Black & White: I Know I Don't Know

I saw Blood Diamond yesterday, and I just finished reading Makes Me Wanna Holler, by Nathan McCall. The movie is about white greed, manipulation, and the ensuing genocide in Sierra Leone; the book is a black journalist's memoir of street to prison to the white mainstream. Now even writing about this gets me a little anxious: what do I know? Am I supposed to say something about guilt? I don't feel guilty, so there? I might feel guilty, but it's more like confused? One classmate in graduate school told me "that's just white guilt, and I'm over that." She shrank me down, but why? I am certainly ignorant. Personal politics interest me. World politics intimidate me. Racial politics intrigue me, but seem too complex for any but the very well-informed to comment. Still, if I don't say anything about race, that's a bit pathetic. Saying nothing would mean I think every thing's okay. I know it's not.

I think one branch of my ancestors was slave-owners, and I think I have black relatives somewhere. My other grandparents were Eastern European Jews who came here to avoid the Nazis. The Nazis murdered the family members who stayed behind. I grew up in the same town with the immigrant - yiddishe side of the family. We saw some combination of them every week. I was also particularly close to my southern grandparents, despite the distance. My southern grandfather - who converted to Judaism after he married - had ancestors on the Mayflower. My parents have the family tree, which a southern relative created and distributed about thirty years ago. All of my grandparents, those who spoke Yiddish, and those with a southern drawl, died awhile back.

A few hundred years after the Mayflower gig, I was on my couch doing bed rest, watching television. The dreaded Oprah was on (anyone who has ever been on bed rest knows one sinks to the lowest levels just to have something to do). In this particular episode, a young white guy talked about how he had found his black relations. He had researched his family tree, discovered that his ancestors had been "slave owners," and further discovered that he shared ancestry with black people descended from the same place. They shared the same surname, which happens to be my middle name. Hmmm. It is an old name from the southern side of my family. (I do not mean to imply that I had - or have - anything but affection for them, but refer to them as "the southern side" for clarity.)

(Regarding clarity, is 'slave owners' an accurate term? A person cannot really own another. Should we say murderers? Torturers? Mainstream southerners? Slavery is utterly inhumane. One can hardly skip over that for semantic purposes. I do not know that proper nomenclature exists to describe the act of enslaving another person.)

Back to the show: naturally, Oprah trotted out the black relatives, and everyone was happy(?) to see each other. The white man talked about how weird it was to think of his ancestors owning slaves, an idea that was apparently abhorrent and confusing, and the black people seemed far less surprised that he did that they had white relatives. They certainly knew that their ancestors had been slaves.

Following this discovery, I could never figure out if I was related to those people. Other relatives seemed to have little interest. I soon had a new baby. And even if I did have black relatives, what, exactly, would that mean? I dunno. A few years later, I saw my name as caption under a photograph of a black woman. I saw it a couple times after that, as well. I tried googling. Really, nothing came of it. Today I googled again. Many, many people have the name, and they are all black people.

So here I sit, perhaps the quintessential stereotype, but bewildered nonetheless. Nathan McCall wrote about the cruelty and humiliation of white society, and the violence he propagated in response. Eventually, after serving time in prison, he was able to gain perspective and re-gain his soul. In Blood Diamond, white people manipulate black people, and terrible violence ensues. The genocide in Sierra Leone was real, and the movie dramatizes the horror of the situation there. How does the following fit in: a short time ago, my great-great-great auntie may have sipped tea on a porch while a black lady, separated from her children, poured the cream. Or maybe the black woman worked in a field. Sometime later, a white man raped her.

So here I sit. What the hell does a white lady do, really? Try to lead a good life? Check. Study sociology in school, read the works of African-American writers? Check, check. Work with people of color? Check. Live in an integrated neighborhood? No check. Live in a place where my kids can get a good education? Check. Pretend it's all fine with me? No check. Feel that something is very wrong? Check. Notice the irony of having written all of this without more than a passing mention of money? Check.

I was raised to speak up, so I am trying to say something here. I don't know what to advocate for: political organization, human kindness, compassion, informed consumerism, an anti-racist outlook, pacifism. I got all those. Some thing's wrong - a lot of things are wrong - and I know enough to know I don't know.