. . . who may or may not be African-American. It never seemed like a pressing priority to enquire in our first few months of working together, but now that we've put out most of the urgent fires, I'm starting to get curious.

Of course, one musn't go up to another person and say, "I know we've been working together for over a year . . . but I never got around to asking you if you're Black. Whaddya think? Happen to know, offhand?"

I believe part of my interest in race stems from my own mixed heritage. Most of my family members laugh at me when I claim to be Osage Indian (to the tune of 1/164 or whatever it is), but if I didn't have that ancestry, my brother might look like he's related to me: as it is, we appear to be of completely different ethnicities. Teachers never believed me when I explained that the Good Student with the Dark Skin was my brother. Some of them had to be revived with smelling salts.

When we were teenagers, my father—ever the "travelling salesman" type—recommended that my brother change his last name to Garcia, and attempt to get a college scholarship based on that faux-ethnicity. At the time, I had a good laugh, but if The Older Sibling had listened to that outrageous advice, he might not have been rejected from Harvard.

Of course, Baldilocks once hypothesized that a lot of us ultra-pale Anglo-ish Americans who can trace our ancestry back to the Mayflower (yes, it's true: I could join the DAR, if I wanted) may have Africans in our lineage.

There is, after all, the matter of my lips, which are rather full for someone as pale as I. And: my brother's mysterious, hyper-hyper-curly, kinky hair. He got that, by the way, via our very racist (and very blonde) grandfather. Hm. The plot thickens.

With any luck, my employee and I are very distant cousins—and both of us are related to the great Frederick Douglass.

It's unlikely that I'll ever get around to asking. The fact is, I tend to see actual race as a fairly arbitrary thing. And for my money, very few people have been pure-blooded anything for at least 100 years: the Nazis were simply too late.

As was Professor Fractal, who proclaimed in the 1980s that "the races should all be mixed. And I want to do that personally."

I've been meaning to tell his wife about that, of course . . . it's so unlike him, really. But he did say it.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 01:45 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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