin have not through breeding diluted with color. History shows that white supremacy is not a reality. Black people, Asian people, Native and Arab people have contributed in significant ways to philosophy, medicine, architecture, science, religion, and the arts. Perhaps, more importantly, the idea of purity can also be easily undone with a simple DNA test.
For all intensive purposes, I am a white person. I was raised to believe my family on both sides (paternal and maternal) were white and had always been a mixture of various Anglo/Saxon peoples. I discovered 8 or more years ago that my father’s family was not pure Anglo/Saxon. There had always been talk of how my great-grandmother on my father’s side was Native American. The family name Noe does appear on the Dawes Roll, so that makes sense. My father tanned very easily and he attributed that to this woman with purportedly one-quarter Cherokee blood. The reality is that the family through my grandfather is also mixed. I come from a small group that is considered a tri-racial isolate. A group that some ancestors immigrated to North America in the late 1600’s, then moved to what is now Kentucky and had children with sub-Saharan Africans and Native Americans. The Melungeons stayed in the Appalachia mountains from Kentucky to what is not West Virginia and tried to pretend they were a Portuguese or Native American mixture.
When I thought about the large lips and the inherited condition of lactose intolerance that plagues me, the comments about my skull from hairdressers it made perfect sense that our family was part of the tri-racial isolates. Our family cooked and ate the food that blacks southerners pioneered, played the instruments that sub-Saharan Africans brought from their homeland like the banjo. They firmly denied any black ancestry and talk of grandmother’s mixed mother were quickly squashed even with talk of the Iberian peninsula as an explanation for the ability of family members to tan readily to a color not achievable with pure Anglo/Irish heritage that the family wanted desperately to mimic. Except of course for those of us grandchildren with the MC1R gene who are pale and practically allergic to the sun. I was not shocked by the revelations from my study of my father’s genealogy. The story of the Melungeons aligns perfectly with tall tales about the family told at reunions and weddings or funerals. It allowed my generation to blend in perfectly as white. Yes, my family told me I was Anglo/Irish/Cherokee, but no one said anything about black people being part of our family story. So we were white enough. Except that we were children of children of poor Appalachian farmers and coal miners whose aunt always had well water, whose relatives are in a family cemetery going back to the 1800’s in central West Virginia.
Two years ago I decided to have my DNA tested through National Geographic’s human genome mapping project. I was interested in what would be revealed but disappointed it would only be my maternal line. I thought it would also be a cool way to contribute to the history of humans in a very permanent way since I don’t have children to leave behind my genetic code. I prepared for some boring stuff. My mother insisted that her mother was “pure English” and her father was “pure French,” going so far to talk about the things from England that my grandmother had from her mother. I thought maybe the French ancestry would be interesting, but instead, I’d learn about the maternal line so just a bunch of poor English people who ended up in Newfoundland Canada via Cape Breton Island, and Nova Scotia. So I was surprised to find out that my “pure English” grandmother was indeed not so “pure” not only was she Irish (which I already knew because her last name was Hynes which is an Irish surname) but was Southern European, Eastern European and much to my surprise X2A haplogroup. This meant that on my maternal side one was a first nation woman whose ancestry goes back to before any other indigenous occupants of North America. These people did not cross the Bering Straight and were in North America before any white settlers/pioneers/colonialist set foot on the continent. This means that my maternal line includes Mi’kmaq’s. My cousins and aunts and uncles disparage the “drunk Indians” fairly regularly without realizing that the family was actually part of the “drunk Indians” group who manage to fit in with whites, especially my mother’s generation and mine who also have the MC1R gene.
