I was filling out some paperwork recently that asked my race. With a smile for Grandma Betty, I happily checked every box, pausing for just a second before “Asian”, and then checked it anyway. American Indians came from Asia. There! I am officially everything.

Because of having darkish coloring with lightish features, I am asked “What are you?” more often, I’m sure,  than the average person. I always assumed that finding my biological father would make that question easier to answer, but in fact the opposite has happened. It turns out that my father too has always had trouble answering that question. 

It would make things a lot simpler if I could sum up my ethnicity in a single word. Sure, “Creole” sounds simple enough, but that doesn’t cover my mom’s side. My mother has blond hair and blue eyes, which she got from her father. My grandfather’s European roots were lost long ago in the complicated tangle of American history, but he managed to retain the information that he is 1/16th Choctaw Indian, which is enough for official membership in the tribe. Then there is my mother’s maternal history which has been traced to the Mahican Indians, but there was reportedly a Scotsman in there somewhere and a lot of Italian middle names no one can account for.

To try to identify some common history in this confusing conglomeration of ancestors,  I bought a book on genetics, Mapping Human History, but I quickly lost interest after a few outrageous assertions such as the following: “In any society, attractive individuals are unlikely to lack for suitors and therefore are more likely to have offspring.” What! Is this guy actually saying that pretty people have more kids? What planet is he on?! How could I possibly take anything else he said seriously after that? 

So then I picked up a book at the library called One Drop of Blood- the American Misadventure in Race. From my new, more believable book I learned that Americans, from the very beginning of U.S. history, divided their subjects into three tidy categories: white, Indian, and black. But then everybody messed the whole system up by interbreeding, which is how I wound up being the daughter of a “white Indian” and a “black Indian”.

That’s the polite version. In reality, the history of race in America is difficult to stomach. I was already familiar with the history of the Indian enslavement and holocaust, the white man’s wholesale slaughter of the land’s aboriginals. Let me tell you, I wasn’t too fond of Paleface after reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. But one of the shocking things I have now discovered is that my ancestors, the Choctaw and the Seminoles, were slaveowners. That’s right, not only were some American Indians enslaving the Europeans in the days before Independence, but when the Africans started arriving, the Indians jumped right on that bandwagon and became the proud owners of thousands of black slaves! This was up to and during the time that the Cherokee marched to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, and after they got established there, black slave labor became so valuable that stealing black people, whether free or slaves and especially children, became rampant in Oklahoma. So much for my pride in the Noble Savage! 

The history of every nation in regards to race is equally disgusting. Not even the black man is innocent, since we all know that Africans sold Africans into slavery. The white man, too, has been a victim of slavery in times past. (The word “slave” comes from “Slav” as in “Slavic”. My maiden name happens to be Czechoslovakian.) In ancient times, Mediterranean people felt both blacks and whites made appropriate slaves because they were either half-baked or overdone while they themselves had been toasted to perfection. And the tales of oppression go on and on and on. Black, brown, yellow, white, and red; they were all victims, all perpetrators. No one is innocent.

I have a newfound sense of being the descendant of a bunch of no-good, racist, murdering thieves and rapists. Seriously, I am now embarrassed to be a human being. How in the world could I take pride in anything having to do with race, knowing that race is a man-made idea invented with the aim of dominating other men? I am disowning the whole institution of race and declaring my independence. I will no longer check any box. I will find some other way of establishing my worth as a human being.