by Diane Farr
“Evolved” might seem like the wrong word, except when you consider the cycle of liberalization. First something is taboo, then it becomes chic, but in order for it to become a norm it has to be held up side by side against the norm. Ellie grew up in a home where she witnessed how light and dark were treated compared with one another, and then her own experience in Asia showed her just how hard it is to be the only person of a different color and/or faith than everyone else. Attending college in Iowa state finalized her perspective on how Americans categorize people—into narrow cubbyholes, with little room for people like her who straddle two cultures or, perhaps more to the point, two shades of skin color. Thus, her own experiences brought her an intimate understanding that sharing a life with James was a choice that would affect many other choices—no matter how much my left-leaning, N.Y./L.A., Buddhist ass wanted to believe that her union was nothing but wonderful and righteous. I believe only a personal evolution could allow anyone to stare into the face of race relations when it comes to love in this country and call it out. And Ellie’s willingness to do so is finally making me look at my own history of race and culture that I bring with me into my union with Seung. And I wonder how my own experience might be impacting my pending marriage.
* WHEN I BEGAN CATHOLIC SCHOOL, AT SIX YEARS old, I had heard stories about the “race riots” that had taken place in the public high school just one mile away. This was practically an annual event, due to fighting between black, white, and Latino teenagers. Surrounding counties would lend their police forces to stop the spread of violence from erupting in different parts of my town. My family was out of the city by then, living on a small island off the south shore of Long Island. My parents hoped to give us a less urban experience, hoping to allow us to be kids for as long as possible. The suburb they chose was full of first- and second-generation Americans of every possible descent, and most that I knew were blue-collar like us, and hoping to give their kids more opportunity than they had.
I remember getting off the bus in first grade, in my very Irish enclave, and seeing two white kids chase a black boy all the way to the bay. The white boys carried bats. When the black boy reached the end of the turf, he had no option but to jump the wall of a dock and throw himself into the bay. My friend and I hid in the bushes to see what those guys with bats would do. We saw them yelling and swinging while the lone swimmer crossed a quarter mile of ocean, fully clothed, in winter, to a marsh, where a helicopter is rumored to have picked him up. By that time the streetlights were on and that was my cue to go home.
The following year, in second grade, I was wearing a pin on my uniform to denote an Italian Saint Day. Two tiny, Smurf-like girls I hung around asked about my jewelry while we hopscotched on the black-tar parking lot our school called a playground. “You’re not Irish? You’re a guinea?” one scoffed. The Smurfettes then let out a tirade of slurs about grease and oil and pigs and woppers and other things I didn’t understand. My heart began to race. I had an impulse to make this awful feeling I had yet to identify as shame go away. I surmised I could do this by explaining that this was only half of me. The other half was just like them! But I was afraid. Afraid to disown ... something. My mom, maybe the things I loved about my house, the Italy I imagined—me, even?
I stood paralyzed in my plaid skirt, wondering how this had all turned so ugly so quickly. Specifically wondering where Jesus could be as these little shits taunted me. Wondering what their well-manicured mothers would say if they could see them now. I had no idea their mothers or fathers were the only people who could have taught them these words I had never read in any book. I sat behind my miniature desk the rest of that day, emotionally distraught, while McShort and McVicious threw slanderous notes at me and whispered my tale to others. How sad to call this a rite of passage, but hasn’t everyone had some version of this afternoon in grade school? Over something that made you different? After school, however, the rawness of where I grew up was primed to show its teeth.
The mafia of two multiplied in just one afternoon to a bunch of Irish girls and two boys they sucked in. Together this green gang of second-graders cornered me outside chapel to “tell me” what else was wrong with being Italian, as they launched into a beating of another kind.
But this wasn’t the start of my cultural journey in America. It wasn’t even my first experience with prejudice. It was just the first time it was directed at me. So it remains indelible. My family had a short history in this country before this moment when I was about to get my ass kicked for being a child of two cultures that most people would never even notice I am a blend of. Now that the cultural cat was out of the bag, though, today was my turn on the chopping block. The slight difference between me and my entirely white, Catholic, mostly Irish, eight-year-old classmates was laughable if not saddening, forty minutes from Manhattan, in 1977—but where I grew up defined much about my ethnic experience, as I have found it does for most Americans.
I’d love to say that I was inspired to become an actress by Meryl Streep or someone with an academy award or an Ivy League degree. But really, I was moved to the stage by learning to survive in the alley behind it where I grew up. I scared off my classmates that day with a tool I realized I had while eating gravel beneath them: words.
As soon as the first shove toppled me, I began telling a tale of my twenty-five Irish cousins and another fifty Italian cousins in the public school who fought other white kids as a warm-up for the fights with blacks and Puerto Ricans in the public high school. And that I would unleash both sides of my family on these twerps if they didn’t back off right now. I only bled from the knee, from that first push that brought me to the ground, because then the kids dispersed—and I spent the rest of my adolescence making sure I would never be knocked down again.
