Teresa Wiltz - The Real America: The tangled roots of race and identity

I. When it comes to race, nothing is ever as it seems.

I remember sitting in the front row of Passing Strange, the Tony Awardwinning musical, toe tapping furiously, head bobbing. Crying. Onstage, guitars were grinding as an all-black cast of wild-haired, leather-clad talent leaped into the audience, completely obliterating the fourth wall. They sang about Camus and James Baldwin, Godard and Buddhism, obsessing over race and identity at the same time that they were annihilating any and all categories: The performers morphed from punk-rocking, rich black kids to free-loving, broke white Dutch bohemians.

America is flowing, slowly exiting my veins

I am giddy, cold, and glowing

And this song will break my chains.

The chains of I-I-I-I-I-IDENTITY!

I felt ridiculous, sitting there, crying, but I couldnt help myself. I cried because in the guise of Stew Rodewald, the shows round-bodied, bespectacled creator/performer, I saw myself: A bourgie, shape-shifting, rock-loving, world-traveling integration baby, someone who fit in neither here, nor there, but everywhere.

Ask Stew where his 2008 hit show came from, and hell tell you, Travel. It came from travel. Leaving home. Wanting to get out of that little box. Those little boxes that ascribe race into neatly constricting categories of either/or, rather than either and or.

Preach, Stew! Ive never felt like I fit in anywhere, racially, culturally, emotionally. I am, as my cousin puts it, a Heinz 57, an amalgamation of generations of variant strains of DNA mixing and matching, an Ivy League preppie/bohemian/dancer/writer/journalist, the descendant of slaves and slave masters, of Native-born Indians and foreign-born interlopers. I am as quintessentially American as you can get.

Others dont seem to get this. Just listen to the Glenn Becks and the Tea Partyers screaming, I want my country back! Or watch Peggy Noonan casually describing a white Senate candidate as someone who looks like a real American. Then theres the Texas Board of Education, voting to whitewash school textbooks. Its as though were living in two countries, parallel universes. Theirs is a fantasyland where white = American, where legitimate immigrants hail from northern Europe and slavery didnt really exist except as something called the Atlantic Triangular Trade.

My country, on the other hand, is a messy affair, beautifully complicated and filled with black, brown, beige, and white folkssome new to this country, and others, whove been here since, well, forever. My country has always been a multiracial/mixed-race country.

Lets not forget that even during Colonial times, indentured slaves of all colors were meeting and mating; whites, blacks, and Indians worked together, lived together, ran away together. That is the truth of this country. We need to remember that. We dont like to acknowledge that weve been, to borrow Thomas Jeffersons term, amalgamating from the very start. (Something he apparently practiced at Monticello with gusto.) Or that the biracial products of those interracial unions often blended into white society. In many minds, blackness still bears the taint of all things negative. And to be white is to be pure.

Race is the great measuring stick in this country. Were obsessed with categorizing ourselves, categorizations that have deep, lasting impact on every aspect of our lives, from our health to our finances to where we are able to live. Still, while we paint ourselves in stark shades of black and white, underneath the simple, two-toned veneer is a complex, multicolored palette. It was always so. It will always be so. And as interracial unions in this country multiply, and brown minorities start to outnumber the white majority, are we simply going back to the futurereturning to our original, mixed-race roots?

Our mulatto past is prologue.

As geneticist Mark D. Shriver has calculated, some 50 million white Americans can claim at least one black ancestor. Shriver places the number of black Americans with at least 12.5 percent European ancestry (the equivalent of one great-grandparent) at 58 percent. Other estimates place the numbers of African Americans who can claim mixed-race ancestry as high as 7080 percent. Of the 5 million claiming American Indian ancestry in the U.S. Census, 2 million are of mixed-racial heritage. Our color line is a lot more blurred than we think.

The folks living in that other, mythical, America have always been in denial about that fact. But realitythat is, demographicsis gaining on them. According to Dr. Ella Bell, a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, within the next five to ten years, 83 percent of the entering workforce is going to consist of women, immigrants, and people of color. By 2040, less than 30 years from now, whites will no longer constitute a majority in the United States.

Will that mean the End of Race?

Already, throughout the United States, there are pockets where race is turned upside down. Consider New Orleans, my fathers birthplace, the city from which half of my ancestors hail. Now, New Orleansand the whole state of Louisianahas always been the poster child for miscegenation; New Orleanians have always celebrated the mixing of genes, the blending of races and cultures into a potent ancestral gumbo. But Katrina has divided the city along more stark, black/white lines, between those who have and those who have not. And those divisions get played out in some really surprising ways. Like with voodoo.

Post Katrina, members of New Orleans voodoo community70 percent of the city is voudoun, its devotees like to sayhave returned to the city. Those who can afford to return, that is. New Orleans voodoo scene is divided between the rich and the poor: The public face of voodoowhat tourists see in shops and museumsis overwhelmingly white and wealthy, like Susan Glassman, a Ukrainian-American Jew who converted to voodoo and now reigns as one of the citys chief mambos. The private face of voodoo tends to be black, and deeply underground. In New Orleans, as in the rest of the country, when it comes to race, nothing is ever as it seems.

II. Lighter skin comes with privileges. Just dont talk about it.

The principals voice crackles through the intercom at Powell Elementary School, a surprising intrusion on a sunny April morning: Were closing the school. Run, dont walk. Go home. Now.

I run-walk through the streets of Northwest Washington, my head to the sky, looking up at the yellow-green leaves forming patterns of lace in the trees above me. I hurry along because that is what they told us to do, but I dont really understand the urgency, cant grasp the importance of what is going on: Martin Luther King Jr.? Shot? Dead?

Never heard of him.

April 5, 1968. The day after. I am six.