BLK IDs Podcast Ep. 01
Transcript
An interview with my mother, Charlette Harrington
Katharen Wiese: My name is Katharen Wiese, and this is the BLK IDs Podcast.
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Kat: I’m excited to start this podcast as a way of exploring who we are, why we are, how we are. There’s a lot of ways that the African diaspora identifies. I know multiracial people who identify as Black. I know multiracial people who identify as white. I know Black Americans who identify as only African American. I know some folks who identify as Negro. I know so many many different people who are part of the African diaspora, but would call themselves by so many different names. So this podcast is sort of a celebration of that diverse expression. And it’s a way of understanding those stories that lead people to identify one way or another.
Kat: I was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, where I’m currently living. Most of the people I’ll be talking to on the podcast will be from Nebraska or have some intersection with the state or the broader Midswest. Just over four percent of people in my city in Lincoln are African American or Black. So the topic of culture and race, particularly in white communities, I think has broader implications about isolations and PWIs. So that might be something that will become a theme just inherently by virtue of the demographic. I know it’s something that comes up in this episode. If you don’t know what PWI is, it just means a predominantly white institution.
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Kat: If you know me, you know I'm a visual artist. As part of this podcast, or really as part of this project, I made the podcast because I was really interested in not only making portraits of people who are part of the African diaspora, but looking at their stories. I think so often when we’re looking at visual art featuring people of color or African American people in particular, you might notice the way that the figure is sort of politicized or sort of tokenized, or treated as more of a symbol than an individual. I’m really interested in the specific individuality of the people that I am portraying. I spent a lot of time making images of the Black body and of Black figures where they’re sort of symbolic or the individual is less important than the message that’s trying to be communicated. But the more I thought about that, the more sort of dehumanizing that felt. And so, I’m doing these interviews before I even make a painting or a drawing to sort of give space for the person behind the art. For the person behind the painting to really be a collaborator and not just an object in the image. Which of course, thinking about the relationship between the African diaspora and slavery, to objectify the Black body is just… Can we just stop that shit? Can we just make a new history? So yeah, I made this podcast in anticipation of a show I’m having in 2021 at Kiechel Fine Art. I’m super excited. It’s my first solo show and it’s one of the biggest opportunities that I’ve had in my artistic career and so I really wanted to honor this opportunity and make the best of it.
Kat: So thank you for joining me, and I’m looking forward to having some hard and beautiful conversations. And I think the whole point of this is not to argue with why people identify the way they do, or to try to dictate their identification, but rather to get a deeper understanding of where those things come from. Because the stories are so much more important than the results.
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Kat: Naturally, the first person I interviewed for this podcast was my mother. Generationally, there are gaps in how Black Americans talk about themselves. So for instance, in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, there was a lot of people that were calling themselves Negros. Today, no one would ever do that. There’s like very few people that do that. So we actually spent a lot of time just trying to find common language. So you’ll find in this podcast in particular I have a lot of questions that are very carefully crafted. Part of why I wanted to interview my mom as a portrait for this art show I’m having is because when i think about who I am and the way I identify in the world, it’s sort of inseparable from my family, of course. I think culture is made by groups of people, it’s not made in isolation.
Kat: So yeah, I’m going to kind of walk through the podcast in order of the show a little bit. I’m going to try to do that, we’ll see… we’ll see what happens. So, we’re starting with my mom. But we have interviews with people from all over the state, and I have some in the backlog with people who I’m not related to. I did that. So yeah, I’m excited to share more broadly, and share some people who I’m sure you’re familiar with if you live in the Lincoln community.
[music comes up]
Kat: This is my mom, Charlette Harrington, talking about her life and who she is.
Kat: There are four pervasive stereotypes of Black women. There’s the Mammy, the Sapphire, otherwise known as the angry Black girl, the Jezebel––the sexy one, and the Matriarch. And so I’m just curious for you, how did the presence and persistence of stereotypes about Black women shape the way you thought about yourself growing up? And as a sort of follow up question, did you find yourself actively trying to identify in contrast to any specific stereotypes about Black women or Black people?
