That Most Confusing Day, A Tale of Otherness.
I have always been Other, but I was not always aware of it. I grew up in Brooklyn of the 60’s in Coney Island, one of the most integrated neighborhoods in America. I have French, Native American, Black, German, some Anglo-Saxon, and a little smidge of Jewish. But the short version is that my mother was darker than me, and my father was lighter. They married each other in Chicago, in the 50s… which goes some way to explain why they moved to New York. They were a better fit, and there was work that suited them. Father drove a yellow cab, and my mother was a dancer in a mafia-run West Village night club. It was an “all sepia review,” if you follow. It was a different era. In 1960, they moved with their toddler son to Coney Island on the southern edge of Brooklyn. The neighborhood was Jewish, Irish, Italian, Black, Puerto Rican, with a bit of Russian and Asian. But the neighborhood was almost entirely working class, a great social leveler. Everyone rode the bus and subway, and lived in tenements, projects, and bungalows by the boardwalk. There was the beach and Nathan’s Famous, Steeplechase, Astroland, the Wonder Wheel and the arcades and rides, not the least of which was the world famous Cyclone. it was a ghetto, but not a bad place to grow up until Urban Renewal came along and started busting up the neighborhood in the 70s.
My mother is originally from Gary, Indiana. And we still had family there. So it came to pass that one summer, probably the summer of 1967, I spent some time visiting my Grandparents in Gary with my Mother. And one day I was wandering grandma’s neighborhood, much as I might have back home in Coney Island. I mean, it looked a lot the same to me, working class houses, except that it was the industrial Midwest, and there was no beach. But Gary is not like Brooklyn. Brooklyn was a swirling melting pot of humanity. No neighborhood was 100 percent anything. Not even Chinatown or Little Italy were entirely Chinese or Italian. And the beach and the subway were like the United Nations. But Gary was more like Chicago. Chicago of the 60s was a checkerboard. Black squares. White squares. No brown or tan squares.
A few blocks along I find myself accosted by some white teenagers. “What you doin’ around here, boy.” And I have a Robert DeNiro moment… you talking to me? This is confirmed. “I’m talking to you, nigger!” Whoa. What the heck? This is extra weird because I didn’t know what a “nigger” WAS. No none had ever talked to me like that in my short life. My parents had never uttered the word in our house. And it was pretty uncool on the street as well. The Puerto Rican kids would kick your ass. “Ay! What the fuck, pendejo!” Biff… biff… biff!
But I did get the message pretty clear that I was unwelcome and they were teenagers and I was like … eight. So I turned my ass around and headed back to grandma’s house.
And this is where it gets weird.
Apparently there are border guards at Checkpoint Chaka Zulu, too. What I failed to realize was that by some magic I was unaware of, I had transformed from a darker-than-average person entering a White sector, into a lighter-than-average person invading a Black zone. (That I had left minutes ago was not a consideration) And before I know it… “Wha’cha doin’ round here, honky?” I don’t know what a “honky” is either. But I have a difference of opinion with the fellow and his friends, since I was headed back to where I just came from. “Going back to gramma’s house.” That difference of opinion was resolved, I did make it back to Grandma’s place — a torn shirt, black eye, and a split lip later.
So like any upset eight year old, I hunt up my mother, crying and snotting… “I’m soooo confused!”
I promptly get a dose of “Black Woman Face, ” which is the look that tells little boys to shut the hell up, sit down, don’t talk, and just listen to The Law. I immediately fear that I have somehow screwed up and brought this upon myself. But it turns out to be a, “Sit down. We need to talk,” moment. Mama proceeds to calmly explain to me that there are some people in this world, a lot, actually, who think that you should be treated differently because of the color God painted you. And this is where I actually do screw it up.
I don’t believe her.
I couldn’t imagine that anything so inane and nonsensical could possibly be true. It made no damn sense at all to me. And I promptly fail my Zen test. You know, that little internal dialogue that you have in a stressful situation, that keeps you from letting the first stupid useless worst thing to say that flies into your brain, from sailing out of your face. But out of my eight year old mouth comes…
“That’s fucked up!”
