When I was young, my mother told me a lie. It was a big lie and she told it with remarkable consistency.
She told me she was Jewish. “And since all that matters for Jews is what your mother is, that means you are Jewish, too,” she’d say.
There was evidence in her favor. Grandma’s matzo ball soup. Cards from Aunt Joyce wishing us a happy new year in October. My mother wore a Star of David and promised that any year now, we’d celebrate ALL the holidays.
Well. My mother got big into Christianity around the time I was eight or nine and signed me up for Sunday school, where everything I’d learned second-hand (Jesus was one of many prophets) went over very well. It set me on the path to atheism, the juxtaposition of two versions of ‘ultimate truth.’ They couldn’t both be right, but they could easily both be wrong.
I’d gone to college believing myself “ethnically jewish.” I joined the Jewish Students Activity Board to “get in touch with my heritage.” Then, one day, on the phone with my Aunt Jean, my mother’s sister, somehow it came up. I said something like, “Well, of course, you were raised Jewish.”
“No we weren’t,” Aunt Jean sounded surprised. “We were half-Jewish, since your grandfather was Jewish, but we weren’t raised Jewish. We celebrated Christmas, but otherwise had a very secular childhood.”
Forgive the phrase, but Oy Vez! Someone could have told me that a bit sooner?
(And FYI? The whole “You are Jewish if your mom is” thing started because Jewish women were getting raped by pogroms hoping to ”wipe out the race” because it used to be you were Jewish if your father was. Yeah think on that one for a bit, and about Rules for Ethnicity and how they are rooted in the sexual subjugation of minorities.)
There’s an ethnic lie on my father’s side, too. We were always told we were part Native American. A substantial part. My dad would get quite sensitive about westerns on TV. He got an arrowhead tattooed on his arm. His buddies called him “Foot.” He said we were part Blackfoot, but then my uncle did some genealogical research and found out it was actually Cherokee.
“Oh no,” I thought, “Nothing sounds faker than claiming you’re one-sixteenth Cherokee.” You can’t bring up Native Americans without the nearest white person saying, “I’m one sixteenth Cherokee!”
It’s so ubiquitous you’d think part of your White Person Starter Pack had to include it. (Along with, I dunno, a fondness for mayonnaise and baseball?)
Why always Cherokee? I blame ancient propaganda about them being “the civilized tribe”.
Why one-sixteenth? It’s the point at which you’re talking about one great-great-grandparent. Few of us meet our great-grandparents, and most nobody meets a great-great. So 1/16th is the threshold of myth. The point at which it requires a modicum of effort to disprove. 1/8th- well, which of your grandparents was half-native?
So I was told I was 1/8th, but after watching my uncle’s family genealogy slideshow I learned I was 1/16th, the ‘full native’ great-grandparent actually being half.
(Even so, I met Great Grandma Corn, and cousins with glossy black hair. So if you claim 1/16th and you haven’t met any of your relatives who are actually Native… chances are good that’s a lie or it’s such a small percentage you should really stop bringing it up every chance you get.)
Why do we yearn to be more ethnic than we are? Why can people simultaneously do this and be bigots?
In fact, it feels like they do it to BE bigots. To reconcile the racism and genocide of their ancestors with “Well that isn’t me, I’m part downtrodden-side! Wew, off the hook! Gee, these descendants of the disenfranchised should get over it, I have.”
The greatest tell of this is when I hear someone say, “Well, I’m part Native American and Chief Wahoo doesn’t offend ME.”
Do you have any risk of people mistaking Chief Wahoo as a depiction of YOU? Do you even understand the racist origins of that depiction? Of course you aren’t f’n offended it’s not aimed at offending you, white dude!
(Yes, I recognize that for most people it’s meant as a harmless thing, an honest thing, accepting whole-cloth something said by a parent, and why would your dad lie to you? But there is harm in it. You erode and mute the voice of the oppressed when you try to claim part of it as your own.)
My dad looks somewhat movie-native. He has high cheekbones, a prominent roman nose, and had glossy black hair. He got called “Indian” sometimes. Ironically, his rounder-faced brothers look more like the native ancestors in my uncle’s photo slideshow, and Dad is the spitting image of a French great-great grandpa. Stereotypes are like that.
The only time I felt attacked “for my heritage” was in sixth grade social studies when the teacher was asking everyone to tell their nationalities and we’d make a chart on the board and I said “Native American” and he threw his chalk down and ranted for twenty minutes about how “everyone wants to be one of those stinking, dirty savages! Let me tell you how awful Indians are!” And all I could think was that I had brought this on, and a boy named Crowfoot was sitting behind me. Congratulations, Mr. Logan, middle school teacher and town mayor, you made me very aware of my whiteness.
For whatever reason, my family enjoyed white privilege while simultaneously holding on to a personal identity as non-white, but only in situations where it was a curiosity or benefit. If I had kids, and had not learned better, I might have passed it on again, one step further removed. This is how it happens.
This post is a personal confession, it embarrasses me to report this, as a quarter-jew and sixteenth-Cherokee. I promise to stop “exploring my heritages” and acknowledge my pure, 100% Caucasian-ness and the responsibility that entails, the least of which is not trying to cozy in on the few things non-WASPs get to enjoy, like knowing they weren’t descended from the demographic that thought slavery was a neato keen idea.
by 
by 
