Mixing it Up

There was a post up this morning in Facebook saying, essentially, if you have Irish blood, watch this. It was a video of a young girl singing Danny Boy, very sweetly, with visuals of the Irish coast. I think of myself as about a quarter Irish, in a British Isles mongrel mix. My daughter gave me a gene search kit for Christmas a few years ago, and I came out about there. Peasant stock, obviously, looking at my big bones and square build. None of which is very relevant, except that I am white. Privilege from the word go.( I am also female. Discrimination from the word go, although in many respects covert and subtle. Subject of another rant some other time.)

If you are mixed race and it shows, the discrimination is neither covert nor subtle. It is right there in your face. If you want a picture of how a whole society handles mixed race, I direct you to the Benjamin January series that Barbara Hambly has written about pre Civil War New Orleans. The discrimination informs every plot and defines every character. It is also a superbly written and thought-out bunch of books. And I came away from reading some of those books questioning everything I thought I knew about prejudice.

I grew up in an integrated community, or so I thought. Windsor, Ontario, where I was raised, is across the river from Detroit, Michigan and was a landing place for Underground Railway escapees. The escaping slaves got to British controlled territory, were automatically free and safe, and stayed. So there was a good representation of blacks in the schools and in the city. Many of my classes in public school had black* kids in them. And the black kids were frequently mixed race and showed it in either feature or skin tone. This was normal for me. What I did not know was that the black community valued these evidences. When you think about it, that sucks. Most of the identified-as-black people with lighter skin tones, or straight, light-coloured hair or Caucasian features, have these attributes because they have a female ancestor(s) who were raped or coerced by white men. The resulting children were slaves like their mothers, but with mixed genes. And their heritage shows in their Canadian descendants.

* The polite term we used at the time was ‘Negro’. I know this is no longer acceptable. But I do not really understand what is. I don’t like African American because for me, an American is someone south of the border. And African North American does not work. So I use ‘black’, and I really hope you are not offended.

I have joined a Facebook group called ‘If you grew up in Windsor…’. A lot of people are posting school photos to this group and I am surprised at how few black kids show in the photos. When I look at my own high school yearbooks which are available on line (I threw out my own copies years ago), I can’t spot a girl I know was black by running my eye down the photos. Her skin tone is not different on the somewhat yellowed page. And when I look at other class photos, there are perhaps three or four with dark enough skin to catch my eye or with a big Afro. I am pretty sure there are more that I do not catch. But not enough to really show an integrated community. Not nearly enough.

My father had a friend who was black and a lawyer. I am pretty sure he was unusual and not invited to be a member of the local Golf and Country Club. My parents had no other black friends although they were not members of the Club either. My aunt was. She moved to a retirement complex in her eighties and was quite surprised and upset to find a neighbour of Chinese extraction. However, the neighbour was a hot Bridge player and pretty soon my aunt, another Bridge fiend, was on a first name basis with her and there were no more comments. Thus is prejudice overcome, she said with a somewhat rueful chuckle. The point being that my aunt’s acquaintance had previously all been white.

In my daughters’ schools and generation, the mix is there, obvious and taken for granted. Children in every class photo are a mix of colour and race. We were lucky there, I think, as our school was next to a fairly large area of what was called ‘low rent’ housing. When my daughter came home upset about a classmate whose parent could not afford to buy material for a sewing project, it was a valuable lesson for her. When she came home and told me she had torn up the application for the French Immersion program, it was a valuable lesson for me.

My point is, the race thing is improving. The fact that so many young people are demonstrating and marching and actually living the richness of an integrated life is heartening. In my childhood community, the stories that motivate them would have been suppressed. I envision to a world in which the majority of people are mixed. Married to one another and producing beautiful mixed children. Mixed together in schools, neighbourhoods and at work. Mixed together in all levels of government. And not as mixed up as I was as a kid.