On a small and desolate western Virginia road, an unsuspecting driver will come upon a lonely and extremely aged bronze plaque. Commemorating a long forgotten and fairly unremarkable soldier who served in the Revolutionary War, fighting at Valley Forge under his commanding officer, General George Washington, the plaque is actually a tribute to the soldier’s effort to qualify for and receive his military pension long after the Revolution was fought and won. He walked on foot from these mountainous hinterlands of what was the far edge of Virginia (West Virginia had not yet become a state within the US) all the way to the capitol of DC, determined to not lose out on the pension he had justly earned. That soldier often got second looks in the American society of the day, largely because of a significantly darker skin than the mountain people of Virginia, though the rest of his facial features seemed decidedly European. For his part, he assuaged the suspicious looks and curious glances by explaining he was European Spanish, though in reality he was a member of a group that at the time was derogatorily and mysteriously referred to in the area as the “Black Dutch,” referencing a racial mixing of parents that involved Netherland traders deeply embedded with the West African slave trade partaking a bit too intimately with the human cargo. It must be said ‘mysteriously’ to describe the group not because of any odd behavior on its part but because of the ignorance of historians at the time who simply did not care or bother to investigate the tortured roots that produced this curious little by-product along the middle Eastern seaboard of America in the 18th and early 19th centuries. As such, little is still known about this fascinating community.
That soldier was called Gustavus “Dolphin” Crosston and he was my great great great great great grandfather directly by blood. I, of course, never knew of his existence or my own connection to this “Black Dutch” community (nor had I ever heard of that group despite having studied race and racial history throughout my life in America) until I found a need in my 30s to undergo genetic testing. Up until that spit tube, if someone had asked me my genetic background, all I could tell them was that my mother was traditionally ‘mongrelized’ across numerous Northern European mixtures as so many New England Protestants tended to be (mixing English, Irish, and Scottish on my mother’s maternal side with a dominant German streak on her paternal side), while my father, cryptically, would only say he was “100% Italian,” thus explaining why he always got so tan in the summer months and maintained a darker complexion than most even during the winter season. As I would come to learn from the genetic testing, I in fact had almost no Italian blood in me at all and, while admittedly not a mathematician, I was fairly certain that meant my father had lied to me my entire life about our family background on his side. The testing also told me I had a very curious background in my blood, one never mentioned and laid claim to by anyone in my family: a prominent 25% of Scandinavian blood mixed ever so slightly with a 1% ranking of genetic markers from Senegal, West Africa.
Obviously, this fascinated me not only because this odd mixture of Dutch and Senegalese, European and African, could be so easily traced to a sordid period of world history involving the American slave trade, but also because the testing put me in touch with living members of my ‘genetic family’ (99% certainty in fact) who were clearly African-American, with a Senegalese heritage, and from the state of Ohio, where my father’s family and many others had moved at the turn of the 20th century from what is now West Virginia, when the coal mines started to die out and the promise of new jobs and opportunity were being offered in the rubber tire manufacturing plants associated with the emerging automobile industry. Subsequent digging revealed the above portrait of Gustavus “Dolphin,” which nearly gave me a cardiac “eureka” moment when first putting eyes upon it: he was an eerie dead-ringer for my father as I remembered him in my youth.
While I am thrilled to have unearthed family I never knew about and rejoice in the new knowledge of a background and history I had been denied, I am still left with questions and queries about myself and my society that are incredibly difficult to answer as America seems to, once again, be going through yet another wave of racial violence and confusion. The chief query is quite simple: so, who am I really? In the vernacular of so much racial history and strife, am I privileged, passing, or persecuted? The only real answer seems to be, frustratingly, ‘it depends.’ And that, alas, doesn’t depend on me or what I want or how I identify personally. Rather, it depends on which America and when America is being discussed?
