Blackwhite

Amalgamation Nation.

Photo by Alex Padurariu on Unsplash

I asked the increasingly popular and partway glib conversationalist and A.I. wunderkind, ChatGPT, a question.  What thing, if you pull it apart, is no longer the same thing?  It answered:  An atom.  If you pull an atom apart, it is no longer the same thing, as it becomes subatomic particles such as protons, neutrons and electrons, the building blocks of all matter. 

I had been thinking along the lines of a butterfly or a layered fudge cookie, but sure, an atom works.  There are many things, of course, that once split, peeled, or ripped in two is no longer that thing.  But, truth be told, the actual thing I was pondering when asking this teaser of a question was America and all its interwoven Black folk and white folk.

What now seems like a long time ago, back in July 2oo4, at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, a fetching but barely known Black man, almost 43 but not quite, gave a rousing speech about this nation, proclaiming, with equal parts charm and conviction, that there was no real Blue America or Red America, only the United States of America.  Some found his statement to be aspirational, others labeled it naïve; a thing devoutly to be wished but far from our cold, if not frozen, reality.  Who could seriously make such an airy claim?   The thing is, as we all know by now, this charismatic young Black man went on to prove a big, fat chunk of his assertion in a rather audacious way, nabbing the U.S. presidency a mere 4 years and 4 months later.  In his earth-moving victory, he conquered largely Red Indiana, North Carolina, Nevada, Iowa, Virginia, and currently Red Ohio and Florida.  For a brief, shining moment the cynics were hushed.

Which brings us, or at least one of us, to the matter at hand.   So let’s lean right into it with a somewhat daring and fully provocative assertion.  It’s akin to Barack Obama’s assertion.  And it’s this:  there is no Black America and White America, there is only Blackwhite America.  After a very long and ugly opening act, now, 400 and a handful more years after the first slave ships arrived, remove either portion of the human equation and the layered cookie crumbles.  There is no more America.

African Americans and European Americans are the parents of this nation, its co-creators.  Take either parent out of the equation and you’d have a very different child, and a wildly different place.  Surely not this one.

Beyond sports and big sections of the culture, beyond blues, jazz and rock n’ roll, what are we talking about here?  Remove people of African heritage from America and America is left with, what… too much banjo music?   More Waspy-stiff and uptight interaction, much less loose, to-the-bone soul?   No soul, period? No Black cool and no Black genius? No James Baldwin or Thurgood Marshall? Surely no Halle Berry, Alicia Keys, guitar legend Slash… or Barack Obama?

Beyond the obvious, deeper than the shallow surface layer, is something of unalterable significance.

A nation and its larger, complicated character is less about its socio-political hierarchy than it is about its human tapestry.  Both the hierarchy and the tapestry shift and reassemble, surely in a nation that is nearly all immigrants.  Here, it was and remains more like an endlessly shifting kaleidoscope.

But for two of its races, there is no weight and no jumbled entaglement quite like the complicated, confounding Black and white, and ensuing shades, of America.  South Africa, Canada, Malaysia, Peru, the Philippines and others have some exotic mixing going on, but not quite like ours.  21st century America and its racial amalgamation are an outsized character forged in a crucible of blood and transcendence — one of root pain, terror and terrible beauty, transformed.

Now consider, the word used was amalgamation as opposed to unification or integration.  It’s way past time, and beyond the space and the ink necessary here, to itemize and recount all the ways Black people in America were first used and dehumanized, and then trodden upon, strung up, held back, excluded, disregarded, endlessly insulted, and kept outside the neighborhood gates.

That’s not the whole of U.S. history of course, but it is as large a part of its core as lava is to a volcano.  (So much so, that I have no problem understanding why many Black Americans would scoff at any concept of genuine Blackwhite America, and instead consider it part liberal fantasy, part damn fool nonsense.)

