I was prepared this morning to write about my favorite low-hanging fruit, reparations for American slavery. As I woke up, I had the essay pre-packaged and ready to go. Here is a sample from what I was going to publish:
Reparations, Allison and Me
For today, I wanted to offer my thought on the reparations debate sweeping the country. None of my Twyman uncles would be surprised with my position. And, if they were alive, we would all gather around in Grandma's living room or Uncle Robert Daniel's living room and have a raucous debate. Twymans -- we can disagree without being disagreeable.
Why I Oppose Reparations -- A Letter to Allison
Wink,
BTW - I failed to mention that I encourage you to submit your treatise here on reparations to a proper channel to be published - such as Quillette - WSJ - and would love for the public at large and of course our miscreant Congress (at least the majority of them) to have it be required reading. Oh what I would give to see you read aloud your reasons at that Congressional hearing!
As I sat down to order breakfast, I knew where I was going this morning. My old standby, Reparations for American Slavery. And then I read an essay that changed my day. I read America’s Tragic Search for Authenticity by Jenny Holland. All of my best-laid plans flew out the window. Holland saw into me and I saw into Holland and this soul we call America.
Like Prince as a composer, I felt an emotion and knew I should go with my felt emotion. This essay, inspired by an American of Irish descent, is about my search for authentic identity in my native land.
=========
Holland “was born in Dublin to an American mother and a father who was Irish (actually, Northern Irish — itself a contested identity.” From those nuanced and complex beginnings developed a life, a relationship, from Americanness and a partial non-American identity. Full Americans appreciated the non-American Irish side of Holland as she grew up and found herself in New York once and then twice again.
I recognized the evolving nature of one’s identity which is why the essay so captivated me at breakfast. In my 96 percent white junior high school, a white student once confided in me that I was ok since my skin color was brown, not dark. I observed the comment as noteworthy since, in my all-black neighborhood and family, no one cared about skin color or would have ever made such a comment to me. In one setting, an aspect of one’s identity mattered. In another setting, the same aspect of one’s identity garnered indifference. My experience parallels Holland’s memories.
Holland’s American grandfather was proud to have a grandchild born in Ireland. He even wrote Holland a letter about his feelings. For Holland and as a writer, this quirk of identity, the prestige of being native to Ireland in America, warranted reflection and note. Such are the reverberations of identity in an American family.
In my American family, I was born in Richmond, Virginia in a segregated colored hospital. Both of my grandfathers had passed away by the time I came on the scene. So, I do not know whether or not they would have taken great pride in my birth in Richmond, that I was a native of Richmond, a native of Virginia, a native of America. My Mom once said her Dad had no use for white people. My Mom married into a genetic family dating back to 1621 and Peter Montague in Jamestown.
American identities clash, come together again and recombine.
At this point, my experience diverges from Holland’s search for identity. I have found nearly all of my Black American family members decline, and refuse, to acknowledge matter-of-fact genetic ancestry and heritage. There are exceptions, a distant cousin here and a close cousin there. And yet my ancestors are the oldest of Old Americans. Wouldn’t the pride of Holland’s American grandfather seem, I don’t know, reasonable? And as for the Old Country? There is no genuine conception of an Old Country, despite faux celebrations like Kwanza and the virtuous wearing of Kente cloth, the garb of Ashanti slave traders.
But I am the Black Sheep in my Black American Family. I am curious about all of my blood ancestors on American and Irish soil. My mother-in-law is 25% Irish in ancestry. My younger son and I both had reddish hair as babies which suggests the genetic life of the Irish lives on in us.
The words of a commentator, Sam McGowan, on Holland’s essay landed:
Jenny, I love your writing and agree with most of your ideas, but you need to understand something, you're not an American, you're a New Yorker, which is not the same thing. You told me yourself you have never traveled in the South, a region populated primarily by descendants of Scots-Irish, once you get away from the East Coast. New York is not America, it's an island that takes up a few hundred square miles on the Hudson and New York Harbor. New Yorkers even believe this, as evidenced by the infamous New Yorker cover depicting New York (Manhattan) in the foreground with the West Coast in the far distance and a wasteland in between. That is the New Yorker's attitude. New York has become important in the minds of the (pseudo)intellectual set because it is the center of publishing, or used to be, and wannabe writers flocked there. A few became famous. They looked down their sanctimonious noses at the real America, the America that exists outside of that island and those distant West Coast cities.
