The Race Card Project
By Michele Norris
Francine Piggott Butler
Delaware, OH
Piggot Road is in the Scottish District in Barbados. The oldest synagogue in the Western Hemisphere is also found in Barbados. My mother recently told me, “Oh, my grandfather wore a yamulke (kippah).” There’s a lot about my family history I don’t know. I’ve always identified as an African-American, but I may need to broaden my thinking.
Erica Stone,
Perrysburg, OH.
The process I went through to get these words where things that I’m going through right now in my life or what people notice about me first. Some of the words I thought of came naturally while others I had to put more thought into them.
The reason I decided to put these words is because I am a red head so that was my first choice because it’s usually what people see about me first, I am a mother of a 6 year old so this is very relevant to who I am, I get angry a lot with what has and is happening to me in my life everyday, I chose unbroken because no matter how much has happened in my life I am unbroken, and finally I chose strong because no matter what I go through I remain strong and will always be strong for myself and my child.
La Shawn Hankton,
St. Paul, MN.
RACE HATE IS OBVIOUSLY WRONG, SO WHY DOES GOD ALLOW SUCH HATRED AND UNJUST TO BE?
Rena Brown,
United Kingdom
I’m a quarter Dutch burger born to a British father. My mother is half Scottish Highlander and half Dutch burger. The latter comes from various Europeans having children with the local Sri Lankan girls. The next Europeans preferred to have children with the mixed race girls because of their lighter skin and so on. I am a small part French, Dutch and Portuguese as well as the Sri Lankan. My mother’s mitochondrial DNA could not be identified. This brings home how much I am still connected to my Sri Lankan side. My mitochondrial DNA is from there and that of all my children as it only passes from mother to child.
The link to Asia is still recent as my grandmother was born in Malaysia and my mother in Singapore (where she was born a prisoner of war). With this intriguing history I was drawn to Asia and spent two years living in Hong Kong and learning the Cantonese language to satisfy my thirst, having met many Hong Kong students at university.
I don’t think a colonial past is something to be proud of, but I can be proud of my Sri Lankan DNA which forever links me too Asia even if only by a tiny bit.
David H Lippman,
Newark, NJ
My situation is different…my mother is English, my father a third-generation New Yorker, so I either sound like I come from The Bronx or from London.
The accents switch at the slight move of my tongue, which can be voluntary or involuntary. It’s involuntary if I’m talking about specific subjects. I can’t talk about baseball in an English accent. I can’t talk about British history in an American accent. It even impacts my emotional reactions. I can only say, “Bloody hell” in an English accent and “”Ya gotta be kidding me” in an American accent.
On numerous occasions, I will say some phrases in the “wrong accent,” which is involuntary. An outfielder makes a fine running catch at Yankee Stadium and I say to my pal, “That was rather well done,” in an English accent. I finish buying a pizza in New Zealand, rattle off the end of the order, and add, “That’s all she wrote” in my Bronx accent. Everybody gets puzzled.
Because of this dichotomy, I failed US Navy broadcasting audition. The instructor said my voice was a cross between Walter Cronkite (CBS) and John Snagge (BBC), two legendary newscasters. “Your voice is a cross between The Bronx and London,” the instructor said, which I knew.
However, I answered him, “Well, look here, old boy, (British) what the **** are youse talkin’ about? (Bronx)”
They sent me to a broadcast unit anyway, where, among other things, I had a radio show, and my Senior Chief, a great character, called me in said, “Dave, if you ever say ‘shhedule’ instead of ‘schedule’ again, I’ll kill you. It wasn’t the only time I lapsed into English on the station…I introduced a segment on the Nagasaki bombing by quoting William Shakespeare…in English. British English. Our headquarters guys commented on the segment: “Why is the narration in an English accent?”
When the sergeant who did the markup came to us, she got NOTHING but the English accent from me. She was puzzled and amused.
It leads to other things, some bad, some good. The bad was when I was a kid and my English voice was associated by my schoolmates with latent homosexuality. Therefore, I had to be beaten.
The good side was that I could understand both British humor (based on puns, absurdity, Benny Hill in a dress, Goon Show inside jokes, and Monty Python multiple characters and animation.
And American humor: Three Stooges slapstick, Marx Brothers three-corner lunacy, Mel Brooks satire, and Abbott trying to con Costello.
Totally different theories.
