Hi Elyse:

Have you read Zora Neale Hurston's essay, "How It Feels to be Colored Me"? It's a deep, playful meditation on the range of subject positions that she felt empowered to claim as an African American woman in the 1920s. Listening to music with a white friend, who just doesn't feel it, she writes that "He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am SO colored." "At certain times I have no race, I am ME," she writes in the very next sentence. "....I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads...." "But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless." I like the way Hurston thinks about race more than the way you think about race. It's more self-accepting, more centered, and less judgmental. For the record, I'm not your ally. I'm your fellow citizen. I carry the fiction of my own whiteness--which is to say, my own mixed half-Jewish ethnicity--as lightly as Hurston carries the fiction of her own blackness. I've been fortunate enough to be married for the past 16 years to a black Texan of great warmth, wisdom, resilience, and good humor. Our son, almost 15, is the product, like you, of a specific kind of mixed marriage--and he, to our mutual delight, owns himself free and clear, the "black" side and the "white" side, and neither of us is forcing him to choose sides. We play with each other in the family circle, joke with each other, take joy in each other. We don't lecture each other, ever, about how we MUST identify racially. You and I agree on one thing: the Capitol rioters were white supremacist idiots. The white identitarian banner they carry is a fool's banner and those who committed crimes on that day and in the run-up to that day should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. I join you in celebrating our common humanity and our shared citizenship. But please don't tell me, or my son, or my wife, how we must racially identify. The slaver's categories, as Thomas Chatterton Williams called them, aren't worthy of our respect. "It is my hope," he wrote, "that as many people as possible, of all skin tones and hair textures, will come to turn away from the racial delusion" ("Self-Portrait in Black and White, 155). Amen. You're free to join us, if you'd like.