Meister Eckhardt
AD 1260 - 1327
Dominican Priest and Mystic

At moments like this, I deeply sympathise with Hassan. His handsome, angular face twists into a knot, and his dark eyes are quagmires of perplexity. For him, the answer is easy enough: If we were Muslims like him, there would be no problem. In principle, a Muslim can be descended from virtually any tribe or tribes, can be black, white, brown, yellow, blonde, red-headed or albino; straight-, wavy- or kinky-haired; slant- or straight-eyed -- as long as he follows the teachings of the Prophet. But we infidels are different. We have to have labels in order for him to understand what we're all about and place us in a workable context. And since I cannot answer his questions in a way that is satisfactory to him, he shakes his head, says "Tsk, tsk, tsk!", and goes back to serving the other guests, and I admit that my lack of an answer is inadequate.

And what is one to do for an answer? Karl Lagerfeldt the Paris designer, has said that the new models who are turning up on the cat-walk are the most beautiful women the world has ever seen, because they are such blindingly handsome mixtures. They do not conform in any way to the usual perceptions of how someone of a certain "race" should look. A model who is part Ethiopian, part Chinese, part French and part Estonian, for example, has a look that is so unique, it enhances and brings out -- Lagerfeldt feels -- the genius of his fabrics and cuts, giving them a whole new, unparalleled visual dimension. He loves the "new" look of the "new" women.

But what on earth do we call these "new" people? I'm sure that if we examine this particular woman, the hypothetical fashion model I have described above, a Chinese Brotherhood Federation would be happy to claim her as their own, as would a Society of French Working Women, an Estonian Fellowship Guild and, not least, the NAACP. However, what I maintain is that none of these causes or covens has any right to this young woman's undivided allegiance or fealty. She is "mixed-race", period. Yes, she can sympathise with them, she may attend some of their meetings just to placate ethnic opinion, but no one of them has any right to put their "Certified Genuine" stamp on her.

My mother's father was 1/2 French, his mother was "m�tise" (1/4 French, 1/4 Seminole and 1/2 African), while Mom's mother was 3/4 Irish and 1/4 African. My Dad's father was 3/4 African, 1/8 Irish and 1/8 Cherokee, and his mother was 7/8 Cherokee and 1/8 African. Now pore over all those fractions for a moment. What in pluperfect hell can anyone with a family tree that looks like a mathematics lesson call herself but "multiracial" -- as I do?

There is something so patently small-minded and thick-witted about our need to pigeonhole people, to sort them and portion them out into little square boxes. But then, on the other hand, when you've got something sorted in a box, you know what to reach for when you need it. And that's exactly what the NAACP and certain other organisations are into with a vengeance. If you can call everybody from Jennifer Beales to Tiger Woods to Ben Vereen "black", then you're guaranteed to have a horde of troops behind you, in fact, you're almost certain to outnumber just about anybody. You can curry more favour with government instances, win more acceptance for your lead-footed, ponderous bureaucratic programmes, and turn the screws a few more times on the thumbs of the money-holders. This is not leadership, it's show business combined with extortion.

In an earlier article I wrote for Interracial Voice, I railed against the developments of the last thirty-odd years on the racial front. There was, after all, a time when a good many, if not most, black people had a pride and a dignity that had nothing to do with bizarre dress or outrageous attitudes, that in no way required of them a "bad-ass" behaviour, that did not force them to choose between being mainstream American or being "black". The old generation -- dead today but still very much alive in my memory -- apologised to no one for not being white, but at the same time were determined to uphold a standard among themselves, before their peers, that was impeccable. Many of them made an example of themselves, defied the basest of opponents, and transcended their limitations, both on a heroic scale (as witness the example of the martyrs Martin Luther King and Malik El-Shabazz in their attempts to lead all the people out of racism's cul-de-sac), and on a small scale (the black homeowner standing in his well-kept garden hosing down his lawn and flowers of a Friday evening). Basically, these two accomplishments are the same: God told Adam to tend His garden, and people of this old-fashioned high calibre, famous or humble, did just that, the best way they could.

