Subjectivity

Peter asked me about my "subjectivity" the other day when I went to see him. It was in regard to the fact that I have some decided opinions on the topic, being involved in the community as living experience. True I have been dealing with the confluence of blackness and whiteness for a few years now. The interesting thing about it is that I have only recently begun to look at the racism and race involved in this. Before now I just assumed that Thorkell was black, or mixed or biracial. But for much of it I thought of him as Icelandic or Irish American and Haitian, rather than a black or white child. In the last few months I have been reflecting on my experiences while he was growing up. I remember the looks I got in VA when we first got back from Iceland. And staring back at them when they gave me dirty looks for being so white with such a brown child. At first i ignored the looks, thinking that they were of little importance, perhaps I miss read them, and they were just curious or surprised at a white women having a none white child. Mixed race relations even in Washington in the early 1990's. From my reading the early 90 was a big boom in mixed race children, I am not sure that it is quite that way. I think it is a matter of people claiming a different category, they did change them for the census in 1990 and then in 2000. I think it is also a matter of changed attitudes, in the 90's it was more common to see interracial couples in the larger cities. That does not mean that they were not stared at or commented upon. But they seemed much less at the margins then they were before, while absorbed into the black community.
One of the things I remember from my childhood was the woman who babysat my brother, who was married to a black man. They had two boys. I never remember questioning the normalcy of this, the older son was my age, but went to a different grade school. The husband worked for Polaroid, and the wife was a stay at home mom obviously since she cared for my toddler brother. My mother later in life talked about them having social problems but not about how severe they were. I don't ever remember thinking that they were an odd couple or family. I liked being at their home. At the time they seemed good friends. I wish I knew a bit about how they were treated.
So even as far back as grade school I was in the presence of mixed race couples and children.
Then, the next time I remember thinking about race if it can be called that, was in Africa. I remember the horror of seeing the leper and how scared I was when she got into my aunt's car. I remember the cook and the gardener that my uncle employed. The cook was Kikuyu, a small light-skinned man, thin and wiry, and rather quick tempered. He liked my brother, but not me. The gardener was a Luo, tall very dark, with an easy smile. I remember being enthralled by him, he told us stories, taught us about the yard. He seemed to have boundless patience with us and never made us feel like we were in the way or taking up his time. He had an easy manner about him, loose-limbed and methodical, unlike the cook who was quick and impatient, catering to my brother when he bit off his tongue. I recall that the gardener was one of the most handsome men I had ever seen. So dark was his skin that it appeared black as night, making his smile seem whiter than white.
Then over the years in Iceland, where we are the whitest of white, I payed little attention to color variation of people. Even over the summers I had few non-white people in the sphere we moved in.