The Singular Power of Writing

Come to find out, French aristocratic youth rebelled and started dressing like the colorful, poor Romani (getting the label haute bohème) and the general stereotype that said poor Eastern Europeans must also obviously be from the nearest "eastern" country.

So, cultural appropriation and misidentification going back to the 19th century (an insult to both the Romani and the Bohemians).

Also strangely, I recall my father's older relatives frequently telling terrible jokes about and referencing others of the same identity as "bohunks" which I didn't discover until a few years ago was a racial slur. In a way, their adoptation of it seems to have been similar to the frequent use of the n-word in black hip-hop, rap and edgier pop culture.

There are similar stories about my mother's side of the family. The world is a strange, complex place, and somehow boiling that family history down to "white" just doesn't do it justice.

In the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs 67,000 mortgages were insured by the G.I. Bill, but fewer than 100 were taken out by non-whites.

I grew up in Columbus, Georgia in a house purchased using military benefits. My part Cherokee father was extremely white-passing, yet spent 18.5 years of his 26.5 year military career overseas.

He's no longer alive. I can't ask him if he did that to escape racism in America.

What if he hadn't successfully downplayed his part Native heritage? Would I have even grown up in a nice house in the suburbs?

After my father died, I tripped across a photo of a full-blooded Iroquois actor that looked uncannily like my father. I was already not comfortable with our social construct of race. But I just no longer can comfortably answer that question with stating "I'm white."

What makes me white? My skin color? If so, why is my darker skinned mother also white?

My socioeconomic background? I could argue that grows out of my father successfully downplaying his Native heritage. So does that make my whiteness a fiction? Perhaps even a lie?

My father made his own constructs. Which constructs are more "real" or more valid? His? Those of a nebulous racist thing we call society? Where is this thing we call society? Can I go talk to it?

No, society is just a sum total of something that grows out of a group of individuals. Individuals like my father.

My father chose to protect himself and his family. I can't find moral defect in that decision.

But I also find it increasingly offensive to even try to answer a question about my heritage with an answer from a canned list of arbitrary answers rooted in a long history of social BS where none of those answers remotely fits anything I would identify as.

I have long association with American military culture. Military dependent is not an option.

I was born and raised in The Deep South. Southerner is not an option.

I'm part German. German American is not an option.

I'm part Cherokee, but only a very small part. I don't even know what to call that. Mixed race doesn't really seem to fit this case. But why not? I look part Native to my German relatives. How many generations does it take to "erase" my Native blood so it no longer counts?

I'm not interested in trying to officially join the Cherokee Nation. I'm not interested in trying to qualify for scholarship money reserved for Natives. But isn't calling me white just another way of saying "those people" don't count?

If you aren't full-blooded Native, your Native ancestors don't count? Doesn't that further deepen a history of genocide? Many Natives were murdered by European settlers. Do we also need to murder any memory of them? Any trace that survived in mixed bloodlines?

Do we need to deny that "those people" are a part of us people, even if only a small part?

Why?