I am white skinned. I am the whitest white, I beat everyone I know regarding pale white skin. I have gray eyes. My family raised me as if my pale skin meant I was white and not black and not native American. I am passing. When people met me, they think my whole family must be recent Irish immigrants, because they don’t know more people in Scotland have red hair than Ireland by population percentage. They assume I must be Anglo/Saxon and because of the ideas about red hair being a trait of Vikings and because I am well educated having attended three separate graduate programs in three different subjects in two different states and two countries. My poverty has never made me feel all that special for being white, I have studied colonialization, I have read and written about Fanon. I felt like part of that oppressed group regarding poverty and somewhat because of the cruelty to you if you have MC1R presenting hair. While people eroticised me I was also a sexual threat, “red heads will give you diarrhea.” The reality is that I am a hybrid. My ancestors came from many different lands and cultures and blended into what people now assume is white, but the evidence is clear there is no “purity” to our whiteness. We are hybrids. And DNA evidence is exposing the truth that most people sanctioned as white in our society and many who hold deep hatred towards non-whites are also hybrids. The rape of millions of black women led to many pregnancies that they carried to term, and the whiter children were often taken into the master’s, or the rapists, household, never to know about their black mother. Black people also mixed with white people willingly and as a combined result of up to 12% of the white population in some places is mixed.[2]
There is no binary
We are all hybrids of cultures and religions and languages there is nothing “pure” about 80% of the humans existing on the planet at this time. Even before colonization by Anglo/Saxons became the hip thing to do in the late 1600’s there were people from the East sailing to the Near East; there were people from the African continent sailing to South America and across the Mediterranean as well as the Indian Ocean. People have been moving around this planet and mating with people from outside their designated “race” for most of human history. Our Neanderthal ancestors mixed with other groups until they physically were no longer identifiable. I explain these things to white people, and they get very uncomfortable, they are convinced that their parents or grandparents would know the truth about their heritage and never lie about their ancestor’s complexion.
“I wonder if people who hate/fear/discriminate against/harm transgender/gender-queer/non-binary people realize: …
- That the attempt to make their own pain and victimhood “pure” enough that they think have a right to engage in bigotry unassailed by the sting of implication only makes clear the depth of their inhumanity and hypocrisy, and sheds light on why ideology > identity.
- That the very basis of their argument *relies* on virulently oppressive and violently anti-human white supremacist capitalist imperialist non-disabled patriarchy rather than defies it.[3]
Asks the writer who goes by the moniker of Son of Baldwin[4] wrote on his Facebook timeline.
Son of Baldwin has gained attention recently in response to criticism of his questioning of if it is worth risking your own life to save someone who openly hates you, and works to destroy you and your community every day. He was responding to the fact that a black lesbian woman had saved the life of a Republican senator who called himself David Duke Lite, the Klan grand wizard David Duke in case you are unfamiliar. This man, Sen. Steve Scalise is a known white supremacist who actively sought to ban same-sex marriage in his state of Louisiana, was saved, ironically, by a black lesbian.[5] Crystal Griner is a U.S. special agent assigned to protect members of the government. She knew who this man was and how much he hated most of her existence, yet she saved him. Many hailed her as a true ethical hero, who saved the life of a man who in private calls for her to be enslaved or killed. Baldwin questions if that is a good tactic, to place yourself in the line of fire to protect someone who actively works to mark your life as unworthy of any salvation. Son of Baldwin thoughtfully reminds us that:
For centuries, black people have been regarded as sub-human workhorses whose entire purpose is to serve white people’s whimsies.
For centuries, queer people have been regarded as sub-human degenerates whose whole existence was an anathema to cisgender heterosexual people’s off-hand sensibilities.
And what our — black/queer people — response to that has been, largely, is to attempt to be a more moral species of being than those who dehumanize us.[6]
As Son of Baldwin points out black people are not monolithic in identity, there are queer black people; there are non-binary gendered black people. This leads us to the realization that binary categories of identity are inadequate. One is not simply white or black, within those divisions are a myriad of identities. Some people are cisgendered, some people are Muslim, some people are bound to wheelchairs, some people are parents, some people are mentally ill and all these people can have any color skin. Identity does not function as a singular intersection of binary opposites; rather it is a fluid concept that morphs depending on when and where you are at. The fact that colorism within the black community exists also shows that there are different ways to be black in the world. Colorism, the preference for light skin and Caucasian phenotypes, works more against black women than black men. “Gendered colorism can be particularly damaging among women with dark complexions, as society tends to reward those who look more Eurocentric.”[7]
Thus there is not one black identity, but this also means there is not one white identity and many who think they are “pure” whites are in fact mixed. This is particularly true in the Southern U.S. where enslavement and rape produced many hybrid children some who would go on to “pass” into whiteness. Even Southern culture itself which is held up as a white enterprise is also a hybrid. Southern foods like peanuts, okra, and watermelon are all things that the triangular trade of enslaved people brought to the South.
