As we all know, the evil of slavery and the sting of the whip have given us many things including the voice of Nina Simone, the prose of James Baldwin, the Air Jordan sneaker, the blues, jazz, moonwalking, and more recently gangsta rap.
Most so-called 'black' people do not feel themselves at liberty to simply turn off or ignore their allotted racial designation, whether they would like to or not.
Of all the things I feel, I do not feel myself to be a victim - not in any collectively accessible way.
The name Albert Murray was never household familiar. Yet he was one of the truly original minds of 20th-century American letters.
Years ago, I worked briefly as a consultant for Sciences-Po, one of Paris's famed grandes ecoles, encouraging American high school students and their parents to pursue an English-language education abroad.
As a 'parisien d'adoption,' I am only semicognizant of where I may fit at any given time into the French social fabric.
I grew up in New Jersey, but my parents are from out west. They moved the family to New Jersey when my father, a sociologist by training, took a job in Newark running anti-poverty programs for the Episcopal Archdiocese.
What I know now is that I used to not just tolerate but submit to and even on some deep level need our society's web of problems called race, its received and dangerous habits of thinking about and organizing people along a binary of white and black, free and unfree, even once I suspected them to be irredeemably flawed.
Traveling through France in regular times, for better or worse, I am simply perceived as an American.
There can be no dragon slayer in the absence of dragons.
Like neurotics obsessed with amputating their own healthy limbs, middle-class blacks concerned with 'keeping it real' are engaging in gratuitously self-destructive and violently masochistic behavior.
At various points in my own life, I have been laughed at scathingly for calling myself black.
My family matters most to me, even though so much of our daily lives and commitments make it so difficult to be as present with those you love as you might wish.
Paris has long been a palimpsest of different cities, each new iteration grafted on top of the still visible last, spanning the extremes of human excellence and beauty and, just as crucially, filth and squalor.
The idea that a person can be both black and white - and at the same time neither - is novel in America.
Mixed-race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black - and interracial couples share a similar moral imperative to inculcate certain ideas of black heritage and racial identity in their mixed-race children, regardless of how they look.
We tend to paint the past only in extremes, as having been either categorically better than the present or irredeemably bad.
Whenever I ask myself what blackness means to me, I am struck by the parallels that exist between my predicament and that of many Western Jews, who struggle with questions of assimilation at a time when marrying outside the faith is common.
I'm descended from southern slaves, and I'm descended on my mother's side from northern European Protestant immigrants.
I've been socially deemed black in America, and this is a category that's been hurting my family for generations and that has also led to extraordinary cultural contributions that I'm very proud of, but it's not a real category and our society is damaged by insisting on it.