Other different theories: history itself. I had trouble when the Americans fought the British in two separate wars, even if the first created America. I had relatives on the British side. I had even more trouble with historical myths, as a guy who writes World War II history for magazines. The movie “Patton” is wrong. Montgomery was not a strutting, jealous, incompetent in a Paisley scarf. There was no “Race to Messina.” The movie scene never happened. WW2 was won by John Wayne, Errol Flynn (a Nazi sympathizer), and the kid from Arkansas who was too young to die.
More importantly, I do not and never will regard the Royal Family as a source of gossip, fashion, and entertainment. My family has served them in battle and as civil servants since 1680, all over the world, sometimes landing in unmarked graves, doing so at their command. They are direct connections to Britain’s past and who we are. When the Prince of Wales speaks out for the World Wildlife Fund and environmental conservation, when the Duke and Duchess of Sussex work on the Invictus Games, when the Duke of Cambridge goes to New Zealand to console victims and survivors of a ghastly hate crime, it’s reminding New Zealand that their future king is not a distant ruler, but — as he put it — the future head of “the family.” I take that seriously. Americans do not. They worship the Kennedys and the Kardashians. The former for glamor and wealth, the latter for glamor and low-cut dresses.
A few years ago, I went to an event hosted by the British Consul-General in New York to mark the 100th anniversary of The Somme. My great-uncle went over the top on the first day with the 1st London Scottish and was never seen again. Great War language is very familiar to me. After the event, two of our diplomat hosts said to me, “Well, we’re done here. You’ll have to leave now.”
I smiled and said, “That’s a diplomatic way to say ‘Naff off sharpish,’ right?” They cracked up.
Jarret Cummings,
Rockville, MD
My wife and children are members of the Cherokee Nation, but we have the good fortune to live in an area where they are unlikely to face discrimination. I worry about what may happen if my children ultimately go someplace where racial discrimination is still prevalent and how I should prepare them for that possibility. As a white male raised in Texas, I’ve never before had to think about racial discrimination as a personal concern as opposed to a social and political problem. Now, the thought of my wife, son, or daughter possibly having an encounter with the police has a chilling dimension to it that’s hard to process.
#EDUCAUSE2018
Nina Martin
Phoenix, AZ
I am quietly proud of my multiracial background: my mother is Chinese, and my father is half German, half American. I also look absolutely nothing like my mother, save for straight hair and slightly tanner skin. While never a negative issue, this has led to some interesting situations since the time I was little: being the only “white” person in family photos among my Chinese cousins; having a substitute call another, Asian girl when my mother came to pick me up from school; my mother joking that people would think she was the nanny, or I was adopted.
I was also born three months premature, and for a while I have wondered what those three months would have given me. Would I look more “Asian” ? Would people no longer puzzle over my face, and ask me almost instantly “What are you” ? Would Cantonese flow off my tongue like water, rather than bricks as it does now?
Would I still feel the same?
To some degree, my childhood was filled with ambiguity. I knew our family was different, that I was different, and that was OK, but it becomes even harder to figure out who you are when you sit in the gray regions between two worlds. But it is the very lack of definition that has given me the freedom to explore exactly who I am, and also gives me the perspective to look at people who are different from me and find the common threads.
Those three months didn’t take anything away from me: they gave me who I am today. I chose my career in public health because I can help bring longer, healthier lives to people across the world; I fight to make a difference now because I came into this world fighting.
Hannah,
St. Louis, MO.
My mother is from Africa. She has dark skin. My father is Swedish. My mother used to get asked if she was my Mexican nanny. I was bullied as a kid because I look like no one in my family. No one understands I identify more as a minority but I look like a white woman. It’s a weird place to be. I often felt like a spy.
Elise DuBord,
Cedar Falls, IA.
Growing up in the Midwest, I started studying Spanish as a second language in high school, fascinated with learning about other cultures and enchanted with the idea of traveling to or even living in a new country. As a middle-class white kid, I was completely unaware of the privilege I brought to learning Spanish. I was not studying Spanish because I had to; I was doing it because I wanted to. It was interesting and exotic, and there was no penalty to me if I didn’t do it well or spoke Spanish with an accent.
After living abroad for a few years in college, I was able to call myself a Spanish speaker, and as a young adult, I wore that label proudly and somewhat cockily, showing off my Spanish abilities any chance I got. One day at work, I greeted a Latina client who was about my age in Spanish. She sneered at me and forcefully (and fluently) said, “I speak English.” I was mortified. Had I offended her? Was it wrong for me to greet her in Spanish? Did I have a right to make a claim on being a Spanish speaker?
