When I Was White

by Sarah Valentine

  The theory of black racial identity formation (Cross) comprised five stages: pre-encounter, encounter, immersion, internalization, and commitment. During pre-encounter, the black individual has internalized a neutral or negative attitude toward blackness. They consider race as only a problem or stigma and are socialized to favor a Eurocentric perspective. During the encounter phase, the black individual experiences an event that forces them to confront how blackness and racism impact their lives. It forces the individual out of their comfort zone and leads to confusion, anxiety, and depression. In immersion, the black person chooses clothing, hairstyles, and politics that defy Eurocentric culture and has a dichotomous view of the world: everything is either black or white. In this stage, black people feel both rage and pride. Internalization leads a black person to establish relationships across racial lines with those who are respectful and acknowledge their self-definition. A person expresses the desire to form coalitions even as they maintain a strong love for and acceptance of African American communities. When they reach the stage of commitment, black individuals become self-determining, whether it means suspending political action for other pursuits or dedicating themselves to furthering the cause of blackness.

  The theory of biracial identity formation (Henriksen) identifies six stages: neutrality, acceptance, awareness, experimentation, transition, and recognition. When a person is neutral in relation to biracial identity, they do not acknowledge being different in any way. They block out whispers, stares, and other energy that suggests there is something different about them. They may feel uncomfortable but do not pursue the cause of these feelings. During the second stage, the biracial person accepts the identity society has given them. The person does not ask questions because what everyone else thinks must be correct. The individual may still have a sense that something is off but quickly dismisses those feelings and returns to daily life.

  When a biracial person becomes aware of being different, a flood of anxiety is unleashed; they feel a great need for self-examination. They feel lonely and abandoned, wondering in which ways they are like one group and in which ways they are like the other. If society has placed negative stereotypes upon each group, how do you identify with them? Dread and depression at this stage heighten as pressure mounts to make a decision. In the experimentation phase, biracial people decide to emulate or join the group in which they feel most comfortable. This can also lead to depression because they risk rejection by others who don’t think they belong. At this point, a biracial person can suffer from a dissociative physical and emotional state. During the transition period, a biracial person remains distant from both groups, creating a circle of chosen family and friends that do not share the racial characteristic of either side of their family tree. This could lead them to feel false or inauthentic. When a biracial person achieves the stage of recognition, they accept their identity as biracial but also accept both sides of their biological family tree. They no longer experience the internal conflict of feeling the need to choose between identities and become comfortable in their own skin.

  Reading through the stages of racial identity formation blew my mind. I saw how clearly my life experience from childhood followed the biracial identity model even though I didn’t realize it at the time; I saw how I’d struggled to let go of my anti-black prejudices and felt betrayed and angry with white people and myself for being the architects and beneficiaries of racism.

  Dr. Wade encouraged me to read up on biracial identity and to find a spiritual practice that would help center me and give me hope, which was something I lacked.

  She framed the story I’d been told about my biological father from the perspective of a young black man in a remote, white town, probably the first in his family to attend college. It was the first time I heard the story from his side. She suggested that dating an African American was an adventure for my small-town, conservatively raised mother. Then, when things went too far, she got scared, realized she didn’t want a life of shame and ridicule for being with a black man, and married my father, who was the safer choice.

  All this sounded plausible and implied that my mother knew or suspected that she wasn’t pregnant with my father’s child but told him that she was.

  Dr. Wade assured me that even if it were true that my parents conspired in a lie and my mother wasn’t being truthful about her past, I needed to focus on my own growth and development. Trying to unravel that messy web would eat up all my energy and lead to a psychological collapse. She gave me a small, leather-bound book called The Impersonal Life.

  “Focus inward and listen to the small voice inside yourself,” she said. “It will tell you the truth.”

  Thirty-one

  I tried to follow Dr. Wade’s advice, but I was still too fixated on my doubts and suspicions. Inside, I was a ball of confusion, anger, and doubt. My mother and I were locked in opposite perspectives; every time we talked on the phone and I pressed the issue of my father with her, she insisted that it didn’t matter and that I was throwing a tantrum like a child because she refused to give me what I wanted. I felt that she had betrayed me by withholding the truth for so long and now I could not trust anything she said. We were hurt by the other’s actions and couldn’t move past it.

  “You can choose how things affect you,” she’d say. “Don’t label yourself or let others define you.” She didn’t seem to realize that for most of my life, she’d both labeled and defined me. The subtext of her remarks was that I should not let being African American, which to her was nothing more than a set of stigmas, define who I was.

  Michael was the only model I had for someone who had integrated his biracial and multicultural identity. He was comfortable with his English and Igbo heritage, even though his mixed features often led other Igbos to misidentify him. He was comfortable in Nigerian, British, and American society. He spoke English, Igbo, and some Yoruba. Wherever he traveled to his literary readings and festivals, be it in Thailand, South Africa, or Italy, he could always connect with the locals. He was someone who owned his multifaceted identity in a way I could only imagine.