Charlette Harrington: You know, I think it takes a bit, especially when you’re growing up, to realize that there’s even stereotypes. To realize when a stereotype is being assigned to you, or recognizing when those filters and where those filters are being applied. I think I wasn’t cognitive of it up until I was probably in my tweens and early teens. Because at that point in time I was having more interactions, and I would have strange interactions that would leave me wondering, “Why did that stranger just come up to me and ask me to come clean their house?” You know? I wondered at things like that. I wondered as I got older and I would walk down the street, or interact with men I had never met who wanted to fondle me, or thought that I was somehow willing and knew my place was to interact with them sexually. And I was like who and where did this expectation come from? And as I got older of course, and had a family and started transitioning out of that “jezebel” kind of dynamic. People would call me “mama” and that term of the whole “mami” dynamic, people would hint at it because of how I wore my hair or how I dressed. It wasn’t to their expectation, be it a Black expectation of success and straight hair, or the white expectation of “look like us and have straight hair.” You know, that dynamic. And with being a mother of a rather large family, you know that whole matriarchal role can step in, being big mama. And I thought about that. I tried playing around with it, but it really doesn’t fit me because I tend to be a nonconformist. So with all of those, I encountered them and then promptly decided who I wanted to be, and how I wanted to be perceived. And it wasn’t like those stereotypes.
Kat: I think most of us don’t think of those stereotypes actively until we’re older, so I’m glad you said that. And so, it sometimes takes stepping away from it to be able to see in retrospect, like oh, that’s why I was being treated like that. And then I thought it was really interesting that you even played with, “does this role fit me?” Is this something I can play with comfortably? And I think that’s very true. We don’t always exist in opposition to these stereotypes. Sometimes there’s something about them that’s attractive or that could benefit us. So it’s like, well, maybe I want to be that person today, or maybe I want to play that role because it would do this for me. And it’s not always exploitive, but yeah, sometimes we play into those assumptions people have about us.
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Kat: The other day you had mentioned to me the way you had felt that you’d internalized… You talked about how you internalized the privilege of white people in a way. Because you had felt like you had been trying to make yourself attractive to white men. And fun fact about our whole family: I’m married to a white guy. And my mom married a white guy. And my mom’s entire side of the family married white people. [laughs] And I don’t know why this is. I think we are in the state of Nebraska, so you can read into it if you want to. But there’s also the reality of the geography that kind of limits your options. But it’s like, what does that mean in some way, or do you feel that has further meaning? So the question I have is when you were growing up, did the familial narratives around other Black Americans encourage you to identify with them or in opposition to them? And how do those narratives impact you today?
Charlette: My grandma married the whitest Black man on the planet. [laughs] With green eyes, red hair and skin that would burn in the sun. And he was like a piece of paper, but he was Black. [inaudible?] So we grew up seeing a variety of color. You know? So there was my mom, who is extremely light skinned, married to my dad, who I would describe as like a chocolate brown. That’s the color, like a medium to dark chocolate brown. So it’s just what we saw. And during the 60s, where we lived, my dad had broke into working and making an income that was close to and above $100,000, which for a Black man at that time was a huge thing. So Charlie was working at the University of Nebraska, then he worked at a smaller college, and then he became a consultant for Exon corporation. So it was a huge thing. And the people we spun in circles with, you know when he had dinner parties, or when we went to dinner parties it was at somebody’s mansion. And so the expectations for who we were, who we were becoming, and the level of education that we received at catholic schools, it put us into a different educational class. It put us into a different economic class. I went to white schools, and I was not in the Black community going to the Black schools. Lincoln was really a small town, not a lot of people at all. So that tight culture that grew in T town, I only heard of it, but hadn’t experienced it until junior high when for the first time they desegregated the school system in Lincoln.
Kat: Yeah.
Charlette: And all of a sudden, I met all these Black people that I’d never interacted with, other than maybe to see them on occasion on Sundays. You know, but I didn’t know them. And so that gave me an introduction to Black culture in a whole different way. Those are two distinct cultures. My culture was a combination of both. It was primarily Southern. And so when my sister, my brother and myself, and my mother, went looking for spouses, we went looking for spouses that correlated with what we’d been adapted to. You know, that higher level of education, people who had financial support. We didn’t see that in the T town community. It wasn’t the same. So I think that that is the biggest influence in marrying into white culture. Because one, it was what my parents were striving for. To fit in, to have the same privileges, the education and a good job. So that’s what we were trained to look for.
Charlette: Towards college age, then I started running into Blacks from other parts of the country. And I ran into more Blacks from Omaha. And so then there was more diverse thought, more diverse experience, more diverse education levels. And not everybody was in this escape mode, or just totally focused on sports. There was more conversations about intellectual things and the things that my sister talked to me about, which were politics, you know, and understanding culture and art. So there was more variety, hence my interactions with Blacks increased. I met your dad by then. But I started realizing there’s a broader spectrum of people to interact with. Did I answer your question?
