In Full Color Page 2
If scrutinizing people’s appearances can’t provide definitive proof of their racial identity, what does? How do you decide whether certain people are white or Black? What’s the determining factor? Is it their DNA? Is it their skin color? Is it how other people perceive them, or is it how they perceive themselves? Is it their heritage? Is it how they were raised, or is it how they currently live? Does how they feel about themselves play a role, and if so, how much? Does one of these questions provide the answer, or do all—or none—apply? And, finally, does the idea of separate human races have any sort of biological justification, or is it merely a creation of racism itself?
Adding further confusion, the definition of Blackness has not only shifted from decade to decade but also differs from person to person. For most, Blackness comprises much more than one’s physical appearance. It’s the culture you inhabit and the experiences you’ve lived. It’s philosophical, emotional, even spiritual. Was Michael Jackson Black? By the end of his life his skin was nearly white and many of his features had been altered in a way that made him look far less Black than he did as a boy, but nearly everyone would still respond to that question by saying, “Of course.” How about O.J. Simpson? With his brown skin and curly hair, he appeared Black, but the way he viewed himself suggested otherwise. When pressured to pull the race card, he reportedly once said, “I’m not Black. I’m O.J.,” an opinion seconded by a helicopter pilot for a film crew that filmed Simpson fleeing the police in his white Ford Bronco on June 17, 1994. “If O.J. Simpson were Black, that shit wouldn’t have happened,” she later told the documentary director Ezra Edelman when describing the LAPD’s atypical restraint that day. “He’d be on the ground getting clubbed.”
Yes, my parents weren’t Black, but that’s hardly the only way to define Blackness. The culture you gravitate toward and the worldview you adopt play equally large roles. As soon as I was able to make my exodus from the white world in which I was raised, I made a headlong dash toward the Black one, and in the process I gained enough personal agency to feel confident in defining myself that way.
That I identify as one race while the world insists I’m another underscores the psychological harm the concept of race inflicts. Being denied the right to one’s self-determination is a struggle I share with millions of other people. As our culture grows less homogenous, more and more people are finding themselves stuck in a racially ambiguous zone, unable (or not allowed) to identify with the limited available options. One of the few silver linings of the media firestorm that followed my “exposure” is that it sparked an international debate about race and racial identity. I didn’t set out to be a spokesperson for people stuck somewhere in the gray zone between Black and white, but after my own life was thrown into disarray because of this issue, I’m happy to share my whole story in the hope that it will bring about some much-needed change.
I became aware long ago that the way I identify is unique and knew I would need to talk about it eventually, but I hoped I could choose the time, the place, and, most importantly, the method. Unfortunately, when the footage of the reporter in Spokane asking me if I was African American went viral, whatever chance I might have had to introduce myself to the world on my own terms, while explaining the nuances of my identity, was taken from me.
Do I regret the way the interview ended (and, as a consequence, the way my story was presented to the world)? Of course. But, as you’ll see, the evolution of my identity was far too nuanced—and, frankly, private—to describe to a stranger. How can you explain in a brief conversation on the street a transformation that occurred over the course of a lifetime? You can’t. To truly understand someone, you need to hear their whole story.
*Like numerous linguists and academics, I believe “Black” should always be capitalized when referring to culture or ethnicity. Not everyone agrees. Other than Ebony and Essence, two magazines that cater to a mostly Black audience, most major publications have refused to make this adjustment. To my mind, “black” describes a color, while “Black,” like “Asian” or “Hispanic,” denotes a group of people.
I don’t capitalize “white” because white Americans don’t comprise a single ethnic group and rarely describe themselves this way, preferring labels like “Italian American” or “Scotch Irish.”
Chapter One
Delivered by Jesus
WE DON’T GET TO CHOOSE OUR PARENTS.
Mine—Larry and Ruthanne Doležal—met while petitioning the high school principal in Libby, Montana, to set aside a place on campus for students to pray during their lunch breaks. Larry had become a fundamentalist Christian after jumping into a van full of Christ-loving hippies heading west. The van took him from his childhood home in Montana to a commune in Seattle, where he walked the streets and tried to convince others to love the Lord as much as he did. Ruthanne’s religious fanaticism was passed down to her directly from her grandfather, the pastor of an Assembly of God church in Nampa, Idaho. Ruthanne’s brother, my Uncle Ben, had a “prayer van” with “Supernatural House Calls” painted on the side, which he and his wife used to cruise around northwestern Montana while attempting to heal the sick and, in some cases, raise the dead through spiritual warfare. In short, my family was overflowing with what people in the mid-seventies called “Jesus freaks.”
After getting married, my parents bought twenty-three acres of land just west of Troy, Montana, on the side of a mountain, with a view of the Kootenai River meandering through the valley below. While they were clearing the land and building the house I grew up in, they lived in a teepee made from wooden poles Larry had fashioned from trees he’d felled and canvas Ruthanne had stitched with an 1870s treadle sewing machine. Whether they were still living in it (or in a house under construction) at the time of my birth remains a topic of debate in my family, but, either way, my childhood environment was very nearly the definition of rustic.