I was highly aware during the rest of my school years what the dominant culture of any circle I came upon was. I spent my time mastering the art of blending into any group, to avoid the many physical confrontations that recurred for both boys and girls in my’hood. I became so deft at fitting into other cultures that I took first place in a rodeo among farm-raised girls at a summer camp and was moving to Israel to live in a kibbutz after finishing my predominately Jewish high school. But as I turned seventeen, my mother finally shook me by the shoulders and forbade me to move to the Middle East. She was over my chameleon nature and told me I was Italian! I could go to Italy to live with the exchange student we’d housed a few years earlier, or I could stay home until college began. And, well, the choice was simple.
While living in Rome, I learned a lot about life in America. Specifically, that my family’s culture had little to do with Italy—ranging from the Italian expressions they used, which are not even in the Italian language, to the food they ate, which has more to do with New York than with any region of Italy. The cultural tidbits I learned at home that I thought were romantic and foreign were mostly a product of the New York ghettos that bastardized them. I surmised the same applied to our Irish traditions. After this eye-opener, it still took a decade of globe-trotting to crystallize the perspective I have today.
The first step was transferring to a university in England after winning a place in a prestigious drama program. On my first day, a student asked what nationality I was. I responded as I always have: Irish and Italian. Her brow crunched and a high-pitched “Really?” came out of her, as only a South Londoner can do. I locked my feet onto the ground and bent my knees slightly. This was not in preparation for a ballet move. Ready to utilize that other skill my New York education gave me, I asked, “Why’s that?” with a tone intended to feel like a shove.
“I was sure you were American,” she said.
This ridiculous moment was the first time it ever occurred to me that being American is a culture of its own. I was so afraid to seem like a philistine—which I was—at my fancy English college that I spent the next year wiping much of that New York edge off my shoulder, for the same reasons I felt at seven years old: I didn’t want to denoun
ce or embarrass my people. My American people, that is.
And, I’m proud to say, for the most part I have—let that chip/ block/fear go. I traversed most of the globe during my twenties and became such an everywoman that today I am often assumed to be of whatever culture people like most about me—whether that is a place I have lived for a while or one of my cultural backgrounds. But I always, gently, remind people that I am wholly American. And a product of the opportunities it has afforded me. That is, until I fell in love with Seung.
All that running around the planet must have sealed my fondness for other cultures with a kiss. Few of the men I ever considered spending my life with pledged allegiance to the same flag I do, but none of their mothers had doubts about me with the intensity of my soon-to-be in-laws’ family. And in truth, it’s not Seung’s mother or his father or any of his relatives who’ve left me so twisted over my desire to share a life with him. Rather, it is the ethnocentricity of all people in my country who want to judge those of us who love with our hearts first, and our skin ... never.
I have looked at my own parents’ racist boundaries on love and my own feelings of being judged when I’ve been involved with someone whose parents did not want me to date them because of race. I’m quite sure that I have sweated all those feelings out of me—by seeing the world and learning to understand it. So what exactly is possessing me so much that I can’t use my clearest head to make decisions about how to move forward with Seung’s family?
I think I have to keep listening and stop analyzing to find that answer. At least I hope so.
* ELLIE’S CONCERNS ABOUT MOVING FORWARD with James were further weighted. She was also aware that her father would have the same negative reaction as Seung’s family did if she chose to marry outside of her culture and faith. Adding another race onto this would make this union so much harder for him to accept. I believe this stems from the same reason as it does for many Israeli or Korean or for that matter Greek, Croatian, or Belarusian immigrants to this country ... or those of Armenian descent. Anyone from a country or culture that almost lost their homeland, language, and customs within our parents’ or grandparents’ lifetime has a heartfelt desire to keep their traditions alive. Knowing this, Ellie waited almost two years before even telling her mother about her relationship with James. When she finally found out, Mom said she would support Ellie if she chose to spend her life with him. Yet she also suggested that they not tell her father unless this union became very serious. Another year went by before Ellie’s dad became aware of his daughter’s choice.
“My father had never met any of my boyfriends. Bringing James to a family dinner was a very big deal; it meant I intended to marry him.” Ellie tells me this as we sit in a waterfront coffee shop, and it feels reminiscent of Seung’s experience. I have finally stopped talking about the mess I have made in my own relationship and the exhaustion I feel at such a comparatively early stage in my life with Seung. Ellie continuously reminds me that she is telling me details of the experiences that once caused her so much worry only because they don’t come up at all now, ever even, with her family. She is calm as she talks about the anxiety of her decisions—to live with him or not, to tell her parents or not, and perhaps ultimately to give up a relationship with either James or her parents.
When Ellie did finally decide to move in with James, part of their agreement as a couple was that she would tell her father about them and bring James into the fold. Ellie knew her father would be disappointed about this relationship, but it was clearly time for her and James to stand as a couple in the one place they still weren’t: her family home. The first meal at her parents’ house with James was highly uncomfortable, yet there was no drama.
