my daily bread||chimamanda adichie on assimilation

Even now I'm scared of my own voice. Like Chimamanda below, my first books were British and about winter and glens and dales even though Barbados is hot and we had gullies and gutters. So many times I feel as though my voice is buried under the heavy blankets of white European and white and black American cultural influence. And most of my life has been a conscious effort to separate the foreign strands and thread the three with my Bajan heritage to produce my own hodge-podge quilt. Still working on that. Listening to Chimamanda's talk, The Danger of a Single Story, helps.

hotness||"good hair," congolese style

I didn't even listen to the audio, the pics are so fly.

week in review||michelle obama could reunite southern roots

A grad student once asked how my last name came to be Murphy. It was after hours and we were in a packed on-campus pub in central London. My classmates and I were using cheap liquor to forget another eye-crossing day of theory and lecture so it was a plus to chit-chat with the guy whom we had already marked as a cutie. Until he wanted to talk about rape over red wine and reverie.

I remembered this exchange while reading last week about Michelle Obama's earliest known maternal ancestor. Her name was Melvinia Patterson-then-Shields, by transfer of ownership, and we meet her at 6-years-old. I can't recall the last time a First Lady's family history made news but to my mind, the hunt for a slave, no pun intended, is the news.

Even this spray of literary deodorizer:

While she was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of time.

couldn't stop a smile from competing with my critical eye. A slave had been named not in a moldy academic journal, an historical novel or a segregated-by-default ethnic studies course, but on the front page of the paper of record. It was like Melvinia, drowned while toiling in the muck of anonymity, had been rescued and made to sit on a porch with a fan in one hand and a mint julep in the other.

But I also bristled (What is there to explain? Why are you going there?) when the article attempts to explain Melvinia's bi-racial children--to say nothing of those she miscarried. (The rate is 15-20% for a healthy adult woman, today; it must have been higher for enslaved girls and women in the 1850s.)

During slavery, sex between master and slave is typically rape. Love unions, particularly in the American south though less so in French/Caribbean-influenced New Orleans, would have been rare, not to mention, punishable by law and custom.

So why does Melvinia's article omit that point? Why does it leave open the possibility that she found love with the unknown white father(s?)? Because that, too, is what I hope for my own Melvinias.

Perhaps human wiring leads us to fantasize the least likely scenario, as I do, behind the Scots-Irish and English surnames in my family line. No child of rape or other illicit union, or witnesses to either, wants to revisit how they came to be. Silence can be a respectful shield.

Especially for my mother's and grandmother's generation, looking at your mulatto grand or great-grandparent's conception is like sensing your way down a dark street. Don't look left or right, ain't nothing good growing in those alleys. Just keep straight. And of course those generations took their conception stories, if they knew them, straight to their graves.

But, human wiring, I want details. I want to know who I come from but I've settled for the broad stroked history class version--and I expect the white descendants of my Scots-Irish and English branches to have read the same general notes. It's not like slavery and colonialism hooked up for a one-night stand; several centuries of the two entwined, birthed modern-day Europe and the Americas.

So I stiffened when that young Englishman asked me, in a slightly pint-laced tone, to explain our common lineage. It felt like a Little Lord Fauntleroy setting up the servant girl who shares his father's face to describe how she came to be a bastard. Innocence did not become him.

I instinctively blushed and became defensive. The question only highlighted his forebears' success at indoctrinating the myth of apartheid and by extension, white purity--the sacrificial altar at which their mixed race siblings and cousins were sold, hidden, or stripped of their inheritance and legal rights. I don't recall what I said but I answered generally ("Oh, immigrants from here moved there...") and briefly ("I'm gonna go see what my girls are up to...").

My second thought would come later. At least he had asked and perhaps, with less defensiveness on my part and more conversation, we could finally unearth the details of who, when and where, together.

I expect that in a few weeks time, the New York Times will introduce the country to Michelle Obama's distant relatives, the white descendants of the Shields of Georgia. Some of them are probably working the phones even now, calling each other to say, “I think we’re related to the First Lady.”

Call me naïve but I can see, in the hunt for Michelle Obama's ancestor, the beginnings of a national project to reunite the blood lines of black and white Americans with southern roots. Would such an endeavor be useful to the country? Especially now, when discord over healthcare and government intervention has renewed racial mistrust?



Photo credits:
(1) unknown, Greene County, GA, 1941
(2) unknown, ca 1750-1914, Northwind Picture Archives

PdF conference||white flight flees online

MySpace has become post 1960s-Detroit; Facebook is neighboring Livonia. That theory, that young whites have been fleeing "ghetto" MySpace for "suburban" Facebook got more than a few Eureka!-type Tweets from an audience of mostly white folk at a politics-meets-technology conference last month. Two weeks later, it's still getting play on Twitter. If 21st century progressives are starting the conversation with, "racial and class inequities follow people online," then I'm not interested in talking. And if progressives are trying to capitalize on the Obama moment and become the heir apparents to 1990s cultural conservatism, they can't afford to lose a progressive young black woman.

Here's what went down during the "digital white flight" session:



On stage, a movie screen-sized Twitter-feed showed real-time crowd reaction to Harvard researcher danah boyd's presentation on prejudice and inequality in online America. It dissuaded me from Tweeting what I really wanted to say. There was no way to explain in 140 characters or less that the entire exchange annoyed at least one of the 10 black people sitting in that crowd of 1,000.

boyd's Lecture on the Obvious came across like this: You are privileged, yes you are! And there are others who are not, no they're not! And you've got to remember that, yes you do! Insert pacifier. Back pat. Burp. And those mofo's really burped and slept contentedly, as though they'd just been fed some rare formula.