But now "blacks" seem to have retreated from all responsibility for America's development, or their own, for that matter, not to speak of cases in which we have been "integrated" into complete indifference. We have chosen a kind of perverse alienation, a sorry excuse for the total integration that we abandoned as a goal when King died. Many people, black, white and mixed-race, hate Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but it is a fact that he was one of the first to see the writing on the wall, the "Mene, mene tekel, ufarsin!" (= "weighed, measured, found wanting") that heralded the beginning of the breakdown of the Black American family structure at its most vulnerable socio-economic level. When he -- while serving in the Department of Labor -- presented this analysis in 1965, there was a hue and cry from the NAACP and all the other "black", so-called leaders: "Moynihan is bad-mouthing blacks! The cheek of that crypto-racist! Who the hell does he think he is?" But here we all sit today with the results before us, plain as death and taxes. As a society, the inner-city black poor have fallen apart at the seams, and the few bright rays of hope and repair that are shining through, have not come from big government, the big organisations or the big mouths (including Vernon Jordan the Glib, who seems most recently to have moonlighted as the president's Grey Eminence in the Lewinsky monkey-business), but from small-scale private organisations and dedicated individuals who cannot countenance the random, senseless downfall of so many people in the midst of a land of plenty.

I can't countenance it either. And regardless of the NAACP's position, I cannot see any conflict between calling myself "multiracial" (which I am), and championing the cause of any and all people who are being given a bum deal by a shallow, self-indulgent society that has never once taken their welfare seriously. And blacks are not alone in this respect. The profound callousness of America in the face of the poverty, ignorance, deprivation and squalor that engulfs the poor of this country, regardless of their origin or colour, is -- after the traffic in drugs and guns that thrives on so many an urban American street-corner -- the single most despicable manifestation of unbridled greed and irresponsibility that the country can show the world. Mind you, when I say "profound callousness", I don't mean at the official level, where all is sweetness and light, and people will gladly pay a thousand dollars a plate to hear the President speak on new measures for bettering the lot of the under-privileged. To these Mandarins who dine on lotus leaves in the name of ideological rectitude, it can be worth $1,000 to go home afterward with the feeling that "something is being done". No, what I'm talking about here is the "I've got mine and you've got yours to get" attitude, that has made any serious political attempt to help the poor help themselves null and void. There is slight support at the grass roots for these efforts, and there is only a dim perception of how adversely poverty and social disintegration affect the daily lives of those who are better off, filling the nightly subway ride, the walk down a dark street in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, with apprehension and fear. I remember how it was living in New York at a quite good Riverside Drive address in the early '60s, just after dope started flooding the city. (Remember Albert Anastasia being shot to death in a barber's chair in the Bronx in, I think, 1958? That was what the Mafia dope war was all about: who was going to control the merchandise.) And we reacted. We all got scared and we all bought guns. And today, some of our wealthier suburbs are armed fortresses, bristling with guards, weapons and sophisticated electronics, all to keep the have-nots out. Considering the utter desperation implied by this bunker mentality, I wonder whether the residents have taken the next logical step, and had cyanide capsules implanted under their molars...I mean, just in case everything screws up FOR REAL one fine day. You can't be too careful, you know.

But now, because I truly believe that -- ultimately -- economics and politics lie at the root of many of our problems, certainly in terms of the racial conundrum, let us explore a quite different subject that may nevertheless be relevant in this context. (I beg your indulgence here, as this subject may at first seem somewhat "beside the point". I nevertheless maintain that it is not.)

Sweden, where I have lived for over 30 years, is a so-called "welfare state". What this means in effect, is that this society, by maintaining a socialist ideology while managing to tolerate Big Capitalism to the extent to which it could be milked, was able to yield, between World War II and the mid-seventies, a GNP that was astounding, considering how few in number the Swedes actually are: today, along with the foreigners in the country, they are slightly fewer than 9 million people. However, building a quasi-capitalist structure (the practice) on a basically Marxist foundation (the theory), has its Achilles heel. As long as Sweden could profit for a good 25 years on what was, after the War, the wreckage of European industry; as long as Sweden's industry could remain exclusively Swedish, and operate within the framework of Marxist-inspired long-term planning and social engineering; as long as Sweden was still a provincial cultural backwater that was sufficient unto itself; the welfare machine could lumber on unhindered. Mark well: when I came here in 1964, the Swedish living standard per capita was the highest in the world after that of the United States.