So the idea here is not so much a reframed look back as it is a vantage point on the present, as well as a scoping ahead.  It’s an earnest question about where we are now. Of course, past is prologue.  But it’s not stone or concrete.  You’re of your grand-parents but you’re not them.  In certain significant ways, you’re not anything like them.

But before we go forward, we are forced sideways.  There is, at this juncture in our national story, a surprisingly fierce, frequently unpleasant tug o’ war with the American historical narrative. 

46 years after “Roots” aired on network television and 27 years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday became a national holiday (signed into law by none other than Ronald Reagan!), we have decided against any real consensus about human bondage and ingrained injustice in America, preferring to pit “woke” against America First and America Always and Forever Exceptional. 

Understood, many prefer saluting a flag with all its wrinkles ironed out.  It’s as if a singular, remarkable nation could never have been a mean S.O.B. in its formative years.   (Side Note: we might want to revisit the wayward youth of Shawn Jay-Z Carter and Mark Wahlberg, and find out how callous and criminal can, in fact, become thoughtful adult and contributing citizen. Others, of course, start off pretty rotten and stay that way. We need not name them.)   

At present, there’s seems to be a preference for political sorting and point-scoring over established historical fact, with one side choosing a performative willful blindness, while the other far end of the tug o’ war rope is pulled by those who claim, ‘Guilty from day one!  Guilty today!  Guilty forever!’  Oprah and Obama, Condi Rice and Colin Powell, Kamala Harris and Katajni Brown Jackson?  Morgan Freeman playing God? Mere blips on an otherwise moral flatline, they say.  Clearly, history is not only up for grabs, it’s Play-Doh®.

Cherry pick and focus on the hole not the donut all one wishes, there has been great, and often enormous, progress these last 60 years.

However, even as we spat and spar, fight for school board representation and what in our long story is emphasized or ignored in the classroom, the nation as a whole is crossing over a bridge.  Together. 

If people didn’t use the phrase to describe what just happened to their recently departed pets, I’d call it the Rainbow Bridge.  Every color walks upon it, every faith, Jew and Gentile, LGBTQ and non-binary individuals, all variety of Hispanic and Asian, indigenous peoples, fully every shade of brown and pink and freckled orange. Rhetoric aside, that’s our current reality. Despite him.

But if that’s a bit too shiny or too easy for you, I get it.  So how about interracial marriage in the U.S.?  It’s now closing in on 20% and is expected to almost double between Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, and nearly every flavor of humanity over the next 25 years.  When a future historian and heritage expert, the Professor Henry Louis Gates of the 2050 version of “Finding Your Roots” looks at the genetic make-up of his guests, how many do you think, here in America, will be all European, all African, Asian, or any one thing come mid-century?  44%?  22%?  The answer is: decreasingly one thing and increasingly mixed.  And then… then what are we?

Circling back to what America is, is not, or almost is but not quite, we might take a breather.  Sit down, lean back, and turn on the TV.  How beautifully blended are we!

Arrive fresh from Fiji or Iceland, and watch enough current American television commercials over a stretch, and it would be easy to surmise that the Black population in the U.S. was 40% and not 13%, and that one out of three marriages were interracial.  ‘What a happy American family!’ Jann of Iceland might exclaim.

Television commercials these past dozen or so years are more aspirational than Obama circa 2004 and 2008.  It’s how we’d like to be.  Better a broad-shouldered cowboy astride a beautiful stallion than a terribly overweight consumer spilling over an electric scooter in a big box store, right?  We need our myths and ideal imagery.

Better a Yes, We Can (all get along) modern family than a gated community of trembling, pink-hued people with a different, crumbling community only a 15 minute drive (but seemingly 100 miles) away. Integration is not a universal impulse. And yet, left to our own devices, most Americans, liberals as well as conservatives, could script a brave or happy Hollywood movie.  We are brilliant here at screenwriting, as well as crafting great stories about ourselves.

So this Blackwhite story? 