I grew up in rural West Tennessee. NOBODY cared where our ancestors came from! Some of us had Irish (Scots-Irish) blood but most of us had no idea where our ancestors, who have been in America since the 1600s, came from. Some of our ancestors have been here for tens of thousands of years. It's the more recent Irish, Italians, Poles, etc. who make a big deal about the "old country." The African-American identity is of recent origin, around the 1980s. While there have been a few Irish and Germans in what is now the United States since the thirteen original colonies, the huge influx was in the mid-nineteenth century with Italians, Poles and Jews (mostly Germans and Eastern Europeans) coming around the turn of the Twentieth Century - after the War Between the States (which was fought to a large extent by German and Irish immigrants who joined the army in order to eat.) While I have Irish ancestry dating back to the early nineteenth century, my Irish ancestors were most likely Scots-Irish. I don't know for sure and do not care. My name can be Irish but it's actually Scottish. My ancestor was a Scottish Presbyterian who fought with Bonnie Prince Charlie then moved to England where he became a well-known Baptist preacher and dissenter who is buried in the same cemetery as John Bunyan. There was not a single Irish-Catholic (or any other kind of Catholic) where I grew up, or Jews either. I had a French aunt my uncle brought home after the war who was no doubt Catholic, but she didn't last long. She took up with another man while my uncle was flying missions over North Korea. My German Anabaptist ancestor (who I didn't know I had until fairly recently), fled Germany to get away from Catholics and Lutherans. His daughter married a Scotsman and somewhere along the line their descendants became Methodists. In short, that old country identity you mention is only found in large cities - New York, Chicago, Detroit, etc. - where large numbers of immigrants settled instead of assimilating into American society. Incidentally, that's also where wokeism comes from, there and the West Coast.
I am married to a native New Yorker, so I get the commentator’s annoyance with New York as the center of the thinking world. And as for the South? The South was my known world, until I left Virginia for Cambridge, Massachusetts and law school. Like the commentator, I am a native of the South. Holland has not known the pleasure of taking in the smell of tobacco plants on Southside Richmond, the uncle who grows crops in his backyard or the ever present African Methodist Episcopal church. She has other memories about her American identity but her corner of American identity doesn’t include the South, southern beaches like Cape Charles, Virginia or Mr. Jefferson’s home at Monticello. I’m also sure the commentator would agree there is not one South. There is the Upper South and the Lower South. There is the Old South and the New South. There is a Black South and a White South.
Catholics were few in my county. I never met someone who was Jewish until my senior year in high school. Mr. Levy interviewed me as a member of the Harvard Alumni Admissions Committee in his comfortable home in Windsor Farms. In some ways, my American identity tracks Mr. McGowan’s.
=========
Like the commentator, I knew the rural South growing up. However, I never knew of my genetic ancestors who were Scots, Irish and French Huguenots until Ancestry.com and 23 and Me. I became aware of my larger ancestral world around 2016. Race and past slavery delayed my full awakening of the diversity in my genetic past. My 41% Nigerian ancestry interlocks seamlessly with my 8% Scottish and 8% English ancestry.
What does it mean when one’s Old Country is not Nigeria, Scotland or England? Suppose one’s Old Country is where one walked to school or picked blackberries or walked on gravel roads? If I strained for an Old Country, perhaps Albemarle County or Middlesex County, Virginia might fit the bill. But never Lagos, Glasgow or Kent.
Do I have an authentic Old Country like Holland? Or, do McGowen and I share the same Old Country as Old Americans?
Holland coins her Substack page Personal Politics for the Politically Homeless. I read and re-read those words “Politically Homeless.” Could it be I am racially homeless? And, if so, does my hunger for authenticity draw me to Holland’s essay? I think so.
Let’s discuss the Old Country, Ireland.
The commentator’s assessment of the Old Country for Old Americans is on the mark. There was never any desire or thirst for an Old Country when I grew up in Chesterfield County, Virginia in the 1960s and 1970s. Why? Because we were all living in the Old Country of grandparents and great great grandfathers. That goes for white kids and black kids. To this extent, my American identity was fixed and inherited like an heirloom. No one knew anything else but Chesterfield, Richmond and the larger state of Virginia. We had southern roots like the commentator.
