Tag, I'm it!

If you've been following the game of tag being played around the blogosphere, then you know what happens when you become "it." You get to reveal seven random facts about yourself and then pass "it" on. Mes Deaux Cents got me while I was looking the other way on Sunday. Dang! I've always sucked at tag! Here goes...

 

1. I am trying to teach myself to play guitar on a black electric that my husband bought me for Christmas a couple of years back.

2. I once attended a party at the White House with Julia Child and Hilary Clinton. (If standing outside the gathering with Secret Service counts as "attending.")

3. I have visited or driven through nearly every state in the continental United States, except for the northernmost reaches of New England, Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. My friends and I used to take annual two-week road trips and explore different parts of the country.

4. I think I can give Mes Deaux Cents a run for her money with my music collection. I think I have around 5,000+ albums and CDs, too.

5. I am addicted to reading. I read while eating dinner, while watching TV, before the movie begins at the theater, while waiting in line at the drive-thru and sometimes at stop lights. I used to get into trouble as a kid for bringing books to the dinner table. Luckily, my mom is a teacher and my dad was a principal, so they didn't get too angry.

6. I dream of one day having a book published.

7. My hubby and I met on July 4 and were engaged two months later. We've been married for six years now.

An ex white woman speaks; Debra Dickerson listens

Didn't I tell you that race was complicated and messy? Over at Mother Jones, Debra Dickerson has reviewed Bliss Broyard's One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life-A Story of Race and Family Secrets, a book that recounts how the author struggled to come to grips with surprising news delivered by her father on his deathbed. Papa Anatole Broyard, icon of Manhattan intelligentsia, obscured his black heritage, keeping it a secret from the world and his offspring, until his deathbed.

 

Dickerson also looks at Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family, which tells of the author's search for ancestors of the black slaves once owned, and in some cases sired by, members of his family.

 

Books like One Drop and Slaves in the Family are helping to uncover the dirty little secret about race in America. The secret? Nothing about race is black or white, particularly the muddy criteria we use to decide whether someone is black or white. Any student of history should realize that all of us are far more "mixed" than anyone is willing to admit, and that what we call race is really more about culture than physical markers. But still we are to feign surprise when some marginally famous person reveals a drop of black blood and we are to ponder what the revelation means about the identity of the person. My answer? It means nothing.

 

Anyway, check out Dickerson's piece, which attempts to assign meaning to all the recent soul searching by white authors investigating their family's roles in the historical drama surrounding slavery, racial violence and identity.