  In the spring of 2008, Michael and I traveled to Turtle Beach, Jamaica, for the Calabash International Literary Festival, where he had been invited to perform. We stayed in a stucco cottage on the beach, windows open to the sea air. He’d arranged for me to have a massage at the hotel’s open-air spa, and as I walked back, the afternoon sun turning to dusk, I heard the sounds of his saxophone coming from the roof deck. As I walked up the stairs, I saw they were strewn with rose petals and candles. When I reached the top, he finished his serenade, then got down on one knee. He presented a diamond ring and asked me to marry him. I knelt down in front of him, threw my arms around him, and said yes.

  I felt like I was beginning a new life with someone who understood all of me, not just the parts that were acceptable or easy. He recognized my complexities because he embodied them, too; as a writer who was of mixed race, he understood the ambiguities of identity and the difficulty others had in placing him—a black man in academia who knew his white colleagues were suspicious of or hostile toward his presence among their ranks. Michael knew what it was like to have a mother who, despite loving her mixed children, still harbored the deep-seated racism of her upbringing. He made it through his experiences of trauma to become a loving, graceful, creative person. He could hold all of me and I him.

  I called my parents from the hotel’s patio café to tell them the news. My father was happy for me. My fiancé had called him in advance and asked him for his permission, without my knowing. I appreciated the gesture of respect, and I knew my father did.

  He put my mother on the phone, and her tone was much different. Her voice was full of worry. She liked Michael, she insisted, but she wanted me to be sure marriage was what I wanted.

  I just wanted her to be happy for me. Michael and I had dated for three years, and my parents had met him in Princeton and when we came home to Wexford together for holidays. Michael was sure they both l
iked him but remarked that, as with most white Americans he’d met, they didn’t quite know how to place him, and because of that, they were slightly uncomfortable. My mother asked him a lot of personal questions, and he was happy to answer. But she worried that I considered him a mentor, someone whose advice I took over hers. This was true. He was older and wiser than me, and I respected his experience. I had not taken my mother’s advice about anything for a long time, and she felt like my fiancé was her replacement. I was sure Freud would have a lot to say about that.

  Michael and I had moved in together in the fall, and when we returned to LA, we painted the apartment in Caribbean shades of blue and green. I began hunting down addresses of family members to invite them to the wedding that we planned for the following summer.

  Among those most difficult to locate was my godfather, Jimmy. He grew up in the same small town as my mother and went to college with my father at West Virginia University. Jimmy had many friends at the college my mother attended, and he brought my dad along on one of his trips, which is how my parents met. Jimmy was practically a part of the family when I was growing up. He and my aunt Liane, my mother’s older sister, were my godparents.

  While not a blood relative, he was a constant fixture in my childhood and one of my biggest supporters when I played basketball in high school. But he never seemed to have a steady job. He had driven a taxi in New York, worked as a caddy for the golf course my dad played at, and sometimes painted houses. He lived with us for a while when I was little. He was a man of contradictions. We never knew what he was doing or where he was going next. As I got older, he became more and more distant from our family, until we finally lost touch.

  After playing phone tag and having emails bounce back from his full in-box, I resorted to snail mail, writing Jimmy a letter to let him know I was getting married in California and wanted him to be there.

  I took the opportunity to tell him about the secret that my parents revealed about my paternity. Since he knew my parents better than anyone back then, I asked him for information about who my father might be. I was moving forward with my life, maybe even starting a family, and I didn’t want to do that while I was missing such an important piece of my own history.

  A few weeks later, I received a reply written in a blocky, uneven hand.

  Jimmy congratulated me on my upcoming wedding and ended his letter with the line:

  If you really want to dig up the past I can tell you.

  Finally, I thought, someone was willing to tell me the truth about what happened. If that were the case, though, why end the letter with just a teaser? Was he giving me a chance to back out, to be absolutely sure I wanted to venture down that path?

  I wrote him an enthusiastic letter back saying, yes, I absolutely wanted—needed—to know what happened back then.

  He left me a phone message saying he was happy to hear from me and would be at my wedding, “even if it were in Japan.” But he didn’t mention the events about which he promised to tell me. I wondered if he had talked to my parents and been dissuaded from pursuing the matter.

  His evasiveness led me to formulate wild plots. Maybe he and my parents were involved in a crime—a murder? Why did he say dig up the past? Why use those words? Was there something they were all complicit in and wanted to keep quiet?

  I told Michael about these suspicions, and he quelled them.

  “If that were the case, they wouldn’t have told you at all; they would have kept lying.”

  For the moment, I abandoned my conjectures and dove into wedding planning full force.