The socialists are still congratulating themselves on the strides that were made between 1945 and 1970. And most people here, especially the Old Guard who remember when times were great and the factories groaned and roared and hummed at full speed, are still pining for the good old days when the Swedish system ("Sweden, the Middle Way") took care of every citizen from the cradle to the grave. But today, things have changed. The fact that Big Capitalism here is now mounting its asses and camels and folding its tents to move on to greener oases (labour is cheaper almost anywhere but here), doesn't seem to bother the Social Democrats (SD) in the least. The fact that unemployment is at an all-time high (around 14%) is just a matter of juggling figures: if you can herd enough people into state-run -- and thus, by definition, ineffectual -- programmes for vocational re-training, then you don't have to deal realistically with sky-high statistics for joblessness. Furthermore, the fact that the unions wield such inordinate power here (the main labour organisation, LO, is the SD's standing army) that they are able to bar youth, refugees, and several other categories of jobless, non-union people from the labour market, is nothing to fuss about. And, most important of all, the SD-dominated authorities (with the Swedish IRS in the vanguard) make it so difficult for a person who wants to get a small enterprise off the ground, that only the foolhardy or the extremely shrewd will dare attempt to set themselves up in business. This also means fewer jobs, but Small Business (read "outright individual capitalism") is the SD's worst bogey-man. They can tolerate Ericsson, the telecommunications giant, making several billions in profits, because Ericsson employs 40,000 Swedes, and every penny of income, both the company's and the employees', is richly taxable several times over as long as it stays in the country. In other words, Ericsson, being Big Business, can be milked (or bled, as the case may be). But the idea that Ms. Jane Doe -- let's call her Ingrid Svensson -- might be so successful running her boutique or catering outfit that she could actually make a profit, and thus be able to afford a mink and drive a BMW, is ideological ANATHEMA to the Social Democrats, even though we all know that relatively small service outfits are what the future calls for. Hatred of small business has its roots in the fact that redistribution of wealth is the highest priority on their agenda, and has been since the turn of the last century. It's just that this utopian id�e fixe makes for a society with no dynamic, no nerve, and no incentive to do anything but sit on its ass and let the politicians run the show. As a result, Sweden is becoming an open-air museum, orderly and well-kept on the surface, but below it, socially stagnant, economically inert and totally lacking in any kind of vision. Flat line, but still breathing!

Ultimately, of course, "The Middle Way" is on its way down the toilet along with the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union. The entire Western World is having to re-group, re-organise, and re-trench in terms of what "work" means and demands, and the inflexibility and dogmatism of the Swedish labour unions has become Sweden's worst enemy. In the seven years I have worked as a translator for Ericsson, more and more of its work-force has been recruited overseas (over 60% today), more and more vital operations (such as marketing, research & development) have been moved abroad, and fewer and fewer of the company's tax dollars are filling the coffers of the SD for re-distribution as socialist largesse in the name of the Holy Trinity -- Marx, the Welfare State and the Working Class.

In the last 15 years, Sweden has fallen from 2nd place in the OECD index (the GNP-rating for Western Europe) to 18th place, with only Greece, Portugal and Spain behind it. This is especially ironic in light of the fact that just 25 years ago when Sweden was on top in Europe (and bragging its ass off about it), these three countries were piss-poor military dictatorships, and today, they are still gallantly fighting their way up out of the backwardness and rigidity of fascism. As for Sweden, who could ever have thought that this "progressive" socialist paradise would end up in such a debased league?

Ultimately, the object lesson of this is simple: Marxism is a crock, a shell-game for suckers, a potpourri of hoary anachronisms and foregone conclusions that are utterly irrelevant in our time. Why, for example, should workers "SEIZE the means of production" when in today's service-and-information-oriented market, they ARE the means of production?

