“Oh you mean, them ‘yallow’ [sic] brothers who used to live up the street?” |
I was taken aback by her verbal slap and had a visceral reaction to it. I punctured the sudden pregnant pause in the room with an assertive, visibly annoyed and equally voluminous, “Yeah, that’s right.” I shot a glance at Gilbert’s brown-skinned daughter across the room, who was smiling an uncomfortable smile of embarrassment. I replied to her smile with a classic rolling of my eyes, which she appeared to enjoy and gestured to me that it was the appropriate response to the offensive remark. Though it was difficult, out of respect for my host, I succeeded in controlling my anger. But I was seething as I exited the room with the racial insult still stuck in my craw. Passing by the food table, I picked up a massive beef rib and moments later found myself absent-mindedly gnawing on it—sitting at a table under the canopy, chatting with my host, who was unaware that anything awkward had just occurred. After making customary small talk, I excused myself, wished Gilbert a happy birthday, and headed for the cultural comfort of my Brazilian friends, in whose multiracial culture of origin, or so they tell me, this incident would probably never have occurred—because most people in Brazil consider themselves mixed-race. As I crossed the street, still seeing only the ignorant woman’s face in my crosshairs, I muttered quietly to myself: “It never ends. It just never f— ends!”
This incident was just the most recent in a lifetime of similar disquieting experiences—actually, many lifetimes of such experiences—in the history of my family, always posing the same question: “Why? Why do they say these things to us?” This deeply personal and perennial question has in large part prompted my interest in the construction of ethnoracial identity within situational contexts. Why have so many of our African American neighbors routinely treated us with such disdain? This vexing question once inspired me to write the following poem entitled, Who Am I? during my early teenage years—circa 1963.
Samuel M. Lemon, “The construction of ethnoracial identity within situational contexts: A study of triracial family histories” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2007, ProQuest AAT 3270863): 3-4. http://search.proquest.com/docview/304838296.
Tags: Samuel Lemon, Samuel M. Lemon, Samuel Michael Lemon