The people sitting around me in that auditorium had helped devise, fund and implement the online strategies that put Barack Obama in the White House. Yet a very engaging white woman who used "we" a lot, was on stage reminding them that inequality exists online. Not, showing the impact on the have-not's. Not, highlighting methods or programs that fixed the digital divide. Not even brainstorming strategies to do so. But simply stating a variant of the problem, which has existed for 400 years. What, were those dog years?

If techno-progressives are to build the great 21st century participatory democracy, this special ed learning curve, this first grade conversation re: race and privilege can not be tolerated. Not least because it does not impress your natural ally--a progressive black woman who wants to build a multi-racial/class coalition.

Be clear, that the problem is racially-based disparities between many blacks and whites which persist, even now. The problem is extraordinary class inequality between the wealthy and the working class/poor of every race. So forgive my tremendous impatience then, at being told at an elite conference whose attendees propose to build the coming "digital democracy," that white teens wanting to hang online with other white teens is indicative of continuing inequality. Who cares?

fundraiser||women of color radio project

My friend, Tracey Rose has gathered a small group of young women in media to produce radio stories/podcasts from our perspectives. That means, for example, conceiving stories for audiences who look at Michelle Obama and see their mother, sister, neighbor or co-worker and so, would not need to be taught that people like Michelle exist.

I get excited, damn near giddy in the presence of these brilliant women. We are journalists, documentary filmmakers, producers, teachers, authors. Communities of color will feature prominently in our stories but they will not be our only subjects. It's fair to say that we're approaching this with a "World is Yours" mentality.

But we need your help. We need to raise $380 to purchase high quality recording equipment that will be collectively shared among our members. Learn more--and invest as little or as much as you like--here.

Any questions, please, please holla.


Photo credit: John Smock

writing out loud||father's day

It's a weird day for me. I watched the HFD greetings as they rolled out on my Facebook friends feed. One announced, with a smiley face, that he had cooked breakfast in bed for his little girl. Another sent greetings as a "daddy's girl."And another, with a beautiful boy, spoke of the "fraternity of fathers" to which he belongs. Which made me think about what this communal celebration means for me, who never really bonded with my dad.

Beyond a certain age, I rarely allowed myself to imagine that I belonged to him. Living in different countries helped. I am his daughter. He is my father. The words come out of my mouth as a fact of life, like, women have babies. I am not owned, nor do I own. But neither have I been free. Locked away inside, in a little room, is a tangle of hurt and feelings of abandonment that I am sure, bleeds into the way I have lived my life, the choices I have made. Though, not all necessarily negative.

Screw the theories about fatherless daughters. We're no more dysfunctional than your average human being.

A couple of years ago, I met a woman named Carla whose surname is my father's. Saying her full name aloud in my mind--which I often did--was like windowshopping for a pair of jeans. Buying was never the point. I just wanted to see what they looked like. My name next to his sounded fine, I guess. But so did, Carla Murphy.

Over the years, I'd tried to forget about that little room but that doesn't work. It's unnatural to forget about your parent. Right now, the little room just sits there. I don't bother it. And I'm mostly successful at not letting it bother me (I think)--except, of course, on Father's Day.

Today, I called my stepfather and later in the evening I called my dad. Neither was home. Leaving messages to no one in particular seemed about right. That's not a good or bad thing. It's just what it is.


* Photo credit: evilgreg3000 (flickr)

week in review||andré aciman and obama's neglect of egyptian jews

I wanted to be fully sympathetic. Novelist André Aciman points out that President Obama in his Cairo speech, forgot to mention the forced exodus of about 800,000 Jews from Arab lands, including Egypt, Aciman's former home. I was glad to learn this history for the first time but turned off by the piece's, See, look what they did to us, tone. It only invites the other side to rejoin. And around we go--again.

Forced migration and starting over anew must've sucked. But doesn't the current regional quagmire and its worldwide impact, suck worse? And shouldn't that big picture inspire a less harping, but not less truthful, approach to airing your grievance?

I suppose Aciman's op-ed struck me as quite insular, perhaps even, selfish. It displays little connection to or appreciation for the intractability of the wider regional conflict. It doesn't mention Egyptians, whose freedoms have been curtailed for nearly 30 years by President Mubarak. It doesn't describe how Aciman's family contributed to Egypt, only what his family owned and contributed to Egyptian Jewry. And in a world in which forced migration occurs all the time, and to families that can not afford maize, much less own a factory, Aciman's plight edges further down my sympathy scale.

But the bit that really furrows my brow is the final superlative that Aciman attaches to the Jewish experience in the ME:

But for [Obama] to speak in Cairo of a shared effort “to find common ground ... and to respect the dignity of all human beings” without mentioning people in my position would be like his speaking to the residents of Berlin about the future of Germany and forgetting to mention a small detail called World War II.

Is it really? In what sense is the forced migration of 800,000 Jews like World War II? Or does Aciman mean the Holocaust? And if so, why not be specific?

Is Aciman suggesting that the Jewish experience in Arab lands is the same as that in Hitler's Europe? And if so, what does that mean for how we view the Israeili-Palestinian conflict?

UPDATE: Rabbi Michael Lerner at progressive Jewish mag, Tikkun, issues a helpful backgrounder on the Aciman article.

UPDATE 2: Excellent context and thoughtfulness from David Shasha at The American Muslim who writes, "There is little argument that the Egypt Aciman discusses was a hell for the few Jews who remained. ... We can lop off the final act of the Jews of Egypt and dwell on the dysfunction, or we can place that tragic era into a larger historical context which would permit us to get beyond the hostility and the fatalism that Mr. Aciman chooses to provide us. Consider coming late to a performance of “Hamlet” and seeing all the dead bodies piled up on the stage but not knowing how they got there."

*Photo credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times