The welfare state that aims to provide the kind of cradle-to-grave subsistence that the Swedes have been able to depend on in the past is irrevocably doomed to failure in the long run, even though the false promise it offers might win a great many die-hard votes over the short term. (Tony Blair knows this, which is why Marx and his superannuated mumbo-jumbo have finally been purged from Labour's programmes.) There is no legitimate reason why the State should feel itself called upon -- as every socialist state does -- to stake its ground in every nook and cranny of your life. And if it does, beware!

And thus we come back to the point: namely, that I don't believe in simply throwing tax dollars at the poor. It debilitates them, stupefies them, and pacifies them no end. It also solidifies, forever and ever, amen, the bureaucratic powers of the individuals and organs that are assigned to administer the distribution of the taxpayers' money. The result is an ever-widening spiral of abuse on both sides of the fence -- involving the administrators as well as the administrated -- that is self-perpetuating and ultimately ruinous to society as a whole. Here in Sweden, many able-bodied people in their best years have never "worked" a day in their lives, because it has been easier, less demanding and more comfortable to live on the dole. Besides, they can always supplement their welfare checks with "black" work, on which they pay no taxes. I, on the other hand, pay a total of about 66% in tax on every krona I make; in other words, the price I pay for the welfare state running my life is the complete relinquishment of any control I might have over the money I earn, and hence, over my situation as an individual. I, and everyone else here who makes over $28,000 a year, live on what is basically an allowance that the State grants us (i.e., the remaining 34% that we are allowed to keep and use as we see fit).

How does all this relate to the race issue?

Back in the good old days, Sweden was always lecturing other countries (in particular, Britain, the USA and South Africa) about how badly they were treating their "non-white" minorities. Sweden was "tolerant" of all people; the Swedish Middle Way made it possible for all men to live as brothers. I complained now and then to friends that I was being ill-treated in the streets by Swedes who threw racial epithets after me, or spat before me as I passed by them (this was in the '70s and early '80s; today I dress a little too well for them to dare). But I was reassured by my Swedish friends that my attackers were only "socially misguided" people, people who had not seen the TRUTH, in other words, the type with whom every society has to reckon. With time, they would see the error of their ways because sooner or later the Welfare State would bring them to enlightenment.

Today, with the economy strained and joblessness among the young at an all-time high, the Swedes are shocked, not to say downright discombobulated, when Nazi kids run wild in the streets every now and again, chanting "Sieg Heil!" and kicking the living bejeezus out of the occasional dark-hued foreigner. Still, many people in high places stick their heads in the ground -- the politicians foremost among them -- and assert as one man: "It can't happen here!"

And I say, just you wait! The point is, you cannot inculcate tolerance or uproot hatred by using the taxpayers' money or a stone-dead ideology to whip people into line. Look on Yugoslavia, ye Mighty, and despair!

But enough about my adopted country (keep in mind what I've said, though). Everyone, everywhere, seems mistakenly to feel that it's easier to help people in need if we have first identified them as groups. On the other hand, no one seems to give a damn about the individual. The NAACP and Jesse Jackson want us all to consider ourselves "blacks" on the basis of the numerical, and hence, political clout that it gives THEM (and believe me, they'd snatch Cajuns, Yemenis, Berbers and Maoris too, if those groups could be cajoled into the fold). And they know damned well what they're doing; they're making sure that federal money can be filtered through them before it trickles down to "needy black folk". But representative democracy has to begin re-defining itself. We have got to stop thinking in terms of racial GROUPS when it comes to need, and start thinking in terms of INDIVIDUALS in need. The black dentist with his (most likely) white or mixed-race wife living in a 12-room estate with pool and servants' quarters in Baldwin Hills, CA, does not feel obliged to identify with the 21-year-old unwed white mother of 3 children, living from hand-to-mouth in a roach-infested Milwaukee tenement. But why should the help this affluent pair deign to provide be targeted only at the black community via, say, the NAACP or federal programmes that it backs? What this young woman needs, like every other woman in her situation, black, red, yellow, or what have you, is help to help herself, and it has to be provided by concerned individuals, private organisations, to ALL OF THE POOR, regardless of colour. She needs the book-learning that can lift her out of semi-literacy, the on-the-job training and in-depth orientation that can familiarise her with the conditions of the workplace, and the child-care and schooling of such good quality that it can break the lock-step of social misdirection and hopelessness that would otherwise be her children's lot tomorrow, even as it is hers today. And, most important, she needs to earn her own money in order to feel her own pride of accomplishment.

