On Redemption and Race-Mixing

The company that hosts our website provides us with information about who visits our website. When we began blogging, we had about 100 "unique visitors" per month and now, a year later, we have over 3,500 per month. I don't know how this statistic is calculated, but I assume that around 3,500 individuals take a look at the Green Parenting blog and some portion of this number regularly reads our posts. Our host also lists the sites that link to ours. This week I noticed 200 visits from littlegeneva.com. I went to see what wonderful people decided to promote our blog. A tiny little confederate flag – the flag of the slave-holding states during the American Civil War – popped up next to the url. I knew I was about to see something interesting.

The basic argument propounded on littlegeneva.com is that the Bible tells Christians to marry within their race and that America's greatness depends on racial purity. The post with the link to Green Parenting was called "Reject Race, Reject America" and the title of the link was "Race-Mixers and Pagans," which went to my post about how MaGreen and I have different religious backgrounds. The post included a picture of Amba Ma, a Hindu goddess, with the face of Jesus spliced on it. I am pleased that my post seems to have really hit the mark for littlegeneva. Not only are we "race-mixers," but we are also pagans. We seem to epitomize exactly what he loathes.

I've shared this discovery with some of my friends and co-workers. They ask, "Aren't you worried?" As a matter of fact, I'm not worried by the link to our blog. I grew up in Mobile, Alabama. Racial insults and threats were not quite a daily occurrence, but they were common. At the nearly all-white school I attended, St. Paul's Episcopal, my classmates refused to touch me my first year there. I was an untouchable. The substitute nigger. They often called me by names including mix-breed. I always wanted to say, "I'm not a mix-breed. My family can trace back its Nagar Brahmin ancestors for fourteen generations. You're the mix-breeds. You don't even know where your families come from." I never actually said that. What I did do was trounce the rest of the students every year and in every single class including Bible Study. When I made a perfect score and they barely passed, I would clench my fist and relish my academic superiority, which did not help matters.

And yet, I never got beat up. I knew what lines not to cross and when I was in real danger. I spent time with all kinds of white people in Alabama. My Boy Scout friends and I had this game whenever we were out in the country where we would rate pick-up trucks for the number of Confederate flags displayed, the number of guns in the rack, and other such features. I remember one afternoon at Camp Maubila, the regional Boy Scout campgrounds, spent trying to teach some very poor white boys from Bayou La Batre how to spell words like "socks" and "shoes." The same day at dinner, the boy behind me in the cafeteria line grumbled, "hurry up sand nigger." So I grew up very much in my skin. I often wished I was white. Up until we left Alabama, I felt that I was ugly and undesirable. My pen and my intellect were my refuge.

Years later, when I visited India, my identity as a victimized person of color was turned inside out. I really was the pure-bred Brahmin. I was the light-skinned person benefiting from the privileges that my family there took for granted. I identified with the people my family and my ancestors looked down on and, arguably, exploited. Simultaneously occupying a privileged, high-caste position and the subaltern position of the substitute nigger has given me double vision. That doubleness feeds my empathy for the exploiter and the exploited; my questioning of gender norms; my passion for ecological balance; my impatience for economic injustice; and my deep connection with MaGreen, who grew up in very different circumstances from me but came out with the same basic perspective on the world.

I thought about writing a comment on the littlegeneva blog. But how am I to engage with someone who bases his beliefs on obscure quotes from the Old Testament? It saddens me that bloggers can create amazing communities, but the worldviews of these communities can be so dramatically different there is no potential for fruitful exchange. Littlegeneva sees the browning of America. He so energetically documents the sea change taking place here. It makes him deeply angry, as if he is being attacked. He thinks the British, European, White, Christian customs that were planted in America's fresh soil will be vanquished. I wish he could see what I have seen. Then he would know that if those customs can be redeemed from their awful pasts, it will be by the mix-breeds like my daughter.