The Real America: The Tangled Roots of Race and Identity

By Teresa Wiltz

Growing up, Teresa Wiltz always knew that she was black. Her parents, the mixed-race descendants of both the enslaved and the enslavers—and a stray American Indian or two—made it abundantly clear: we’re black. Be proud. And she was proud. Problem was, everyone else was always questioning her about her racial bona fides. She grew up bumping against the either/or boxes, being mistaken for everything from Puerto Rican to Moroccan to Brazilian to Ethiopian to South Asian and getting terribly confused by it all. Looking like a generic ethnic means getting stopped by cops in Havana, Cuba, who see her hanging with other Americans and are convinced she is a jinetera, a local prostitute, up to no good. It means being hassled by the customs official in Islamabad, Pakistan, who assumes she’s Pakistani American, or having a West African cabbie insist, “Your mother is white and your father is black!” (Um, nope.) She used to hate it when people asked her, “What are you?” and “What are you mixed with?” or even, “Do you speak English?”—but now, she’s come to appreciate her family’s convoluted racial heritage. Because her family story, with its generations of mixing and miscegenating, is very much an American story. A story of the Real America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Release date: Mar 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940838236

Teresa Wiltz

Teresa Wiltz is an award-winning journalist who was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Atlanta and Staten Island, New York. She has lived in Guatemala and Mexico and has reported from Senegal, Guatemala, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Liberia, Afghanistan, and Europe. After graduating from Dartmouth College, she pursued a career in dance and performed with several modern dance companies. On retiring from dance, she received a master’s degree from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Over the course of her career, she has worked for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Root, and Essence. Her essays are featured in Souls of My Sisters, City: Chicago 2000 and in the literary journal Konch, edited by poet Ishmael Reed. Wiltz lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and their dog.

Book preview

The Real America

I. When it comes to race, nothing is ever as it seems.

I remember sitting in the front row of Passing Strange, the Tony Award–winning musical, toe tapping furiously, head bobbing. Crying. Onstage, guitars were grinding as an all-black cast of wild-haired, leather-clad talent leaped into the audience, completely obliterating the fourth wall. They sang about Camus and James Baldwin, Godard and Buddhism, obsessing over race and identity at the same time that they were annihilating any and all categories: The performers morphed from punk-rocking, rich black kids to free-loving, broke white Dutch bohemians.

America is flowing, slowly exiting my veins

I am giddy, cold, and glowing

And this song will break my chains.

The chains of I-I-I-I-I-IDENTITY!

I felt ridiculous, sitting there, crying, but I couldn’t help myself. I cried because in the guise of Stew Rodewald, the show’s round-bodied, bespectacled creator/performer, I saw myself: A bourgie, shape-shifting, rock-loving, world-traveling integration baby, someone who fit in neither here, nor there, but everywhere.

Ask Stew where his 2008 hit show came from, and he’ll tell you, Travel. It came from travel. Leaving home. Wanting to get out of that little box. Those little boxes that ascribe race into neatly constricting categories of either/or, rather than either and or.

Preach, Stew! I’ve never felt like I fit in anywhere, racially, culturally, emotionally. I am, as my cousin puts it, a Heinz 57, an amalgamation of generations of variant strains of DNA mixing and matching, an Ivy League preppie/bohemian/dancer/writer/journalist, the descendant of slaves and slave masters, of Native-born Indians and foreign-born interlopers. I am as quintessentially American as you can get.

Others don’t seem to get this. Just listen to the Glenn Becks and the Tea Partyers screaming, I want my country back! Or watch Peggy Noonan casually describing a white Senate candidate as someone who looks like a real American. Then there’s the Texas Board of Education, voting to whitewash school textbooks. It’s as though we’re living in two countries, parallel universes. Theirs is a fantasyland where white = American, where legitimate immigrants hail from northern Europe and slavery didn’t really exist except as something called the Atlantic Triangular Trade.

My country, on the other hand, is a messy affair, beautifully complicated and filled with black, brown,