  My girlfriends from the postdoctoral program went dress shopping with me at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. We had a champagne brunch in the rooftop café overlooking the bustle of Wilshire. I felt I were living the kind of life I had only ever dreamed about. I was engaged to the love of my life in a fantastic city on the brink of a successful career and a whole new sense of self. It felt like a second chance.

  Thirty-two

  On June 20, 2009, Michael and I married in a nondenominational ceremony on the rooftop of the Canary Hotel in Santa Barbara, California.

  Thanks to bridal boot camp, I looked tanned and toned in my gauzy Vera Wang gown. Tara, Courtney, and Amy—to whom I grew closer as I lost touch with Abby—were my bridesmaids and attended to me as if I were a queen. Tara, my maid of honor, agreed to intervene with my mother if she decided to make trouble during the wedding.

  My gown was strapless, the bodice covered in delicate layers of chiffon with an empire waist that blossomed into billowing skirts of chiffon and silk, perfect for a beachside wedding. My hair and veil were short, and I wore vintage-inspired accessories. The ring my fiancé had picked out for me was a square-cut canary diamond framed by slim white baguettes. He’d made sure to buy it from a retailer that sourced diamonds ethically. As a West African, he knew the savageries of the industry went beyond what Hollywood portrayed in Blood Diamond.

  We saw the movie at the Grove, and on the way back to the car, I faltered in disbelief.

  “Yes,” Michael said, “it is really like that, only much worse and with no fairy-tale ending.”

  My bridesmaids wore short pearl-gray silk dresses in the same empire cut as my gown, and the color accented their pale skin and dark blond hair perfectly. Next to my warm-toned darker skin, black hair, and ivory gown, they looked like the perfect ladies-in-waiting.

  The theme was tropical. My bouquet overflowed with fuchsia orchids. The aisle was strewn with bright pink and orange petals. The tables were adorned with white candles and tropical flowers. My mother seemed happy, even excited. She got her hair done with the bridesmaids and me. The photographer snapped some touching photos of her affixing a bracelet to my wrist while she smiled wistfully.

  A British friend of Michael’s—a peer, no less—officiated our ceremony. It was the eve of the summer solstice, and the town transformed into a festival ground. Colored streamers sailed through the streets while figures on stilts wearing tall papier-mâché masks danced in the parade.

  My father walked me down the aisle. He was emotional; I don’t know if he ever thought the day would come. Maybe no father does. I know that the moment, for him, was bittersweet.

  A classical violinist friend of Michael’s accompanied my walk down the aisle with a piece he had written specially for the ceremony.

  Kate, Michael’s younger sister, was his best man, and two writer friends, one white, one African American, were his groomsmen.

  I beamed as I stepped out from behind the trellis heavy with bougainvillea and caught my soon-to-be-husband’s gaze. He hadn’t seen me in the dress, and his eyes were bemused and misty. The collective “Aah” that every bride wants to hear rose from the audience.

  Michael and I wanted to incorporate Igbo tradition into the ceremony. Both of Michael’s parents had passed away, and the only family members who attended the wedding were two of his three brothers, Albert and James, and Kate.

  Before we said our vows, Michael’s older brother, Albert, stepped forward to present to my father a bottle of scotch to symbolize goodwill between our families. Then he turned to me and asked, “Where is your husband?”

  I had to symbolically look around the crowd for my husband, though he was standing beside me. When I pointed to him as if I were surprised, it broke the tension, and the guests laughed.

  At the reception, we had Caribbean food and a Nigerian DJ. Our first dance was to Buena Vista Social Club’s “Chan Chan.”

  Albert and James led the room in an Igbo kola nut ceremony and a call-and-response ritual to get the guests excited to kick off the reception. One of our professor friends from Riverside, who was African American, leaned over to his tablemate and said, “Now that is culture.”

  The lights darkened, and we showed a slideshow of Michael and me, who grew up in different decades in different parts of the world, in side-by-side photos starting with each of us as infants, then children, teens, and eventually adults. Michael’s close friend
s Ron and Beth, who were like surrogate parents to him, stood in for him as guardians at the ceremony. They sat with my paternal grandparents at one of the tables nearest the slideshow.

  “How wonderful that these two biracial people from different continents found each other,” Beth said.

  My grandfather “corrected” her, “No, Sarah isn’t biracial. We have Cossacks in our family.”

  In the days after the wedding, Beth relayed this to my husband.

  “It was so absurd, Beth didn’t know what to say!” Michael told me.

  We both had a good laugh. This was a justification even I hadn’t heard before. Maybe my dad’s father had been telling people all along that his granddaughter was the product of Cossack blood. It certainly added insight to my interest in Russia, and perhaps because of that, my grandfather reverse-engineered the connection. Cossacks had a reputation for being swarthy, wild folk, with large mustaches and tall hats that gave them a Eurasian look, but they were actually ethnic Russians. I’ve been asked before if I were Russian, since it’s usually the only connection people can fathom for why I studied Russian literature.