Kat: Dang, that’s really relatable. Yeah. That was a great response, that was so insightful. Because it speaks so much to… I just went to a talk by NeighborWorks Lincoln about redlining in Lincoln and how it affected that area around the Malone Center. And the way there’s a lot of Black people around that area and the Malone Center has served that community for a minute, like generations to generations. So you’re articulating a history that’s really well known I think within the Black community in Lincoln. You also articulated very well like being a multiracial Black woman. And also a multicultural Black woman coming in the second wave of the Great Migration, and the sort of culture shock of coming here. Or maybe not culture shock, but being a middle class Black person coming into Lincoln where there’s not an established middle class or upper class Black community. It’s like, you’re pretty much just there alone. And so it’s pretty isolating. And I grew up, of course, the very first few schools I went to were predominantly white. The elementary school I went to, Fredstrom, there were like over 1,000 kids. I was probably one of five kids of color at the school. And so I was really shaped by my experiences in white culture. And then when I went to middle school, I met all these new people and I found people that look like me. And it was really good for me to meet other people. And then finally in college, even though I had Black friends and some of my best friends growing up were Black, it wasn’t until I went to college and really found people, like groups of people that I identified with that were African American, that I realized like I’m really part of that larger network of Black folks. And I hadn’t identified with it until I had found my tribe, or found other artsy Black girls. And I was like, we out here, we being artsy, we doing it. [laughs] It takes time to find your people and also figure it out, so thank you, that was good.
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Kat: [18:24] What cultural or ethnic groups and/or geographically based groups do you identify with and why? And you may have already answered this because I know you had said in your last response that coming here you felt like you were really shaped by being Southern ‘cause your whole family was Southern. And your sister, who you spent a lot of time with, has written entire books about being from the South and growing up in the South. So yeah, what cultural, ethnic and/or geographically based groups do you identify with and why?
Charlette: You know, that’s a great question, and I think the whole diaspora dynamic…
Kat: Imma pause you because I love you and I want you to say that word correctly. My mom’s been saying “disporia” for years… even though I correct her. [laughs]
Charlette: Diaspora, diaspora. [laughs] I did it again, I did it again.
Kat: It sounds like a disease, “disporia.” Okay, there we go.
Charlette: [laughs] Diaspora, diaspora. Oh my gosh. So, the diaspora aspect of our family coming from the South to Nebraska. And having one cousin living in Omaha and then the other uncle lived in Kansas City. So we were really isolated. And when we came, we were farmers, you know? And I carry this passion for Southern food, Southern hospitality, and plants and gardening and nature. I’m almost… and I think this is because of my sister growing up and being a teenager during the late 60s, early 70s, and her influence on me, I became a bit of this hippie. So I’m a hippie, with conservative values and a love for God. But then I’ve got this side of me that very much loves this Afropunk scene. I don’t love all their music, some of that could be improved. But some of it is just mind blowingly fun and creative. And I love the creativity of how people design themselves, how they present themselves. Because it reminds me––I don’t think it’s the Massai tribe, but it’s a tribe that’s very close locale wise to where the Massai are. The people there dress like nature. They decorate themselves with paints and flowers and pods and grasses, all sorts of things in their hair, on their skin. You know, just all over. And they look like nature. And that’s how I see the Afropunk community. I know the roots of it are different from that. But they still remind me of that dynamic. And I love that, I love that. So I’ve got that side to me. So I relate to people who are believers, who have a love for the Creator. I relate to people who don’t like boxes, are noncomortists, but nonconformists with a love of people, not a rejection of people. Yeah, that’s how I would describe myself.
Kat: Yeah, I really related to what you said about grandma and gardening and I was just thinking about that, and I had never thought of that like “gardener” as an identity before just now really, or something that has formed the whole family because of grandma being, you know, growing up as a farmer. In her little two plots or whatever, or she owns two properties that are right next to each other. So one property she grows a bunch of roses, and on the other she has kale and peppers. And every summer I go there and help her garden, and it’s become something that is so precious to me when I think about the time I’ve spent with grandma. And also how I grew up even, like you would pay me a penny for every dandelion I picked from the front yard.
Charlette: Five dollars, no no no, five cents. I would pay you five cents.
Kat: Yeah, yeah.
Charlette: Then you picked 15,000. I’m sorry, you picked 1,500. You picked 1,500, so I had to cut it down to pennies because I couldn’t afford you. [laughs]
Kat: Yeah, we spent a lot of time outside and I think that time we spent outside is really formative. So I liked that you identified with that or thought of that as an identity. Because I think a lot of people identify with activities as much as they identify with groups of people.
