It makes me smile and nod yes, and usually I post "yep" but part of me thinks "come on, yall, this story right here is about Black folks." It's a kind of very soft, gently intended, "All Lives Matter" reaction on their part. I'm not trying to get into a pissing match about who is worse off (and as a light-skinned, upper middle class Black woman that sure ain't me) but I do think we can tend to gloss over the really bad hurt of a particular situation - i.e. what happens to Black people at the hands of too many police - by generalizing that hurt to all folks who might have ever felt that hurt.
You state your mother tried too hard to integrate herself into this black culture, especially since-as you say-it is a "club it seemed rational to want to leave"? Do you feel the same can be said now about those trying to become American? Is being an American now something you want to be a part of, considering the current social, political, and economic climate?
Whenever I'm in a Lyft or a cab, I talk to the driver, and often that person is an immigrant. I ask them how they're doing. I ask them why they chose to come here, and what they think. Usually I have my own complaints about America in mind as I listen to them, and every single time I'm slapped back into reality: however bad you think America is, Julie, to Black folk, to the poor, to American Indians, to "others," America is still a place that offers an education and job opportunities to those who seek it. In talking with strangers from other lands I'm reminded that despite her deep unhealed festering wounds, America simultaneously offers a balm for people from elsewhere. I believe that America is one of the most interesting experiments humans have ever undertaken, and I believe our best days as a nation lie ahead. And occasionally I look at property in Canada. If it wasn't so white I might not be kidding.
Has it ever been mentioned that your treatment of your daughter in her younger years is similar to what your mother had done with you?
Ha, no it has not, probably because folks aren't reading closely enough or don't know how to talk about it if they noticed it. So to your insight, I would say thank you for that, but also yes and no. Yes, I, too, was trying to foist identity upon a child, as my white mother did with me. But since I am a person of color and my mother is not, I bring to that effort an authentic knowledge of what it means to be a POC in America, and how a person struggles with that, and how ultimately identity is part ancestry, part phenotype, part education, part how the world treats you, and part who you know yourself to be after you experience all of that. I also bring a humility where my mother was more hubristic - I know I cannot impose an identity on my child by telling her she is "Black" or "Biracial" or whatever. Best I can do is try to raise children to know who they're from and who love themselves unconditionally.