The Edge of Tomorrow

By W. F. Twyman, Jr.

How to tell my story over the past twenty-four hours? The hour is late and my wife is at a play downtown. Hope, the cat, sizes me up from across the room. I am not the preferred human. My wife is. I’m just not into you, I imagine Hope is thinking. Hope and I have a complicated relationship. Did you know that Tikvah means Hope in Hebrew? I didn’t know until a few weeks ago. One of the benefits from knowing people around the globe.

Twenty-four hours ago, I reached out to a young writer for advice. I wanted to move on in my writing beyond The Fires. Black History Month was coming up. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday was next Monday. And I was raring to return to my daily series on pioneer black lawyers. Every February since 2021, I have written every day about a black pioneer in the legal profession. I loved the constant challenge of discovery and crafting stories from raw material. The curious mind in me never grew bored with these men of enterprise.

My young writer brought me up short with a direct question…Do pioneer black lawyers really excite you? Who is the audience for that? I loved the implicit challenge in the question. If I were a law professor, I could be challenged in this constructive and probing way every day by colleagues. Sadly, I write alone and make decisions in solitude. None of my close family members are interested in my writing. There is no curiosity on the home front. When one lives in a home of unexamined lives, one craves the intellectual outside the home.

I replied to my writer friend thusly…Yes, it excites me. There is zero audience. I received a rapid fire Lol text reply.

Why write about pioneer black lawyers this Black History Month for the fifth time in five years? What constructive purpose is served if there is zero audience?

I write about these pioneers because I am curious about humanity. I love to learn night after night about the lost and forgotten positive stories in our American past. I enjoy the research as my curiosity fuels my relentless quest for knowledge. Then, there is the creative process of assembling a coherent story from raw materials and facts. It is hard to explain the rush I feel as I recover forgotten lives and share them in my daily essays. One of my former law professor colleagues said I should find my calling. I believe I have every night I bring to life the deceased in our American past. More positive stories are needed and I can do my small part towards a better way. California Pioneer Black Lawyers

But does being black alone make someone interesting, my writer friend inquired? If the pioneer invented something and his race was ancillary or irrelevant, that story would be of interest. Just being black is boring. My friend’s critique is powerful. Maybe, it is a generational thing. When I came of age in the 1970s, any black person of achievement and accomplishment was sacred. If you are young and in your thirties, being an accomplished black person is boring. This boredom represents racial progress. There is nothing remarkable about being black per se with a brain.

I suspect I am a captive of my place and time. My neural pathways will always be turned on by the hunt for black enterprise. I am a reflection of my generation, place and time. How I Became Black

=========

Do I want race to be over? Yes, I want race to be over as I trumpet the trans racialism of Carmen Delgado. Carmen Delgado Is Not Yet Born The Carmen Delgado Dining Room What Is True Is Not Popular The Declaration of Transracial Independence Like my young writer friend, I am bored with race. Race Is Beginning To Bore Me Glenn Loury and John McWhorter feel the same boredom. I’m Tired of the Race Narrative

A simple doom scroll this morning of You Tube brought me back to a sad reality. There are people out there who remain mired in race obsession. One of my favorite visionaries on race is a young podcaster who leads with the label Exoticals United. A daughter of a family that did not emphasize blackness, Exoticals United came of age in wealthy private schools before attending a historically black college and university. She is an online leader in the ambiguous black women movement. I lament and cringe at her use of profanity but her insights are penetrating.

In a podcast, I heard that some unambiguous black women are bothered because podcaster Jada Cheaves has admitted she is 25% Mexican. Oh…My…God! A black woman has a Mexican grandmother and deigns to say so in public. For the life of me, I do not understand black women who care about someone’s Mexican grandmother. I cannot conceive of caring at all. In fact, the more mixed and ambiguous we all are, the better we will be in our wisdom about us.

I am linking this video because some readers may not believe some black women care about whether someone claims their Mexican grandmother or not. It is my hope that mono racials and cis racials face imminent extinction over the next thirty and forty years. It is self-hatred to police the self-identity of others. Please, please excuse the profanity and foul language at times. I wish Exoticals United would keep it clean since her insights are cutting edge for fluid identity.

=========

“If you’re mixed, you’re mixed” — Exoticals United

Before August 30, 2016, I experienced my sense of self as a mono racial black American. I came from an atypical black family and an atypical stable, suburban neighborhood but I never cared enough to examine the implications of a quirky racial experience. It just did not matter that much to me. I cared about other things since I don’t live in Black Consciousness.

My sense of self changed on August 30, 2016 when I discovered my larger place in a larger family tree. There were about 2,000 distant cousins who shared my family name and not my race. They were a genetic part of me. I was a genetic part of them. A self-conception as a mono racial no longer aligned with my curiosity about myself. The more I researched and discovered, the more I burrowed beyond shibboleths. My natural curiosity about the world, my openness and lack of race prejudice against others, accelerated my hunt for self-identity.