Did it matter that I came of a Black American family? Well, yes and no.
Yes, it mattered since a whole series of separate churches and neighborhoods had developed since the Civil War. The world I was born into was an insular world. No grandparents were born in Ireland. I was not born in Ireland. I took my first steps within walking distance of where four generations of my ancestors had taken their first steps. In this way, my search for authenticity will lead me to a different place than Holland.
On the other hand, it did not matter. Our culture was American with a southern overlap. My family would have had more in common with the commentator than Holland’s nuanced and complex identity.
What I find interesting is the place of Ireland in my background. My paternal great grandmother was the direct descendant of an Irish immigrant family, the Wilsons. There are DNA matches on Ancestry to show Wilson blood runs through my veins. However, those memories of the Old Country did not survive beyond the early 1800s. The Irish identity in me is long gone. Genetics alone don’t create identity in the sense Holland encountered the weave and flow of identity. My 4x great grandfather, Samuel H. Wilson, was born in Ulster, Ireland in 1773. He immigrated to the U.S. and died in 1854 in Lewis County, Virginia.
As this essay is about one’s search for authenticity, I leave you with another passing story in my bloodline. My 4x great great grandfather Samuel Wilson was born in Ulster, Ireland and immigrated to what is now known as Ireland, West Virginia. His son and my 3x great grandfather, David Wilson, married Rebecca Lisky. Both David and Rebecca were white. David and Rebecca had a son, my 2x great grandfather Joseph Wilson (1831 - 1909). Joseph was born White but had a black daughter named Mary around 1856 by Mary Wilson.
By the 1870s and 1880s, Joseph Wilson was living side by side among my black ancestors in Manchester, Chesterfield County, Virginia. He fathered my Grandma’s mother, Amy Wilson, by Mary Wilson. As the new century rolled in, my ancestor found his new identity. The 1900 U.S. Census recorded Joseph Wilson as a Black man living near his black children and grandchildren.
My ancestor of Irish descent had passed for Black in America.
Conclusion: The search for authenticity has special meaning for my generation. Coming to a world of desegregated predominantly white public schools in the 1970s produced “a psychic break which would leave them forever searching for their genuine identity.’ I am using Holland’s incisive words but in the context of my known world of Old Americans assigned the label Black Americans (although my Grandma referred to herself as a Colored American).
I found my genuine identity in a thousand and one memories until I encountered a world of dogma on April 21, 2018. And so it was not the evil white southerner but dogmatists, the Harvard Club of San Diego, who caused a crisis of identity for me. Because I knew myself and my forebearers, acceptance of Blackness as Oppression. Nothing else matters proved untenable. A new identity awaited me beyond the box of dogma.
The way of the future is a single story of us.
https://www.theoryofracelessness.org/
I may not get there with you but fellow travelers like Holland will lead us in the right direction. The question is not whether one was born in Ireland or whether one’s 4x great grandfather was born in Ireland. The question isn’t whether one has lost all memory of the Old Country or whether one grew up in the Old Country on American soil.
The question is whether we can find our way beyond ideology.
My parents came to America from the USVI, specifically St. Thomas. People want me to identify as someone who understands black American culture, when in fact, I'm really just now learning it. Am I not an authentic black man because I don't have the specific roots, of many blacks in America? Am I something other than a black man who grew up in America because I lived my formative years in Bangor, ME and Rome NY? I am a person made up of so many different people groups. I grew up with Italians, Poles, Irish, and French Canadians, in addition to the caribbean heritage my parents instilled in me. My old country is this country and perhaps St. Thomas. I want my children to know and appreciate where my family came from but not to obsess about it. As I've gotten older I'm learning to appreciate it more and hope to share that appreciation with my family. I've lived and visited so many parts of our great country and believe my authenticity comes from being an American, that perhaps encompasses too much, but that's how I feel.
I find my family history fascinating, and while my ancestors' lives are not my life, I often wonder about the flow of history breaking on the shores of today. I'm not of the cultures of the old countries but I'm a conglomeration of various cultures into a Southern American Catholic identity. That is my authentic self.