“There was very little dialogue between me and my father—not that we were exceptionally chatty before this,” says Ellie. But the moments of silence were loaded now. And the continuation of them, over the coming years in Ellie’s life, would only make them heavier and heavier.
“But you do what you’re doing, Diane. You show up and you put the work in and you try to keep talking as much as possible. And it works out. It always works out, honey. The thing you have to shed now is the anxiety and the anger and the fear, because that is yours. And that’s the only thing you can control. You are marrying him, and you have to remember why and move your life forward. If you don’t trust them, then please trust me when I say they will come around.”
Funny, that’s not the way I see it happening. I can’t imagine that my Habitrail will just knock itself off its paralyzing stand one day and suddenly move forward into the future. And truth be told, that’s not how I remember Ellie’s path, either.
This is my good friend. I know her story. And I know my opinion of it has its own biases, but now I must ask her if she really and truly remembers it going that smoothly, after she introduced a black atheist from Trinidad as the man she loved most to her father. Ellie takes a moment.
She reminds me that at James’s urging she began therapy after they first told her father about their union. She did this to learn how to put her own experiences and awkward feelings about growing up biracial into words. So that she could then begin to separate that experience from her and James’s experience and speak to each, independently, with her family.
Which all sounds so wonderful now—but in the years this was happening I remember feeling very frustrated with her. I wanted her to yell at her father and tell him that “conditional love” was not acceptable! And I wanted to tell her mother to fight harder for her daughter’s choices. And I wanted James to propose because it was taking a really, really long time to me on the outside. This was, of course, before I stepped up to the podium for my own try at Racial Jeopardy, where each question you pose has the potential for incremental gain or total loss. I was unaware of the particular finesse needed in many families before an interracial marriage or having mixed-race children can happen ... and sometimes still afterward.
In fact, Ellie is the person I believe I most owe an apology to because I had such a “right side/wrong side” view of those who didn’t immediately support a son or daughter like her when they began dating someone other than what was “expected.” But as Seung’s parents have become more and more human to me (even as his relatives become more and more caustic), and as each of the families I have asked to counsel me shows me the way to a happy mixed-race marriage with formerly judging parents, I have come to a larger view of what I consider a “pending” postracial America. This would be an America in which we would be less racially minded because this experience and all of my discussions about it have led me to believe that we are still not “post” anything to do with color and class—even in this new century, even after riding the wave of hope and change in 2008.
But I believe we can get there much faster now, with dialogue, for one main reason. Estimates project that the 2010 census will show that today one out of every three Americans is of mixed race or ethnicity. That figure is up 25 percent since the 2000 census, when checking more than one race became an option for the first time. And this percentage is up because of the children of those original seven million Americans who checked more than one box to define their background at the turn of this century.5 So as each of these Americans grows up and attempts to find a soul mate, the palette to choose from is widening. And therefore, that line that Ellie awakened me to a long time ago, when a trend goes from taboo to chic to the norm, is probably right around its tipping point.
Yet even reconciling my new opinion of Ellie’s path to marriage and seeing that it wasn’t so slow after all, but rather allowed her to recognize her own experiences, I’m not transposing this information to my situation yet. I assume I’m just not trusting enough to let this “fix itself” over time. And I can’t stop thinking about Jennifer and Sonu, who waited seventeen years for her parents to come around. I don’t have the patience for that.
I had no patience long before this romantic relationship began. Lack of patience is like a genetic defect in m
y family. My father was born without any and he passed that flaw on to me and I’m sure I will give it to one of my unsuspecting children. But sitting here with Ellie, I now wonder if this inability to slow down and let this happen naturally is my actual problem. Because I understand what Ellie is telling me. And I believe it to be true. I’ve also seen from all the couples I’ve already talked to that punching the “elephant in the room” doesn’t work, either. I can’t even make myself go that route when I feel super angry. So Ellie is right that time heals the prejudice of love. I should worry less and let my new family find their own way to me.
But I’m no more convinced I’m going to be good at this “holding my tongue and letting others see things for themselves” job than I was when I first interviewed Lisa. Even then, before I had even met a single person in Seung’s family and held my first interview/crying confessional over the phone with a complete stranger—who warned me to think about the long haul and the big picture before taking any action—I had no faith I would rise to that challenge.
I can also see that Ellie has this part figured out for a whole other reason, which has brought her a kind of peace I never could have imagined for her. I’m drinking iced coffee rather than hot in this city famous for its brew because Ellie’s son Daniel is running in circles around our table. I’d rather miss out on the freshly brewed than possibly hurt this perfect child in any way by accidentally spilling hot liquid on him. Daniel is making me and everyone else in the café laugh out loud as he tries to cheer me up. At three years old, he might be the most delicious thing in this shop, and there is a lot of pastry behind that counter. But I’m getting ahead of myself ...
