Picking Up the Pieces

by Racialicious special correspondent Wendi Muse

“Eh, you don’t really have a culture.”

It stung to hear that, all the more so to hear it from my boyfriend at the time, who is also a person of color. Though he identifies as ABC (American-Born Chinese), my ex was considerably privileged. He had a history to speak of, ancestral accomplishments to go on, and the written records to prove it.

The month of this discussion? February. Black History Month. The 28 days of the year that “my people” are celebrated for their accomplishments on a national level. Given, “his people” had a month too, but for the most part, he personally was never accused of having no culture, no past, no history. Quite the opposite. Americans were still fixated on an Asia of the past, and one very far away at that. Though my ex was a student at the same college as I, was completely “assimilated” (read: no accent), and defied pretty much all stereotypes about Asian-American males (including his body type), he was still mistaken for the take-out delivery man on occasion as he waited for me in the lounge of my dorm. That’s how much history he bore on his skin, I suppose. So much history that peers my age failed to notice the glaring differences between him and the thin, middle aged men who brought them cheap Japanese food in the middle of the night on bikes.

But there we sat, having a discussion that would nearly lead to a break up. One that was a reminder of how so many people elsewhere felt about the miniature chunk of time given to celebrate the same few brown-skinned people we come around to every year. You know, MLK, Rosa Parks, and Frederick Douglas.

“Black people don’t really have a history,” he said with a straight face.

It wasn’t a new revelation. I had heard it somewhere before, though not as bluntly put. It came in the form of the motivation for late middle school/early high school angst, a time when I was really discovering my otherness. As the only black student in my class of 47 at my predominately private white all girls’ school in the south, let’s just say that my hair got touched a lot. All the residue from being treated as a social experiment had begun to build up, and every day was becoming a struggle to avoid putting all those young ladies in a mental compartment set for Siberia and jumping ship to start the first chapter of the People of Color Panthers (I had to find an inclusive term to incorporate my Asian-American friends somehow). But I held back and channeled my frustrations into working myself to death, each day becoming a test, an exam, some sort of demonstration of my self-worth, through which I could outshine the people whom I knew would one day get ahead because of their connections or the last name they had inherited from their fathers, but who, in that historical moment, were my equals.

This sense of overachievement was not exactly forced upon me by my family (my mother always encouraged me to simply do my best, and my family, while proud of my accomplishments, cared more about the new boy I was asking to the spring dance than the college scholarships I was wracking up). It was a reflection of the pressure I put on myself. It all started with the infamous 9th grade “Family History Project,” sponsored by my English class, for goodness’ sake, the very same class in which Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was discussed via literary devices, no mention of characters’ use of “nigger” or the mistreatment of the black Africans until I raised my hand and asked (colonialism was discussed only upon provocation).

We called it “FHP” for short. The acronym was penciled in at the top of all our in-class writing assignments about the progress we were making on the project. It was the name of the special segment we had dedicated to genealogy software during our computer class. It was on the binder I had devoted especially to the discovery of all the people who had come before me. But they also evolved into three letters I dreaded to hear. They were a reminder of the complex that had begun to form long before the project existed to prove it on paper: that black history was one of slavery.

When FHP was officially under way, I recall that the first big problem I encountered was that the genealogy software was useless for me. As my fellow classmates traced their history to William Shakespeare, Lao Tzu, and Queen friggin’ Elizabeth, I hit a serious dead end at my maternal great-great-great grandparents, whom I already knew about from family discussions but who were not even listed in the virtual directory we had consulted. I also couldn’t pinpoint a place of origin. The best I could do was assume West Africa, as additional information was nowhere to be found. My family tree was more like a porch-front shrub. Needless to say, I spent the first few weeks of that traumatizing little project with a severe sense of insecurity because my ancestors’ names had been changed, erased, lost at sea, beaten out of them. As opposed to being bestowed upon their offspring as a gift, last names were a reminder of a past as human property. The white people in my family’s history, though they may have had some connection to the same European greats to whom my classmates found links, would remain phantoms, their liaisons with my black ancestors having been illicit. The Cherokee family members, while mentioned in a hodgepodge packet one of my distant cousins had put together for one of the enormous family reunions we had every few years, were equally as difficult to trace due to migration, name changes, things not being recorded. History has been passed by word of mouth, and someone with the telephone had cut the cord along the way.

It was an early lesson privilege before I even learned what to call it.