Culinary historian and author Jessica Harris says food traditions hold symbols and meaning that serve as a historical roadmap. For decades she has used an image of okra on her business cards as a symbol of her family’s African roots and her own connection to the continent’s cuisine. But as the green, finger-shaped vegetable pops up on menus across the United States as an emblem of Southern American cooking, the true narrative of the plant is at risk of disappearing…[8]
Southern music, especially Appalachian Bluegrass and Jazz are hybrids of sub-Saharan African music with instruments that the enslaved people made, like banjos.
In the United States, the dominant forms of contemporary American music and vernacular dance are also derived from America’s African-based slave legacy. This has occurred despite the fact that drums, the rhythmic foundation of African music and dance, were outlawed in many slave communities in the United States.[9]
Vernacular dances such as jigs, shuffles, breakdowns, shake-downs, and backsteps, as well as the strut, the ring shout, and other religious expressions, were danced to the accompaniment of these drum-less rhythms and to the fiddle, the banjo, bows, gourds, bells, and other hand or feet instruments—all New World African inventions by enslaved Africans.[10]
While many, especially white people, identify Southern U.S. culture with whiteness, this is not true; it is a hybrid of Sub-Saharan African, Spanish, French, English and Native Indigenous practices which have fused together and informed one another. When you understand the history of how the U.S. came into existence you realize that it was not a matter of transference of English culture which grew, but a blending of English culture with the other cultures that colonialism transferred with the indigenous cultures that were already there. The results are identities and practices which are neither black nor white, native or imported but are rather both and neither at the same time; they are hybrid.
Binary identity can be politically useful for drawing attention to those who are forced to the margins and live under a dominant white patriarchy, but they often fail to create change because they are rooted in a myth and not a reality of lived experience. As Bell Hooks remind us:
The postmodern critique of “identity,” though relevant for renewed black liberation struggle, is often posed in ways that are problematic. Given a pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics. Any critic exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and racial domination would need to consider the implications of a critique of identity for oppressed groups.[11]
Binary identity comes from notions of essentialism, still present in the ideas of intersectionality. That is binary identities rely on the idea that there is something inborn and unchanging about identity which makes it who you are. Intersectionality exploded the idea that we are never just one identity, that there is not one way to be black. However, it does not interrogate the reality that there is no pure racial category and no essential way to be raced. Instead, race, like all our categories of identity are never pure but are always hybrid, and are always shifting and mutating as time passes.
The critique of essentialism encouraged by postmodernist thought is useful for African Americans concerned with reformulating outmoded notions of identity. We have too long had imposed upon us, both from the outside and the inside, a narrow constricting notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static overdetermined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of the self and the assertion of agency.[12]
In 2017 we must start to take an honest look at the problems binary identity has created and look for what is common about oppression to find more liberatory ways of being.
[1] Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.”
[2] WadeDec. 18, 2014, and Pm, “Genetic Study Reveals Surprising Ancestry of Many Americans.”
[3] “Facebook.”
[4] “Who Is Son Of Baldwin And Why We Should Listen Up?”
[5] “A Queer Black Woman Saved Homophobic/Racist Congressman Steve Scalise’s Life – AFROPUNK.”
[6] Baldwin, “Let Them Fucking Die.”
[7] Hall, “No Longer Invisible,” 3.
[8] Pinchin, March 1, and 2014, “How Slaves Shaped American Cooking.”
[9] “America’s Cultural Roots Traced to Enslaved African Ancestors.”
[10] Ibid.
[11] Hooks, “Postmodern Blackness.”
[12] Ibid.
melungeon mullins 