Being a mono racial no longer made sense for me. It just didn’t.

I no longer feel the glow from Twyman Road in real time. The memories remain fond, of course. I can tell you reaching out to a distant cousin who grew up across the street from me felt like talking with a stranger fifty years later. We had a name, blood and Twyman Road in common. Nothing else. There was no cognitive horse power or shared memories from adult life. Whatever we shared when I was five, six and seven was lost to the ages now. My distant cousin remains my people but I am much closer to newer friends who are Jewish women, creatives and non-conformers. Who Are My People?

The noble black American and family tradition I knew in the late 1960s is gone. And that is just part of life. Unlike Glenn Loury who has referred to poor blacks as his people, my corner of the world was never James Baldwin. My lifeline to black men was Earl G. Graves, Reginald Lewis, Oliver W. Hill, Henry L. Marsh III, L. Douglas Wilder, Judge A. Leon Higginbotham. That world of distinguished black men I knew as a black American kid is lost, gone.

McWhorter cannot conceive of race being over but I can for me. I don’t do dogma and slogan words. Dogma and Slogan Words

=========

Earlier today, I listened to another You Tube podcast by Malcom Collins. Collins made an interesting point about quirky subcultures within larger normative cultures. Could it be that my neural pathways at a young, tender age were impressed with family and surroundings unlike the larger black American culture? Did the daily reminder of our family name on the street sign signal to us that we were better? Did the knowledge that our ancestors had brought our family into being in the 1870s create a sense that we were different? My cousin Bob once shared this observation with me. Black Culture I am going to share Bob’s surmise at length:

“I don’t want to put words in Bob’s mouth, however, I could imagine Bob resting a bit on the side of Mount Charleston before offering a Zen-like speculation: We grew up on a street that bore our name. And the cross street bore our grandmother’s name. Twyman Road created a pride, an assumption that the world revolved around us. (Bob laughs a Twyman laugh shared with his father and brother Bruce) We were also isolated on a former farm. Our people were self-dependent. Everything you needed was a mile or two up the road. You want a haircut? Walk up Twyman Road to Uncle Winkfield’s shop. Time to attend school? Walk up the hill to Hickory Hill Elementary School. Want to buy food? The grocery store is to the left of school. Time for church? Walk down Terminal Avenue and across the railroad tracks to Ebenezer A.M.E. Church. Even the church was founded by grandma’s family. It was the self-reliance that made us different.”

I suspect my sense of self came from a family internal locus of control. This internal locus of control was rooted in the land since the 1870s. We were not touchy, feely people. We were stubborn, quirky types. Notably, the larger Black American culture writ large was never quirkiness. The larger Black American culture marinated in communalism and collectivism. If you’re quirky and stubborn, you’re not afraid to put views out there within the family. My Grandma made it clear to me that my prime directive was to be a good family member, to bring honor upon the family name. Being different was embraced. This ethos produced more pride in oneself. One didn’t say it but I gather from those born in the 1940s in Chesterfield County, Virginia that Twyman culture was better than generic culture.

This perception of outsiders is a tell. It goes towards the saving grace of quirkiness and internal locus of control in a black American family. I am going to quote Malcom’s riff on this problem of a non-conforming subculture within a larger conforming culture:

I think it’s very hard to have individual pride in your culture if your culture is communal and conformist…this is the specific problem. The specific problem is that you cannot say we are better than other people because of how we are different and resist to their cultural traditions when your culture…and you are defining your cultural traditions by what is normative within that culture. You can’t define your family as different from other (Black Americans) unless you’re in a religious cult or something like that…Because definitionally Your family status is based on your ability to fit these normative value systems. So you cannot have pride in how your are different from the normative value systems. And until you that, until you say, no, we are (Black American) in a way that they aren’t (Black American)…but until you can say that we are different from, and that’s what makes us better than them, it’s going to be very hard to transmit these values intergenerationally.”

Conclusion: When my cousins on Twyman Road made the decision to become absorbed in the larger normative black culture, what was lost? Were values of parents, grandparents, great grandparents and great great grandparents discarded in service of racial conformity? How would one measure displacement of quirky family values and attitudes in lieu of the mono black urban culture? Were the suburbs a safe harbor for non-conforming black families in the 1970s? Why are mono and cis racials unable to take pride in their non-black ancestors?

I am raising questions tonight. I don’t have answers. I do believe self-identity is the essence of human dignity. No one has a duty to be an avatar for a race. No one can control our identity. We owe the greatest duty to who we are on the inside.

Good evening!