As part of their Christian fundamentalism, Larry and Ruthanne were Young Earth Creationists, a group that believes the earth and all living things on it were created by God over a six-day period between six thousand and ten thousand years ago, that dinosaurs were among the creatures on Noah’s ark, and that all of us are descended from Adam and Eve. Larry and Ruthanne also believed that since Adam and Eve didn’t have an obstetrician or midwife, they didn’t need one either. Just as he’d done with my brother Josh, who was born two years before I was, Larry took it upon himself to deliver me, on November 12, 1977, without any medical personnel or assistance on hand; as a result, Ruthanne almost died from excess hemorrhaging. On my birth certificate, Jesus Christ is listed as the attendant to my birth.
I would continually be reminded throughout my childhood just how difficult my delivery had been for my mother. That I’d nearly killed her weighed me down with a sense of guilt I could never fully shed. Compared to mine, Josh’s birth had been a piece of cake—or so I was told. It quickly became clear to me that in our family, Josh was the blessed child, while I was the cursed one.
This distinction even made itself known in my name. Many readers of the Bible only see Rachel’s virtuous aspects. She was beautiful, beloved by her husband Jacob, and blessed to have two children, Joseph and Benjamin, who were ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel. But Rachel was also a human illustration of the consequences of sin. Angry at her father Laban for tricking her husband into marrying her sister—like many aspects of the Old Testament, it’s complicated—Rachel stole her father’s teraphim (idols that represented household deities and served as a form of title deed), hid them in saddlebags inside her tent, then took a seat on top of the bags. When Laban came looking for the teraphim, Rachel lied and said she couldn’t stand up because she was menstruating. Meanwhile, ignorant of the fact that his wife had taken the idols, Jacob issued a curse on whoever was in possession of them. Rachel died in childbirth soon afterward.
Oh, the Bible and its curses! One of the best known occurs in Genesis 9 and involves Noah, his son Ham, and a very drunken night. After Ham visi
ts his father’s tent and finds him highly intoxicated and completely naked, Ham tells his brothers Shem and Japheth, who cover their father with a garment while averting their eyes. Noah responded by condemning Ham’s son Canaan to a life as “a servant of servants.” Most curses in the Bible are generational, which means Noah was censuring all of Ham and Canaan’s descendants as well. Although race is never mentioned in the passage, an error in translation—some interpreted “Ham” to mean “dark” or “black”—engendered the idea that Noah had cursed all Black people, and by the eighteenth century this interpretation was being used to justify racism and slavery in the United States. The idea that Black people are victims of the so-called Curse of Ham, that they actually deserve to be treated poorly, remains embedded in our collective psyche to this very day.
That I, too, was somehow cursed was imparted to me before I could even speak. I’d nearly killed Ruthanne as she’d labored to deliver me. That my hair at birth was almost black and my skin was much darker than my parents’ and my brother’s was a great source of anxiety for Larry and Ruthanne and added to the notion that I was the lesser child in the family. As a child, I cried all the time, earning me the nicknames “The Blue Boo Hoo” (during a winter in which I primarily wore a blue coat) and “The Green Grouch” (different winter, different coat). In the rare moments I wasn’t crying, I was running, moving, and dancing, which, because I was female and being raised in a stoic Christian household, were equated with sinning. I was told that if I continued to act that way—living by the dictates of my “carnal nature”—I would go to Hell.
Whenever I misbehaved as a child, Larry and Ruthanne reminded me of an incident that occurred when I was eighteen months old. Left unsupervised in the house, I fell down the stairs that led to the unfinished basement and landed on the concrete floor at the bottom, breaking my collarbone and several vertebrae in my neck. Most parents would have rushed me to the nearest hospital with tears in their eyes. How did Larry and Ruthanne respond? They prayed over me and took me to a “natural doctor,” who put my arm in a sling and advised me to rest up. No X-rays were taken, no pain medications administered. My neck proceeded to grow straight instead of in a natural curve, as bone spurs fused some of my injured vertebrae together. I’ve lived with chronic neck pain ever since.
Whenever I complained about the injury when I was growing up, Larry and Ruthanne told me the pain I was experiencing was God’s way of punishing “stiff-necked” people, an allusion to the wayward nature of oxen, which were the most important domesticated animals when the Bible was written. Relying on these animals to plow their fields, farmers used “goads,” long sticks with pointed ends, to get them to speed up or turn. Despite being repeatedly and painfully stabbed, some oxen refused to obey, and, as a consequence, these obstinate animals were labeled “hard of neck” or “stiff-necked.”
To Larry and Ruthanne, my neck pain wasn’t a consequence of their negligence (apparently, it was my fault as a one-year-old that I’d fallen down the stairs because they’d instructed me to avoid doing just that) or even an actual physical injury; it was a reminder that I was too obstinate and willful for my own good and a clear indication that I needed to submit to the will of God. That I should feel guilty for acting in a way that felt most natural to me would remain a constant theme throughout my life.