With the Swedish example plain in my mind's eye, I do not believe that government in general (or Big Government in particular) is capable of providing this help. It can only come from you and me at the most basic level: through volunteer work and individual sacrifice and commitment, through companies and clubs and churches, synagogues and mosques, that have the courage to take the initiative to sponsor people in need. (By the way, once upon a time long ago, the black communities in every city boasted several "lodges" and "brotherhoods" that filled this function. They served as bankers, insurance companies, legal advisors and undertakers to their brethren, and the good that they did is well documented in the annals of black urban history for anyone who takes the trouble to read it. Incidentally, just for the record, the Black Panthers in Oakland-San Francisco in the early '70s also fall readily into this category.) Help of this kind has to be HONEST, and HANDS-ON and UP-FRONT, and it has to show MEASURABLE RESULTS! The taxpayers' coffers are not bottomless, as many of these governmental and non-governmental organisations would have us believe. If help is to go to the poor, it has to proceed directly from our pockets and purses straight into their lives; it must not take a leisurely, circuitous route through the labyrinths of power and the corridors of privilege where all those silver spoons hang poised, waiting to skim off the cream. Don't you find it odd that the powerful are always paid lavishly to help the poor, who, of course, remain poor?

We who acknowledge ourselves to be of mixed-race may yet prove to be the catalyst that can sway, even reverse, America's catastrophic course. We straddle a lot of fences that no one dares even climb, much less sit on. We need to close our ranks, own up to what and who we are (and are not), and affirm decisively that we have no stomach for either the fake demographics or the crackpot demagoguery that any organisation, including the NAACP, the Black Muslims or the Federal Government, seeks to cram down our throats. As for the boxes they give us to check, I am indeed "None (or all!) of the above", thank you! Somehow, someday, we may yet be able to force America to deal with her cyclops view of race and colour. Believe me, she will kick and scream and yell bloody murder, but if we can force her to see us as REAL for once, then we stand a mighty good chance of taking on, mano-a-mano, this country's most devastating single evil, racism, and the poverty that always limps along in gait with it like some monstrous Siamese twin.

And that's why I'm talking about individuals helping individuals, not institutions helping institutions, or systems being set up to perpetuate systems, or the State and its favourite pressure-group cronies using our taxes to bribe so-called "niche" voters! If we were just FOR ONCE to stop dead in our tracks, and refuse to play the racial mind-games that the powerful make us play -- in which the odds are always stacked against us -- the whole damned scam would fall apart like a house of cards.

I am absolutely convinced that the majority of people in the USA today are of mixed race, they are not pure "anything" (a contingency that just may, in all likelihood, have crossed the minds of the white government and the black power establishment in their 'worst scenarios', but that's THEIR problem). Just imagine all of us -- "mulattos", "Hispanics", "high-yellas", "Eurasians", "half-breeds", "half-castes", and all the other hybrids, mutts and mongrels (however strong, intelligent and beautiful) who have had to endure these stupid labels that classify us like the yellow stars Jews were forced to wear in Hitler's Germany -- imagine all of us checking the "multiracial" box, and thereby proving, with all the finality of the gates of hell slamming shut, that the largest "minorities" in the United States today are, in fact, WHITES and BLACKS! It is THEY, not WE, who are minorities! And if most Americans end up checking the "multiracial" box, then what does "race" mean altogether? Where lies the "power" in this so-called "power factor"? Where is its sting, and where -- I ask you -- is its victory?

"If this be treason, then I am a party to it." I rest my case.

I have been called, throughout the course of my life, coloured, negro, Negro, black, Afro-American, and now (fanfare!), African-American -- roughly, a new designation for every decade of my life. (Good Christ, what next?) But despite these changes of journalistic, social and official whim, I have always known bloody well what I was. I am multiracial, period. And suddenly, not being young any longer, it has become urgent to me to secure, as a valid ethnic position for my grandchildren, this particular designation once and for all, so that they, too, may be so designated. WE MUST BE CALLED MULTIRACIAL, BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT WE ARE.