In retrospect, I realized that there are no easy answers to these questions and I had much learning to do. Becoming a fluent Spanish speaker did not give me an open invitation to speak Spanish with anyone, anywhere. With many missteps along the way, I have become more sensitive to the language needs and desires of the people I encounter. I have learned to acknowledge and accept that sometimes I am not invited to speak Spanish, and it is not my place to control that conversation.
Fast-forward to a decade later to when my kids were babies and my husband (a native Spanish speaker) and I had decided to maintain Spanish as the language of our family. I knew that I would speak to my kids in Spanish from the start; we wanted them to be able to communicate with their extended family in Puerto Rico and grow up bilingually. In all of the first exciting moments of becoming a parent and meeting your kid for the first time—a new human being who you love and talk to—I was doing it in Spanish. A mother passing on someone else’s mother tongue.
At first, it felt awkward; I realized that I didn’t know how to talk to babies in Spanish. I felt self-conscious on the playground talking to my baby girl in Spanish while pushing her on the swing. Were other people listening? Did they think I was a fake? Most of the time I have felt lucky to be part of helping my kids grow up bilingually. Other times it has felt like a lot of work.
Now my kids are in grade school and are bilingual, even as ever-powerful English persistently erodes away at the edges of their Spanish. As far as I know, they haven’t experienced discrimination for speaking Spanish. But I also recognized that they are speaking Spanish from a place of privilege too. Their fair skin, middle-class upbringing, U.S. citizenship, and perfect English has so far allowed them to speak Spanish without many consequences.
I have many hopes for my kids. I hope they don’t face discrimination because they are Latinas and Spanish speakers. I hope that they are curious, empathetic, and kind. I hope that they proudly maintain their Spanish.
Barry Watkins,
Santa Rosa, CA.
My mother took me back when she told me that. She was loving & guileless. She drove off the road when I told her I had Black roommates in SF, though I grew up in Beaumont, TX. I never thought of my roommates as “Black”, they were individuals – Ron & Rusty. That was when I was glad I had left Texas for San Francisco.
Julia Guerra,
Austin, TX.
My brothers are very important figures in my life. They were born to a white mom and a white dad. They are blonde and red-haired, with blue and green eyes. When they were little babies, my white mom married my Mexican dad and he adopted both of them as his own. I am biracial, with brown skin and hispanic features. The majority of our small hometown almost refused to believe that we were siblings for the 16 years that we lived there. People would say to them, “that brown girl is your sister?” Even after leaving that small town, we are constantly mistaken as friends. People who meet us for the first time are baffled when we tell them that we are related. People who see them across the room say to me, “but they’re white.” We have been together all of our lives. We share a mother, a last name, and a lifetime of memories. Yes, those white boys are my brothers.
Deirdre Stoelzle,
Casper, WY.
In Rwanda there were times that I was the first white person some Rwandans had ever seen. Mostly people wanted to touch my skin, my hair, but at one prison there were two little girls with their mother, bringing food to their imprisoned father. They saw me and screamed in horror. I crouched down, cooing my safety to them. They kept whimpering, shaking. “There’s nothing you can do,” my interpreter said. “In the village they say ‘If you’re bad the muzungu will come and eat you.'”
Sean Robertson,
Kensington, MD.
People impressed with how my wife handles our children have stopped her on the street to ask what agency she was hired through. I suppose it’s an improvement from the Dominican Republic where hotel security tried to prevent me from “bringing in a local prostitute.”
Adrienne Kern,
Keller, TX.
My daughter was two weeks from turning one on September 11, 2001. She is one of them. An Arab (pronounced with a Texas drawl: A-Rab). A camel jockey. A rag head. She is Turkish and Saudi and Egyptian. She is not white like me, her mother, who is also mixed race. Far from Aryan.
When those people killed our people, I automatically went into that maternal protection mode where assumptions are borne. I assumed people would be cruel, and so said cruelty was magnified. I heard an elderly man say, “nuke ‘em all.” But I did not hear his wife say, “But most are innocent.” I heard a co-worker call my daughter Osama’s niece. But I did not hear my boss call her beautiful.