Chapter Two
Escaping to Africa (in My Head)
AS A LITTLE GIRL, my skin was pale, my hair blonde, and my face full of freckles. While I may have looked like Laura Ingalls Wilder, that’s not how I felt. I loved drawing pictures of myself when I was young, and whenever it came time to shade in the skin, I usually picked a brown crayon rather than a peach one. Peach simply didn’t resonate with me. I felt like brown suited me better and was prettier. I could see that my skin was light, but my perception of myself wasn’t limited to what my eyes could take in.
The way I saw myself was instinctual, coming from some place deep inside of me. Living in the mountains of northwest Montana, we were about as far away from Black America as you can get and still be in the United States. The population of the nearest town, Troy, was approximately three thousand, and approximately three thousand of those people were white. We didn’t have a television in our house when I was growing up, so I couldn’t familiarize myself with Black culture that way. I didn’t even know Good Times, Sanford and Son, or The Jeffersons existed until I went to college.
I no longer have all the portraits I made of myself during my childhood, but in one that I’ve managed to hold onto, I drew myself as a brown-skinned girl with black curly braids. Beyond the color of my skin, what’s most notable in retrospect is the cheerful tone of the picture. The sun is shining. Flowers are blooming. Bees are flitting about. And the little girl standing there beside them—me—is smiling.
This was rarely the case during my childhood. I was a naturally artistic and imaginative little girl, always painting and drawing, but Larry and Ruthanne didn’t condone creativity or spontaneity in their household. I was constantly getting punished for expressing myself. “If you’re having fun, you’re sinning” was the message my parents drilled into my head at a very young age. Taught that my natural behavior was somehow wrong, I learned to censor and repress myself, and cried myself to sleep nearly every single night during my tween and teen years, with my face jammed into a pillow so nobody would hear.
Besides, who had the energy to smile? As soon as we were physically able to, Josh and I were required to work right alongside Larry and Ruthanne, who, like many other back-to-the-landers of that era, practiced a subsistence lifestyle that kept them laboring from dawn to dusk. In the summer, we cleared brush, pruned our fruit trees and raspberry canes, excavated dandelion roots from our yard, and dried mint leaves to be used in tea bags. In the fall, we harvested vegetables from the garden and fruit from the orchard, shelled peas, pickled cucumbers and beets, cut corn off the cob and stored it in the freezer, canned green beans and peaches and applesauce, made all sorts of jams and preserves, stored root vegetables and apples in the cellar, and shot and butchered enough elk and deer to fill our freezer. In the winter, we shelled nuts from our English walnut tree, sewed, knitted, and turned the wool we’d gotten from Bill and Ruth Wagoner’s sheep farm—and sometimes our dog’s fur—into yarn with our foot-pedaled spinning wheel.
It was Ruth Wagoner who taught me how to make cheese. After apprenticing at her house once a week for a year, I starting making fresh and aged goat cheeses of every variety. I saved up my own money so I could buy wax to make cheddar and Gouda. I also learned to make homemade yogurt, an elaborate process that takes an entire day. Making bread was an equally labor-intensive activity. With the goal of producing at least one loaf every other day, we were always in the process of kneading, proofing, or baking dough. Just ensuring that we had enough food on the table was incredibly grueling work, and it never ended.
I was so young when I started working in the kitchen I had to stand on a chair just to reach the counter. We didn’t have a dishwasher, so Josh and I were tasked with washing and drying all the dishes after every meal. The stakes were high. If we broke any dishes, we’d get a beating. The sort of meticulousness that was expected of us carried over to all the other household chores we were required to do: cleaning the slats of our closets’ louvered doors with a washcloth wrapped around a butter knife, dusting the individual leaves of our houseplants, and scrubbing the toilet and tub until they sparkled.
The gardens were my special domain. We had two of them, and they were massive. I spent countless hours there as a child, planting seeds in the spring and weeding and watering them throughout the summer. I actually enjoyed these tasks because, separated from the rest of my family, they allowed me to escape into my own imaginary world. Hidden from view by tall stalks of corn in what we called the “long garden,” I’d stir the water from the hose into the earth with a stick and make thin, soupy mud, which I would then rub on my hands, arms, feet, and legs, as if applying a lotion. Covered in t
his way, I would pretend to be a dark-skinned princess in the Sahara Desert or one of the Bantu women living in the Congo I’d read about in copies of National Geographic, which Grandma Doležal gave us a subscription to for Christmas one year. In my fantasy, Larry and Ruthanne had kidnapped me, brought me to the United States, and were now raising me against my will in a foreign land. Back home in Africa, I’d possessed the ability to control the weather, but here in Montana my special power didn’t work.
Imagining I was a different person living in a different place was one of the few ways—drawing was another—that I could escape the oppressive environment I was raised in, and I would stay in this fantasy world as long as I possibly could. It was never long enough. When I was finished watering the garden, I would hurriedly rinse the mud off my arms and legs with the same sense of urgency I had when hiding the portraits of the brown-skinned girl I liked to draw, because revealing her—even in my artwork or playtime—could get me punished. Even at this young age, I knew that my instinct that “Black is Beautiful” was not a widely shared sentiment. When it came to talking about skin color—mine or anyone else’s—I learned to keep my mouth shut.