Nooooooooooooo!!!… Oh SHIT! I’m going to DIE! I just dropped the f-bomb in front of my Black Mom. “Mr. Belt” is coming out. The shoe’s coming off. I’m gonna get sent out back to cut a switch! I’m doomed!
So I wait for righteous and deserved Armageddon to descend upon my stupid ass. And I seem to be waiting for doom for what seems to me to be an unreasonably long time. I cautiously open one flinching eye and my mother is just sitting there looking kind of sad. And of course the voice on the shoulder pops up to torment me. Maybe it’s fucked up. And a moment later my mother confirms that my universe has indeed turned sideways.
“Yeah son. It kinda is.”
And now that other inner voice is just losing it’s shit. AAUUUUGGGHHH!!
So my world changed, and got much larger, that day. And it turned out that my life, my identity, in the eyes of others, was often more defined not by what I was, but what I was not. I was Other, because I wasn’t Black, or wasn’t White, or Red, while I was all of those things. When I was older I did come to realize that my parents had set a brilliant example of racial harmony, to the point it was difficult to imagine that other people might be different. Their loving and supporting each other, and our calm household seemed the most natural thing in the world. To me, there seemed nothing at all out of the ordinary that I had one darker and one lighter parent. It felt completely normal to me. Also, and I think this was critical, the people they befriended, who were close to them, of all kinds, didn’t much give a crap about their ethnicity, but just that they were good, decent, compassionate people.
It was an odd lesson to learn at a young age, but I went forward paying more attention to racial and ethnic issues and racial justice. The following spring delivered another aftershock, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April of 1968; a tumultuous year, full of change and chaos. I watched on national television the nation collectively lose it’s shit. But interestingly, and a source of encouragement, that while there were riots and unrest, New York City did not burn our ghettos to the ground. It is my belief that it was due to our having integrated ghettos, much more so than most other American cities. The dynamism and cultural diversity of the city, that experienced wave upon wave of immigration and migration, we somehow had to learn ways of living among one another.
To be sure, there were, and in 2021 still are continuing problems with institutional, structural, and the momentum of social racism. In some ways some hard-won progress has been rolled back. Marginal communities and ethnic minorities have been largely shut out of the gains of the 1980s forward, particularly as the Investor Class has hoovered up the wealth of the nation, largely at the expense of Working and Wage Class Americans, which are disproportionately represented by minority communities. And there is a sizable faction of our Political Class that have been pressing the button of racial resentment for political gain, pursuing voter suppression that primarily impacts minority communities, and hand waving away or flatly refusing to push back against the resurgence of white supremacists and sympathizers that has become a swing block of one of our major two parties.
I am still always Other. As a multi-ethnic person, I still get to have the singular experience of being the lightest, or darkest, or least-Native person in the room, to not fully belong. I am much more comfortable in diverse settings. I find my points of connection in communities of Spirit, of the Arts, the Drum, Ritual and Ceremony. There are places out here where what colors Spirit painted you matters a lot less than what you DO, how you carry yourself, and how you treat others.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” — The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
We might not be there yet. In fact, clearly not. But despite reversals, there is still progress. At sixty-two, I am old enough to notice. And it is till something worth continuing to work toward, to demand.
One of my Medicine Brothers shares the Buddhist teaching, “Be At Love.” In these chaotic times, there are certainly trends out there that make that ideal more difficult to work towards. Let’s just say that there are some folk out there that tend to damage my calm. But it’s a worthy ideal we should not give up on. It is a hard thing that we do. So we sing, we drum, we do ceremony, we pray, we work at building inclusive communities.
In the Lakota world, we say, “mitaquye oyasin,” or, “all my relations” more colloquially expressed as “we are all related.” Exploring that would be a full essay on its own, but the core notion is that every one, and every thing on this world are relatives. Not just the human races, but all the beasts and beings, the entire ecosystem, the Earth itself, interconnected and interdependent. It is a central part of the Native American worldview that I continually strive to get across to the Dominant Culture. Carl Sagan expressed the sentiment somewhat differently in a way that continues to resonate.
“We are all star stuff.”