A few weeks ago two boys killed and maimed our people again. I wrote on my social networking site that extremists taint all religions. Islam was not the problem, you see, because mental illness and hatred cannot be classified unto a specific belief system. Or race. My daughter is not Muslim, but still it was my duty to defend her.
This Sunday, as my husband baptized our daughter, this beautiful brown-eyed child of God, Allah, Yahweh, I suddenly had an epiphany. She does not need me to protect her. By protecting her, I am only amplifying the prejudice that I fear. I realized that, by defending my daughter’s Arab bloodline, I am the only one oppressing her.
Amber Halverson,
Eugene, OR.
“Oh good! He doesn’t look like he has any white in him at all!”
My first real encounter with my own race that I can remember was when I was in middle school. My white godparents had just adopted a black baby. They “kept his black name”, DiMario, as his middle name and changed his first name to the “biblical” (aka: white) name Joshua.
We were in the store and my godmother took her oldest daughter to the bathroom so I was with the baby waiting outside. An older white woman came up to me and asked if he was my son. I exclaimed, “Oh, no no no. He’s my brother”. In my mind it was a crazy thing to ask because I was obviously too young to have a baby. Her response was “Oh good. Because he doesn’t look like he has any white in him at all!” and then she just walked away like what she said didn’t mean anything.
I was raised in a diverse city with many different races and cultures, but my own race was not acknowledged to me until it was compared to someone else’s.
His was acknowledged right away and was immediately looked down upon, all before he could talk.
I often wonder if his parents have ever talked with him about his race and what it means to him or if they teach him colorblindness.
Debra Miller,
Rochester, MN
Our mother hid our Native American ancestry until I was a late teen. I was raised in an area that continually brow beat and bashed Native Americans and I was afraid to tell anyone about my bloodlines back in the 70s. As I aged I realized it was OK to be proud of our heritage instead of embarrassed and I now openly share that side of me even tho I really know too little about the people before me because “it just wasn’t talked about”. My mother painted the photo I attached showing her vision of Native American art as she saw it.
William (Bill) Roderick Wilson,
United Kingdom
Where did I get my curls ?
Growing up in Scotland in the 1950’s I was one of 5 kids in a happy rural home in Perthshire. My father was Dr William Wilson, a hospital Consultant in Perth, my mother a nurse. His father John had been a Minister in the Church of Scotland, a complete shift from what was socially expected as all previous generations had been coal miners. This was only possible because his mother, the formidable Euphemia McCulloch, determined that none of her 7 sons would go down the pits. She put them all through university with her sewing machine. My grandfather said he never went to sleep other than to the sound of his mother’s sewing machine.
We would sometimes speculate where the curls that were scattered through our family might have come from. My father’s curls were even tighter than mine. At school I was called Willy the Wog which embarrassed me as I didn’t know what a Wog was.
I had no interest in my family history, and it was only when my cousin (another John) began researching it that he came up with the fact that one ancestor, James Wilson had emigrated to the US in 1766, fought against the British in the War of Independence and signed the Declaration of Independence, becoming one of the founding fathers of the US.
John’s research also gave him an interesting idea. He was able to trace the mining Wilson’s all the way back to 1489 (several called William) because until 1833 miners in Scotland were the property of the mine owners. That made them valuable serfs or slaves, so good records were kept. If a mine owner did not own enough miners he would sometimes import slaves from Africa – so John asked ‘might this have been where our family curls came from?’
I took a DNA test and was astonished and delighted to find that my ethnicity estimate included 3.4% African (2.4% North Africa and 1.1% Nigerian). Both these are slave areas and this would be consistent with ancestors being brought across in the early 1700s.
Suddenly as a proud Scot I have even more to be proud of and if I am honest I am still trying to get my head around all that it means. However, I am glad to have the chance to give my story to The Race Card Project.
Bill Wilson June 2021
Perth, Scotland
Joe Stainback IV,
New Tazewell, TN.
A quote from my mother … My positive spin on ‘race’ interactions gleaned from mandated busing in the early ’70’s – Richmond, VA.
Subscription to our newsletter open soon.
Indulge in timeless elegance with our hand-curated collection of luxury vintage men’s fashion. From classic suits to iconic accessories, our online store offers a premium shopping experience for the modern gentleman who appreciates quality and style. Shop now and elevate your wardrobe with our carefully selected pieces that celebrate the art of craftsmanship and heritage fashion.
