Convoluted idea of race
Threatt emphasizes how difficult it is to explain racism to his daughters, who have had vastly different experiences with race in different parts of the country. He reflects on the convoluted definitions of race and the bizarre lengths white Americans have gone to in order to categorize members of different races. Threatt thinks the "Hispanic" designation is particularly silly.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Glennon Threatt, June 16, 2005. Interview U-0023. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- GLENNON THREATT:
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With my twenty year old, as she grew older I let her watch
"Roots." What I didn't want to do is to convey
bitterness because it's difficult to talk about things that have
happened to you without sounding bitter. In an hour and a half interview
you can get a better sense of me as a person because of all of the
things we have talked about, the good and the bad. When your child sees
something on television about the 1960s or they see the images of the
police dogs and stuff like that and she says, "Daddy didn't you
grow up in Birmingham, did anything like that ever happen to
you?" It's very difficult to talk to them about that in a
balanced manner. It's difficult for a child that grew up in Washington
D.C.-because my older daughter grew up in Washington D.C.,
it's difficult for her to come here and see the lack of opportunity and
the obvious racism and class related segregation that occurs here. My
daughter went to Florida A&M, and when she got down
there-Tallahassee is still very segregated; it's like
Birmingham, but it's the state capital of Florida. She's twenty now and
she's a graduate of college and she understands the balance and she's
gone to school there and gone to white private schools and black public
schools in her educational history. So she has a balanced understanding
of it and it's a lot easier to talk to her now. My five and a half year
old is tough sometimes. She's in a summer camp now where she is the only
black girl. Last week, she was in another summer camp where there were
two blacks there and one of the white girls there wouldn't let her play
a little game they were playing. They said, "We don't want to
play with you because you're brown." That's difficult to
explain to her, and I have to kind of do it because her mother is West
Indian. She didn't encounter those things growing
up. She grew up in Guyana and then she moved to Washington D.C. which
had the largest black middle class and the most prominent black middle
class of any city in the United States. That was where she grew up, so
she had a completely unrealistic view of the way black people interact
with whites in the United States by moving to DC. She comes from a
well-to-do family in Guyana, and Guyana half the people there are East
Indian or Portuguese, so they don't discriminate against blacks. They
have other people to discriminate against. For my younger daughter who
has always gone to predominantly white schools, it's just very, very
difficult to explain to her why kids that don't know her don't like her.
- KIMBERLY HILL:
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Does she have any sense of racial prejudice at all?
- GLENNON THREATT:
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I don't know that she sees it as race, she associates it with color. We
have people in my family that look like they are East Indian and we have
people that are darker than I am, particularly on her mother's side. So,
when a child says "you're brown," she doesn't think of
that as ethnicity, she thinks of it as discrimination because of skin
color. I don't know if I'm being clear about that, but there is a
difference. If an African American with a light complexion was there
with her she wouldn't expect them to be treated the way she was treated.
The thing that was weird about the South was that if you have one drop
of black blood you're black. People who have blue eyes and straight hair
are black, like in New Orleans. In New Orleans they had quadroons and
octoroons. When I talked to my twenty year old about that she said,
"They have what?" Yeah, you were mulatto which is half
white and half black, you were quadroon which was one black relative,
one white relative of your grandparents, you were
octoroon-it's just weird the things we came up with to deal
with that stuff.
- KIMBERLY HILL:
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One black grandparent is quadroon -
- GLENNON THREATT:
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Is that quadroon? Because you have four grandparents.
- KIMBERLY HILL:
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If I have one great grandparent who's black -
- GLENNON THREATT:
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Okay, then you are octoroon. That's weird that we came up with these
things. In Alabama, if you have one drop of black blood you are black.
- KIMBERLY HILL:
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Still?
- GLENNON THREATT:
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Still. Up until the last census people didn't have the opportunity to
put biracial, even the respondents of the census, even on their tax
returns. I've had people come in and talk to me complaining that their
kids went to school and they had to be either white or black. She's
like, my child has one white parent and one Hispanic parent or one black
parent and one Hispanic parent, why do they have to put down black?
That's like saying they don't have a white parent. I never thought of it
as a big deal because to me everybody here that wasn't white was black,
because we didn't have any Asians or Hispanics when I was growing up.
The first Asian person I met was when I was a junior in high school, it
was a Korean kid who came here and went to Indian Springs. His name was
Jun Kim, and he was the first Asian that I ever knew personally. I never
knew a Hispanic person until I went to Princeton. It was odd to me
because the first Hispanic I met was Puerto Rican, and he was as dark as
I am with nappy hair. He considered himself to be Hispanic, his name was
Sergio Sotamundo, and he looked just like me!
- KIMBERLY HILL:
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Yes, the census is still trying to figure out how to make that cultural
distinction and also make a race distinction.
- GLENNON THREATT:
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Hispanic is not an ethnicity, all it means is that you come from a
country that speaks Spanish.
- KIMBERLY HILL:
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It has a cultural-
- GLENNON THREATT:
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That's like calling me English, because we speak English here, it
doesn't make any sense. A guy that works here is a good friend of mine
and he's Puerto Rican, so I asked him what do you call people who are
from Guatemala, other than Guatemalan. It seems to me that a Guatemalan
doesn't have anything more in common with a person from Madrid than I do
with a white person from Fairfield. That just doesn't make any sense.
Why are they grouped together? Guatemalans and Hondurans tend to be
mestizo, they're more Mayan than they are related to white folks from
Madrid. Many of them don't even speak Spanish! That's the thing about
it, a lot of the people that are grouped into the Hispanic category
don't even speak Spanish.