- 200 years ago, I would have certainly been oppressed, as the one-drop rule was in full bloom and violently dominant. My supposedly miniscule 1% of Senegalese blood would have been seen as just as black as 100% and I would have been treated just as any slave toiling torturously on the plantations of the Deep South. 200 years ago, how I looked would not have mattered as much as what my racial connection was perceived to be, no matter how small or minimal, so obsessed were Americans at the time in determining the so-called ‘purity of race.’200 years ago, I would have been only black and persecuted.
- 100 years ago, I would have been “passing,” as it is clear from my family tree tracings that nearly every generation since my 5x great grandfather married into purely European (re: white) families, thus diluting not only the prominence of my West African lineage but physically lightening the palette of our family ancestor skin tones.100 years ago, I would have been in an American society still just as tortured and torn by its racial history as a century before, even if America was now a full two generations removed from the Civil War. This was an America splitting itself at the seams with the hypocrisy of Jim Crow legislation, de facto reinstating a pre-Civil War ethos across most of the South and more subtly embedding racist mentality in too many throughout the North. In all honesty, I might not have been able to resist the temptation in my ancestors’ place: white America might have been eager to embrace me just by me keeping hidden the family history that traced back to Africa. By then, America would have seen nothing but a white person looking at me, despite my actual ancestors. Given how America was then, can I resolutely declare I would have been true to my family history or would I have simply chosen the easier and more advantageous route? 100 years ago, I would have been neither black nor white and passing.
- Today, I would be and am simply privileged. Today, my genetic legacy is basically ignored or is a cute and fascinating party trick to trot out at gatherings to surprise people with my “exoticness.” My family history is my own business and only something to share if I so choose and not something that can be leveraged against me in the professional sphere. Perhaps most interestingly, I am often told I am not “allowed” to claim my Senegalese ancestors today. But this is not pushed on me from racists, but rather from white liberals who claim to be fighting the anti-racist fight. In this America, with the sordid and odd stories from the Rachel Dolezals and others who attempt to pass as African-Americans by altering their physical appearance, or the countless multitudes that adopt the dress, style, music, and artistry of African-American culture without necessarily educating themselves to the continued trouble of American racism, it seems like we now have an unspoken reverse 1% rule: where a certain predominant percentage of African blood must be present and proven in order to lay claim to the racial mantel. Ironically, America has evolved to a point where there is an ambiguous but nonetheless high bar one must get over in order to be black. Thus, today, I am only white and privileged.
What a fascinating, but still tortured and twisted, evolution of concept across time and space. Race is often called the “special institution” of the United States. This is not because only America has racists or it alone has experienced systemic discrimination, but because it sometimes seems like only America goes through these violently intermittent convulsions about race, whether it is Jim Crow or the Civil Rights Movement or bussing or Rodney King or Black Lives Matter or I Can’t Breathe or whatever comes next (and truly, none of us think there won’t be a next; in America, when it comes to race, there is always a next and it is almost always negative). And while I never aspired to be a symbol of these tortured convulsions, it does seem like wrapped up in my personal history is a perfect microcosm of how America and its people try to deal with and evolve with the concepts of race, identity, and equality. My family, right or wrong, good or bad, has changed and morphed throughout history, even forgetting an entire part of itself, because of America’s problem with race. I was deprived a real and significant side of my personal history because of that legacy (with ease good old Dolphin is the most historically relevant ancestor I have found in my extensive family tree) and now, because America’s modernity is as inconsistent about race as its legacy is tortured, I literally have no idea whether I will be allowed to lay claim to my family, my ancestors, my history, my identity in full. As such, for now, I am not whole. And as long as that remains true, America – a multiracial society only getting more multi-everythinged – will also remain divided. It will never be whole, always identified by its constituent parts but never truly their sum. It will never be a society in full. Perhaps most of all, that is the damnable shame of this country’s special institution, its curious concept.
*Dr. Matthew Crosston is the first-ever Director of Academic Transformation at Bowie State University, the 4th-oldest HBCU (Historically Black College and University) in America, founded just after the Civil War. He is widely published and sought after on issues of war, intelligence studies, national security, education innovation, and change leadership. His work can be found at https://brown.academia.edu/DrMatthewCrosston.
