October 30 — David Matthews: Ace of Spades
In a candid memoir of identity and ethnicity, the David Matthews describes growing up with his black activist father and his own white skin, his abandonment by his mentally ill Jewish mother, and his life as a black boy caught between the ghetto of 1980s Baltimore and his perceived world of white privilege.
When: Thursday, October 30, 7 pm
Where: Arthur M. Glick JCC, 6701 Hoover Road, Indianapolis, IN 46260
Part of the Ann Katz Festival of Books.
This is the opening of Matthews’s “Lives; Pick One” article in the New York Times:
In 1977, whenI was 9, my father and I moved away from the protected Maryland suburbs of Washington — and away from his latest wife, my latest stepmother — to my grandmother’s apartment in inner-city Baltimore. I had never seen so many houses connected to one another, block after block, nor so many people on streets, marble stoops and corners. Many of those people, I could not help noticing, were black. I had never seen so many black people in all my life.
I was black, too, though I didn’t look it; and I was white, though I wasn’t quite. My mother, a woman I’d never really met, was white and Jewish, and my father was a black man who, though outwardly hued like weak coffee, was — as I grew to learn — stridently black nationalist in his views and counted Malcolm X and James Baldwin among his friends. I was neither blessed nor cursed, depending on how you looked at it, with skin milky enough to classify me as white or swarthy enough to render me black. But before moving from our integrated and idyllic neighborhood, I really knew nothing of ”race.” I was pretty much just a kid, my full-time gig. And though I was used to some measure of instability — various apartments, sundry stepmothers and girlfriends — I had always gone to the same redbrick single-level school. Nothing prepared me for walking into that public-school classroom, already three weeks into fourth grade. I had never felt so utterly on my own.
Why does Provocate think you should attend this event?
The question of identities that are mixed, or split, or in flux — it goes beyond Barack Obama. It is where an increasingly heterogeneous society is headed. Matthews explores the problem of internal racism, which is particularly intriguing.
If you think this sounds interesting, be sure to check out …
Unfortunately an equally significant discussion of conflicting and overlapping identities will also be October 30, when Chinese American writer Lan Samantha Chang talks. Hear a different perspective on mixed identities from Native American writer Sherman Alexie on September 29. Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights discusses another aspect of racism in America on November 18.
Know before you go:
Read this interview with David Matthews; and here is the first chapter of his book.