Kat: Okay, so this next question. The word Black means many different things to different people. In American, among the younger generation, Black is often used to describe a very broad group of people. This is how I personally use it. So thinking about African Americans, Africans, the broader African diaspora, Afrocarribeans, etc. In our previous conversations, you mentioned your understanding of the history of that word in your life. But I believe there’s a distinction between Black as the umbrella term that we kind of mentioned, and then also Black culture and Black American culture more specifically. Which I’m going to use just to describe the unique experiences of enslaved Africans taken from their homes and brought to the US more than 400 years ago, who from this experience build unique manners of speaking, languages, dances, art, etc. So what’s your relationship to Black American culture, and how has that evolved over time?
Charlette: I think my first exposure would have come in going to Black churches and interacting with the community. That was my first interaction. So the exposure to music, food. The mothers, the mothers of the church who not only taught me about God, but they taught me about, “girl, you don’t wear your skirt that high.” [laughs] You know? “Girl, don’t be talking to her. You say, yes ma’am and no ma’am. And you say auntie when you speak to this person. Or you say sister or mother.” You know? They taught about respect. And then I developed friendships with girls from church in junior high and high school. Carol Anne was probably my favorite. Her whole family, there was like eight of them. Her dad was a pastor. And her sister [was] a prominent teacher. Anyway, Carol Anne taught me what it meant to be a Black woman who had respect for herself. Because there were lots of Black girls in school who were trying to be pretty and trying to catch attention. But Carol Anne just had a sense of herself, a sense of her self worth. And she was one of the first people who showed me that Black is not only beautiful, but it’s classy. And it’s okay to let your beauty be on display, and be on display in such a way that it really expresses who you are. And you take that respect with you wherever you went.
Charlette: In the community that I grew up in, when I went to junior high school and the segregation had stopped, I encountered some Black people, you know I think their parents just didn’t have time for them. Their nose would be snotty, their hair would be dirty, their clothes would be dirty. They would smell. There’s a lot of people like that, a lot of people. So it created a stereotype about Black people. It carried that. What I saw on tv, what I was hearing, when I saw people who were impoverished, that’s really what it is. Or afflicted by addiction and didn’t have the care that they needed, it carried that stereotype. And it made me feel like I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to be like that, I don’t want to be seen like that. And so my encounter with Black culture was kind of split. It was at first not understanding why those stereotypes existed and why they were showing Black people always in this light. And then there were these families, like Carol Anne’s, the McWilliams, who were well educated, who were clean, who were loving, who were funny. And they gave me a different sense about not just who we were as a people, but who I was and who I could present myself as. That I didn’t have to live under any stereotype, be it from a Black standpoint, or a white standpoint. I could be who I was and I could define that for myself. And that my skin color, my skin tone was an accent to my inner beauty. And I think that’s what Carol Anne and her family taught me. It gave me this wonderful freedom to be Black. I didn’t have to be militant, I didn’t have to be a stereotype. I didn’t have to be anything but me and my internal beauty.
Kat: Mmm. That’s a gift.
Charlette: I hope you edit all this stuff a lot. [laughs] I’m just talking.
Kat: That’s a gift. No, you’re good. I think your responses are so thoughtful and that is really beautiful. Because I think… yeah, Black culture is tactile. It really is. Like, it smells like something, it looks like something. And it’s beautiful. And it’s really cool. I think about some of the food we grew up eating. Green fried tomatoes and fried okra, and greens. And the food, not that you gave us, but the food that grandma brought with her from Alabama. Those food traditions I think of as something that we’re really blessed to have taken part of. I wrote down some of those recipes. And then things that I wish that I had, like I wish we had learned dances. I wish we had learned some of the musical tradition of Black culture. And that’s not something that we have had necessarily. But I also think we come from a long generation of Black people who have been determined to make space for who they are in the world. And I think that is as much of Black tradition as anything. You know?
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Kat: Please feel free to start a dialogue with me or to start a dialogue in the chat or in the comments wherever I share this podcast. I am absolutely open to any questions or any concerns that you might have. You can email me at katharen.wiese@gmail.com and you can find me on Instagram at @katharen.wiese. Thank you so much for listening and I will hopefully see you sometime here later in January with another podcast episode. Thanks so much, buh-bye.
Kat: The music in this podcast was produced by Spazz Cardigan. Thanks, Spazz!