Beyond the three “super blacks” I mentioned earlier, my U.S. history books only mentioned us in three chapters. Chapter One: Triangle Trade. Chapter Two: the Civil War. Chapter Three: Civil Rights Movement. My group’s past was punctuated by death, rape, war, and struggle. Honors World History and Ap European History repeated more of the same – a study of the world from the view of European eyes. Africa was rarely mentioned, nor were global indigenous nations (I only learned about *some* of those during Spanish class).Until college, I thought that only black people and American indigenous groups had this problem, especially considering that’s all that had ever been said about them. Learning about the diasporic peoples of other parts of the world taught me a lot about the meaning of written history vs. a shared past. I was exposed to the historical fiction and BBC interviews of Guyanese author David Dabydeen as evidence that African and indigenous slaves (throughout the Americas) as well as the South and East Asian laborers in the British colonies of the Caribbean and South America had quite a lot in common when it came to recovering their past. Records and names had gone missing or were poorly cared for, deteriorating in storage rooms in the sweltering tropical heat. Families were divided and displaced. And, of course, the luxury of re-telling stories to pass history via oral tradition, a practice upon which many enslaved/indentured peoples had to rely, only belonged to some. In some cases, people were so traumatized by their experiences that they chose not pass anything along, and others died before they could bear children, reducing their lives to fragmented anecdotes retold by acquaintances, their family oceans away.

Dodai over at Jezebel touched on this issue in a recent post on a British woman’s heirloom wedding dress, inserting some social commentary along the way:

For her recent nuptials, a U.K. woman named Charlotte Middleton wore a wedding dress that had been in her family for 97 years — and she was the sixth bride to wear it! The embroidered silk dress encrusted with pearls was made in Hong Kong and first worn by Charlotte’s great-grandmother Pauline in 1910. Charlotte’s mother Lucy wore the dress in 1975. We’re not so jaded that we don’t recognize this as awesome. Although rather privileged. If your great-grandmothers were slaves, for instance, like some of ours were, you don’t have these kinds of stories. But congrats to Charlotte!

Though the final remarks in this short piece were said somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it’s clear that bitterness about one’s lost history finds its way into the lightest of subjects for some people, myself included. I was reminded of it every time I struggled with my multi-textured hair, looked in the mirror, was asked about my background, and even, at times, when I wrote my last name, which I love, though knowing that it is of British origin makes it seem more like the tag in the back of a piece of clothing or the stamp on a product than an “honorable” surname. I was also reminded every time I was told to “just get over slavery” or that “racism doesn’t really exist anymore” or asked “when will black people just be happy?” As insensitive and incensing as such questions and statements may be, they are included within the content of some of the comments on Dodai’s piece. Readers questioned her decision to have a last word on the piece, to make them swallow the bitter pill of reality alongside a story of one woman’s joy.

Their thoughts reminded me of the complete and utter discomfort we as a nation have with discussing the truth about our history. While people of color are accused of being overly sensitive, jumping to conclusions, and incredibly regressive in our obsession with the past, those accusations could not be projected towards us if there were no catalyst to compel such alleged behavior. While we are expected to take the literal lashings of the past and the figurative tongue lashings of the present, modernity has given way to a society that is anesthetized, temporarily asleep with lies as its lullabies, comforted by its own ignorance and shifting of pain to those who are forced to remember. There is a privilege in having a charted history, but even more so in the ability to assert that what little remains of history for others is not worth your time because it’s too painful to acknowledge.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come full circle—now less embarrassed by my family’s completely muddled history and more proud of the mess that fate has dealt us. Like the child who smiles after sullying his Sunday best after a run-in with the wet lawn, I have learned to worry less about the arbitrary significance some assign to things and gained the ability to make fun of myself, minding, still, not to trivialize my history, but to turn it on its head to place value on the positive aspects of the pain.

I feel that we should acknowledge that slavery and other forms of oppression have left many of us with permanent scars, even if we may not have been the direct recipients of such abuse. The experiences of the past express themselves in the present, whether we want to acknowledge them or not. As many people can attest, the dark past manifests itself in words, in art, in science, and in almost every other facet of daily life, sometimes as a surprise and sometimes as expected, so it only reinforces the darkness when people pretend that its some sort of paranoia they should dismiss. It’s not just collective unconscious occurring when people who have been historically oppressed feel that it’s still happening today. It’s very real.

But the question I am left with as I try to pick up the pieces, to reassemble the history I have been told by so many is worthless, not important, or simply a case of mass misfortune, is how does one reach those with their eyes shut and their ears covered? As Paul Gilroy (author of The Black Atlantic) and other academics who study diasporas have asserted, the arts offer one opportunity to confront the past and share it with those with little to no experience or involvement therein. But as art can be so easily dismissed, exploited, or improperly interpreted in the artist’s absence, I wonder what else is out there. I feel that best option I have, especially as an American (as we are often told we are a young country with no history), is to be a part of making my own history. Now that I have the opportunity to undo some of the damage that has been done to my sense of self due to greater social ills, I hope that it can continue with others after I am long dead, a butterfly effect so that a girl like me in the future will be able to look back with pride and the privilege to acknowledge that her past IS important and have no one left to tell her otherwise.