As for me personally, aside from my Native American Cherokee and Seminole forebears, the first known ancestors of mine to have set foot on the American continent were one Jules Trottier, a lumberman and cattle farmer, and his wife Cath�rine Loiseau, who came to Canada from France in 1646 with their five sons, one of whom, Michel Trottier de Beaubien, ("Beaubien" was the name of the estate north of what is today Montreal, that he founded when he became landed gentry), was my mother's father's ancestor. After that came African slaves, and after them, the Irish, who, at least in the beginning (after the Civil War) weren't appreciably better off than blacks, their white skins notwithstanding. I believe that the Irishman John Mason, a sailor and my great-grandfather on my mother's side, may well have been a smuggler of contraband. (He was just a tad too well-off, from what I understand, to have been altogether on the up-and-up. Among other things, he willed a 12-room house on a street named after himself -- Mason's Court -- as dowry to my grandmother, Madeleine.) But he must have had a fine voice and known a lot of beautiful Irish songs, because my mother sang them to me as a child, even as her own mother had sung them to her.

I am everything that America was and is, and everything it ever will be, and so are you. All its Irish lullabies and Negro spirituals and bluegrass banjo-picking and blues and salsa and rock 'n' roll and big-band jazz. All its hoppin' John and cornbread and gumbo and fried chicken and chitlin's and Maine clam-chowder and Boston baked beans and Santa Fe re-fried beans. All its amber waves of grain and kitschy gambling palaces and mock-Greco-Roman government temples and ticky-tacky suburbs and giant sequoias and trailer parks and endless road-to-hell highways and revival tents and pseudo-Tudor cathedrals. It's the African-Indian Miles Davis playing the Russian-Jewish Cindy Lauper's haunting tune "Time After Time", in a way that can only be American, because it is only Americans who have always been haunted by such a promise -- "If you're lost, you can look, and you will find it, time after time! If you fall I will catch you, I will be waiting, time after time!" -- such a possibility, held forth in a strangely encrypted code that only an American heart can fathom or decipher. It's part of our covenant with the Lord and with each other. It's all there, and it's all in us: hybrid, somewhat hyped, but alive with divine fire.

On the Monday before Easter, a man I loved very much passed away. He was my husband once upon a time, and the father of my two children, Julia and Christian Heine. The funeral, which his present widow had arranged so tastefully and beautifully, with mourners from as far away as Japan, Austria and the USA, was held in a little country church in Scania, a province in the south of Sweden.

These are my notes from that occasion:

"On the Thursday after Easter, Eckhard Heine, my former husband was buried in an ancient churchyard that borders on a beautiful field where horses run free all year round. As his casket was lowered into the earth, his two daughters, my child and her half-sister Maria, and his son, my boy, stood hollow-eyed, heavy-browed and watched. Together, these three children - who are half-German on their father's side - are French, Cherokee, Seminole, African, Irish, Portuguese and English. Nevertheless, they all resemble each other, like handsome peas in the same pod -- all with Eckhard's chiseled features, high forehead and heavy, thick, sleek, dark-brown hair. A frosty wind was blowing, there was sleet in the air, and as the three of them stood there, I was in awe of their beauty and their bereaved dignity. And more than ever before, I think, I loved their father, who dared to defy his Nazi background and every other organised sham, to care for and protect and provide for those he loved."

And so I return to the words of my dead husband's brilliant and profound namesake, the Dominican and "madman" -- excommunicated as a heretic by Pope John XXII -- Meister Eckhardt: "...that I am I, and am myself mine own, belongs to no other man; not to an angel; not even to God." When I was twelve years old and studying to become a Catholic, I read those words for the first time. Being a child, I didn't understood them then, but they fastened in my mind like a mantra. And today, forty-five years later, they have been revealed to me: I do understand them now, and I realise that, for me at least, a seventh seal has been broken. Those words are about responsibility, and they are the code by which every decent human being should strive to live. Yes, every one of us is ultimately responsible as an individual, and must therefore be held responsible for what we do, whether we be Mother Theresa or Heinrich Himmler, or any other unruly soul between those absolute polarities. It's a question of respect; respect for ourselves and for everything else in creation.