In my Blog article of May 18th, 2018 titled, ‘Regaining Faith and Reigniting the Light’, I focused on how we can connect with others when their life experience differs dramatically from our own. I posed the view that connection can occur but it demands acknowledgment of the primacy of First Voices: an understanding that, ‘Them who feels it, Knows it’. In other words, we cannot walk in another person’s life-journey shoes, but we can be given privileged access to what that journey entails and the impact it has had on a person by being humble and attentive to the story told by the owner of the shoes. We cannot and should not seek to squeeze into someone else’s life-journey shoes and the ground they have trod and claimed them as our own. This is fraudulent, myopic and doomed to misinterpretation.
Netflix has just released a documentary film on one of the most recent incidents of such presumption, of a White person claiming to be Black and in her own interpretation of what she thought Blackness was, attempts to enact ‘it’. There are the inevitable accompaniments of having to create fictitiously, ever more complicated storylines of one’s past, one’s family background, in order to ‘justify’ one’s present existence ‘representing’ Black people, partly ‘legitimised’, ‘accredited’, by being Black, according to the storyline previously issued. The title of the Netflix documentary is The Rachel Divide (2018), a Dandelion films production.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=gyhOTvC1v-A%3Fwmode%3Dopaque%26enablejsapi%3D1
The result of the hubris was eventually being publicly forced to own up to the multiple falsehoods, the unravelling of years of layers of concealment of the invention. The devastating impact was painfully displayed in the oral contributions and the body language of the offspring of the imposter who loved her and in turn relied on her, and in the anger, resentment, caused by her deception of those others who had previously supported her- believing in the persona presented in spite of some preliminary misgivings. The documentary film was crushingly sad.
Something did not quite fit in this story. But the benefit of doubt was given and as a result when the falsehood was eventually owned, the disappointment in being lied to, the trust given because it was believed the person was fighting for causes so critical to Black people and the collective shame at not being insightful enough to identify this hoax, was incendiary. The deceit was unforgivable, execrable, and we as Black people shared in the complicity. We wanted to believe the imposter’s story. We were profoundly hurt that it was not factually correct but we acknowledge that the imposter still feels her story is basically true and our grief, anger, and sadness is deepened further.
As I state on my website, www.daviddivine.co, describing the core of my business, Footprints Life Coaching, storytelling is social in the sense that it takes place with others, part formed, encouraged, modified, held to be accurate by some in the listening audience, resonates at times with the lived experience of others, touching on themes felt to be held in common. Storytelling is a process of attempted engagement with others, a seeking of connection using what we feel are private intimate experiences but which on reflection have a wider authorship, being a part of something bigger than ourselves. Storytelling has been described as ‘an empowering act’ allowing experiencing oneself not as a creature of circumstances but as someone who has some claim, some creative say, over how those circumstances may be grasped, borne, and even forgiven…’ (Jackson 2013).
The social context of storytelling, the public court of opinion that adjudicates on the authenticity of your story, found the story told by Rachel lacking and the verdict was damning. Further attempts at social engagement by the storyteller, was denied by the audience even although a book was written subsequently and the non-judgemental documentary film produced by Netflix. The audience had vacated the court.
The reaction to the duplicity of Rachel is understandable when examined in the light of White and Black history in the diaspora. Rachel, a White woman, emerged from the deception with her life intact although her pride and reputation damaged. History shows us that if a Black person sought to ‘pass’ as White, and was discovered, the consequences would be fatal. Langston Hughes (1902-1967), a wonderful Black American writer contributed to bringing greater awareness to White America of the 1920’s and 1930’s, of the diversity of Black culture within its midst that it had largely separated itself from. His stories are seen as accurate snippets of daily Black life and the navigation of interaction with White people usually ending tragically but laced at times with humour. I wish to highlight two of his stories in, The Ways of White Folks (1933): Passing (p51-55) and Home (p33-49).
The story titled ‘Passing’ is in the form of a letter from a Black son to his Black mother. The son is a very light skinned man and can pass as White and whilst growing up realised and appreciated the privileges of being treated preferentially over darker skinned brethren including some of his own blood brothers and sisters. This privilege continued into his early adult life when he managed to secure excellent employment in administration during the ‘depression’ when the only opportunities for Blacks at any time-depression or not- were janitorial. He ‘sealed’ his status passing as White by entering into a relationship with a White woman who came from a ‘respectable’ financially secure family and they were planning to get married and purchase a house. Life was looking good for this young Black man but there was a price to be paid for this artifice.
The price which he and his mother agreed to pay was that in any public setting neither would acknowledge the other for fear of retribution from members of the White community. At that time the interaction ritual between Blacks and Whites was such that even a slight deviation from the enforced accepted pattern could result in the Black person being lynched. Remember the Black son is passing for White and his mother is Black. Both know the consequences of putting a foot wrong. In the company of his White girlfriend the son saw his mother on the same street he was walking on without acknowledging her. The letter was in part an apology after the incident, from the son to his mother for this lack of courtesy and a revision exercise in ‘Jim Crow,’ about how Blacks and Whites should relate to one another in a hierarchical racist society, but both knew this was a price worth paying. The son continued to brief his mother in his letter on his plans for the future, all centred on continuing his charade that he believed would work. The story does not disclose the ending. Was he ‘outed’? What happened to him when it was discovered that he had duped the ‘White Folks’? It is left unsaid because the reader would know the ending: sadness and death of the Black son.
The second story, ‘Home’, is not about deception, but about striving to be the best you can be as a Black person, and suffering the consequences in a racist society, which sees you as ‘An uppty nigger’. Striving for something that has been defined as White owned, and only Whites can aspire to and claim. To dare to even think you can gain that accolade and actually claim it, legitimately, ‘warrants’ instant retribution.
Roy had been away from home abroad for ‘seven or eight years’ and decided because of ill health and possible premonitions that his illness would probably kill him, to visit his mother and siblings ‘who still remained in the old home town’ where he had spent his formative years. He had worked very hard abroad and taken advantage of opportunities that came his way, to work with the best musicians in the world to assist him in gaining the excellence in his craft of playing the violin, he now is internationally regarded as having accomplished. He compared his life style as a top musician in demand with the squalor he saw all around him at the time of depression, hunger, selling yourself for enough to eat, all dreadfully depressing for Roy.
Roy’s mother is delighted he is home and notices he is dreadfully thin and coughing and seeks to provide sustenance to aid. He is invited to White exclusive enclaves to play that excites his mother. He dresses in a way that is perceived as ‘high class White’, and one day, knowing that he is taking a risk he decides to have a walk in town at night. I believe he knows that he is dying but wishes to do so with his humanity intact that he felt was granted to him in Europe where he had spent so many years. This regrettably was still not proffered in his home- town. On his walk he meets a White woman music teacher who had invited him on an earlier occasion to her school to play to her students and greeted her in a way that was not part of the accepted protocol for Black White interactions. He took off his gloves, bowed and shook her hand. He was immediately assaulted by a growing mob emerging from a movie house, and he was stripped, stamped upon, mutilated and lynched in the nearby woods. ‘He knew he would never get home to his mother now.’
Langston Hughes illustrates why the reaction to Rachel’s posturing was so vehement. She never grasped it. No insight. No humility.
Next week I will look, in a series of four parts, at decisions we make in our lives that transform our later life trajectories.