The Wrongness of Being Black

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

Over glasses of wine at a summery party, a bright, friendly woman asked about my memoir, White Wife/Blue Baby. She knew I’d married across the color line — the phrase “white wife” doesn’t leave much room for doubt. But she was unfamiliar with the phrase I’d used in the title’s other half.

I told her about my daughter’s heart disease, the technical term for which is Transposition of the Great Vessels. In such cases, blood goes to the lungs to pick up oxygen, then returns to the heart. But instead of being pumped out to the body, it makes a U-turn and heads back to the lungs. Fortunately, a little blood spills across and gets pumped out. Without intervention, these babies, whose lips are usually blueish, last only a week or so. Fortunately, our daughter’s life was saved, though only temporarily, when she was ten days old and had just hours to live.

Right now there is no known cause for congenital heart disease (though chances increase if moms smoke or drink during childbearing years, and decrease if they get enough folate acid). In Transposition, at about the sixth week of gestation, somehow the major arteries connect to the wrong sides of the heart. To me, it’s a miracle that the connection is made correctly almost all of the time, when the entire embryo is no bigger than a black bean and before a woman even knows she’s pregnant.

“Was it because he was black?” my new friend asked. She wanted to know if my ex and his dark skin had caused the heart disease. Or maybe she was asking if our being from different races had been the cause.

“No,” I said, maintaining my friendly tone, “If it had been a genetic issue, being very different would have worked in our favor.”

My new acquaintance nodded, her face now a bit blank.

(But how different were we? My ex has dark skin but not so dark that he couldn’t also be part Scots-Irish, common in the South, while I’m half Irish.)

What she wanted to know was if the wrongness of being Black, its taint, its danger, its failure, had ripped into my life and stolen my child.

What do you say to someone who unconsciously says something awful? She would not have said it if a Black person had been there, of course. So it wasn’t as if she had no idea.

Still, I should have had a better answer. I should have said that race doesn’t exist. That Black and white people are no more different than, say, Swedes and Italians. Ethnic differences are biologically real, but race is imaginary. It’s used to raise people up, as Churchill did during the Blitz, calling the Brits a superior race, or for hammering people down, as in the US, or, for that matter, all over the world.

I wrote my memoir as a tribute to my daughter, who left this earth when she was eight months old. I also wrote it to continue pondering American racism. To do that, I’ve got to get used to stuff coming at me, as I did in 1968 Chicago. Holding a conversation with my ex while walking down the street took practice: as darkening frowns and stiffening body posture streamed at us, we each used one eye to scan for fists tightening or for the bulge of a gun.

I’ve got to go back on alert, not something I’ve had to do since our other two daughters, both born healthy, grew up and left the house. On alert this time not in self-defense but to provide answers that prompt the asker’s self-questioning. I’ve got to be prepared to give my fellow white people something to chew on.