While the reality apart from the TV landscape is, oh, a wee bit different, it’s still easy enough to argue that, yes, we are wedded together.  We are in fact; in history, cultural crossover, melded language and music styles, overlapping struggles, sorrows, joys, marches, triumphs, and, of course, Oprah. We remain an often cranky, alternately bitter and sweet, and yet, despite all the noise, increasingly appreciative and accepting union.  Please.  Who ever said marriage was easy?

For the cynic and the idealist, the Conservative and the Liberal alike, it is the same place.  Opinions clash, but they don’t change demographics. This history-laden foundation and our current mix is also our undeniable backdrop.  It just is.  This great and troubled and fused American thing is our particular ground and our atmosphere, the air we all breathe (drinking water may be another matter).

Blackwhite America it remains.  This national jigsaw puzzle, while imperfectly assembled, is the same jagged whole for everyone: urban, rural, suburban, inner city, and even for folks half in the wilderness.

So while there are 50 states, distinct and divergent, and D.C and Puerto Rico, and 3,033 separate counties, the artificial dividers are far less than the whole enchilada. There is Salt Lake City and Brooklyn, Dallas and Chicago, Boston and Birmingham, but still, somehow then and increasingly now, we remain, in a 1,001 ways, fundamentally indivisible.  Move 2,000 miles from your family, and they’re still family.

But what kind of family?  A contentious family, to be sure.  But a family nonetheless. Mom and dad, each of different skin tones and stories, are still mom and dad.

We can, and do, make a good intellectual case for different Americas: richer and poorer, hand labor and service work, coastal and interior, urban and small town. We can also divide the nation up into regions, and we do, imparting to each not only different topography or climate, but distinct regional character.  Who will argue that the deep South is just like New England, or that that the Plains states are just like the West Coast?  And yet there are not really eight Americas, or ten wholly discrete regions.  There is, in actuality, one overriding and indisputable America.  Different branches, same tangled roots.  Our national root structure, the fundamental part that lives on most vibrantly, is no longer English-German, it’s Blackwhite.  America is as fundamentally Blackwhite as Canada is English-French.  Perhaps more so.

Today – here, now - this nation has become a vast blender on high speed.  We are not just transforming, we’re creating a new people, or several.  Sure, it would still be too flippant to state that Plymouth Rock became The Rock.  Take a bow and let the velvet curtains drop?  Not yet.  Dwanye Johnson may be more than the awesome product of his Black Nova Scotian father and Samoan mother, with a smattering of Irish.  He, like millions of others, is unquestionably the product of 350 years of human misery and countless struggles.  An avatar of redemption, both for his African half and for the largely white and long unsympathetic society he was raised in, Johnson stands tall, as beloved as any contemporary celebrity.   

But what does that mean for non-celebrities and the rest of us?  For the poor and underserved in innner cities? For America as a whole?

We all know this: he means something.  Johnson is a culmination, as well as a smiling conqueror.  Not the final act, but the Great Blend as a great step forward.  Perhaps in our gut as well as our line of sight, we recognize history in this person, and the triumph over history.

There’s Obama too, of course.  He is literally Blackwhite.  He, our once improbable biracial president, the one with the white Kansas grandparents and the Kenyan father, was seen as special, a trailblazer.  Then again, perhaps that long-dissected portion of his biography is already becoming blasé.   Perhaps.

I think about bringing Lincoln forward thru a wormhole, even for only a brief visit, and introducing them:  ‘Sir, President number 16, here is, Barack Obama, President number 44.’  After capturing his long moment of astonishment in 100 photographs, I am inclined to believe there would follow a wry Lincoln smile, and then something like:  ‘Well, I’ll be.  How do you do, sir.   Now I’m almost glad we fought that damnable war.  Pleased to make your acquaintance.’ 

Anyway, that’s what I imagine would happen.  As for Blackwhite America, I have to imagine nothing.  After all, I live here.