Interracial rape and the mixed race child
Jeff Kunerth:
Everything Myers saw growing up in Ohio and then the small town of Olean in western New York, convinced him it was better to be a white boy with a skin disease than a black kid.
"Why would I want to be black?" Myers says. "I saw how blacks were portrayed in the media."
As much as family members acted as though Dave was just like the other kids, they knew he wasn't. And the difference started showing up in his behavior.
As Dave Myers entered adolescence, the trouble started. He became defiant, hostile and sometimes threatening.
At one point, Myers was sent to live with a foster family. Another time, he was kicked out of the house and lived in his car.
"I was the black sheep of the family -- literally and figuratively," he says. "I was always in the doghouse or always getting out of the doghouse."
If Dave was treated differently, it was because of his behavior, not his skin color, his mother says. "He was just uncontrollable. None of my other children acted this way," Judy says.
During those years, Judy Myers was an unhappy woman.
"She was a hard mother growing up," says Kathy Myers, 44. "Mom had a lot of anger inside her. She was tough, keeping all that inside."
The anger didn't end until, 26 years after David's birth, Judith Myers visited a psychiatrist who advised her to let go of the lie and tell her family the truth.
What she told her husband and children was that she had been raped by a black man.
Apparently, revealing the truth has hurt the relationship between mother and son:
Dave's contention that racism is responsible for the problems in his life, his mother says, has made her more prejudiced against blacks.
"He has with his actions totally soured me on the black race," she says.
Dave and his mother haven't spoken for two years -- not since he appeared on a cable TV program and told everybody the skin-disease story.
And now, as the story spreads to the Internet and the pages of the Orlando Sentinel, Judy Myers says she is ready to take his picture off the hallway wall and throw it in the trash.
"He's not my child," she says. "He's not a part of our lives anymore."
Looks like David Myers is another victim of our multiracial society.
posted by Adam Lawson @ 3:23 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
"portrayed"
It would be interesting to hear more about what he actually means here -- about how he thinks blacks are "portrayed" unfavorably. After all, some of the statistics about black America in general are pretty bad. Nonetheless I might concede some of his point if I knew more.
OK, now that I took the link and read some of the article, it seems more than a little strange to me.
Here is the headline:
"A Big White Lie"
And the sub-headline:
"For 26 years, Dave Myers was told he was white."
Which is perfectly ridiculous! The article includes a foto, and it is clear beyond any doubt that the kid has a black father. How could anyone swallow the nonsense that he was "white" and therefore the victim of some kind of deception about his racial identity enough to write a story about it.
Weird.
He does seem to be a little naive but apparently he was told that he had a skin disease called melanism (also known as melanosis). I guess people believe what they want to believe.
"skin disease"
Thanks Adam, but check out the hair! I don't see how a "skin disease" explains the hair.
The whole thing is ridiculous.
Maybe he and Michael Jackson oughta get together...
Please check out my web-site
www.discussrace.com
b.t.w. My mother was NOT raped.
Sincerely,
Dave Myers
I'll start from early on in my evolution... I am a biracial man whose father is African-American and mother is Caucasian. My parents met in 1959 when my un-wed mother was in a nursing school where my father was employed as a nurses aide... my mother was engaged to a white man who was attending engineering school. My father had an African-American wife and (5) children at the time of his extra-marital relationship with my mother. At some early point of my mothers pregnancy with me she made the decision to marry her fiance, and to lie to everyone about who the father of her un-born child was... she achieved this by claiming that I had been afflicted with a skin-disease called "melanism".
My mother and step-father had four more children together in the space of nine years after I was born, and we grew up together in a middle-class household in white america where the subject of "race" was never discussed. My earliest recollections of having to be aware of race was when I was asked questions about the color of my skin by other classmates in first grade... "Why was my skin dark?", "Was I adopted?" race was certainly a hot-button issue in 1965-66 when I began school , but any awareness that my mother and step-father had achieved from growing up in their white neighborhoods in the 40's and 50's was insufficient in preparing them for raising a biracial child... and to complicate things, they were both in complete denial of their complicity in my mis-education. When I came home from school after having been asked questions by fellow students from my all-white school district, my mother then explained "the skin-disease story" to me... "other kids with this disease usually have dark blotches all over their bodies, so you should feel fortunate". When I would tell my mother about other boys and girls who would call me names or act aggressively for no apparent reason, I began to understand that I would get no further assistance from her to explain this rationale... my step-father was even more removed from the conversation and would only add, "You know what your mother said".
By the time that my step-father transferred jobs and our family of (7) had moved from the all-white Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Stow to the all-white school district of Portville in Western up-state N.Y. it was the spring of 1970 and I was in fourth grade, and already the veteran of many racial incidents and altercations between myself, classmates, and even some adults. My four younger siblings had also been told the same story, and had to explain the same things to their friends when asked why they had a brother who was black... "Hey, did your mother fool around a little bit??" I remember how much that hurt me when I heard it, and I'm sure that they felt just as badly when they did... nonetheless, this was a "subject" that we never discussed as a family, not once, at least in my presence.
I was taught through my observations of my mother and step-father to keep quiet about things that I wasn't sure about, and I was also taught to ignore the obvious.
As I matured into my teen-aged years and began to experience societies issues and insecurities in coming to terms with this countries racial in-equalities during the 70's, I felt an increasing need to rationalize and then codify the information that my mother had given me, regardless of what I was beginning to realize inside... I felt an increasing discomfort, yet there was no one in my life to offer any prospective... I had learned that black people were a part of society that we didn't talk about. ( There was a black family in my small town, and they were poor and lived in a run-down house near the river...I never had any opportunity or reason to associate with them)
I was a "B" student and also began taking an interest in sports where I was above average. Meeting other schools and student athletes were opportunities to then be exposed to populations that had not been inured by my story yet...I was just another black kid to them.
Communicating my experiences to my mother and step-father was difficult because they had no experience with racial prejudice, therefore when I had problems with other children it would be looked at as an issue that "I" had in getting along with others(as well as intra-family sibling issues).
Because "race" was being ruled-out entirely, by my mothers denial of my father, she could not logically use that rationale to explain any conflicts that I would have. My step-fathers complicity in this was to blindly support my mothers viewpoint.
The "white" viewpoint has always been that blacks(black society) were pretty well cared for, and what contact they did have would be polite and careful... What, with the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts being passed, the playing field had been leveled.(re: my mother and step-father's generation)
The feelings and comfort of my mother were apparently what was important, and her inculcation had to have been partly comprised of the idea that white society acted as the gate-keepers and care-takers of an infantilized black population.
questions:
How has black society formed its identity?
What role models have been used, and how does white society react to positive
black role models today? (Are they held to a more critical prism??)
Is there enough information readily available for black people to easily form a
positive racial identity?
Is it important that black society is able to connect accurately the dots of its social
evolution in America? and is it also important that white society can connect those
same dots??
What is White Privilege?
What is White awareness?
What is Whiteness?
What about Affirmative Action?
Is Race just a social construct?
How do we improve our society in America?
Is there any other way(besides the attrition of the old guard) to achieve this??
Dave Myers
www.discussrace.com
I'll start from early on in my evolution... I am a biracial man whose father is African-American and mother is Caucasian. My parents met in 1959 when my un-wed mother was in a nursing school where my father was employed as a nurses aide... my mother was engaged to a white man who was attending engineering school. My father had an African-American wife and (5) children at the time of his extra-marital relationship with my mother. At some early point of my mothers pregnancy with me she made the decision to marry her fiance, and to lie to everyone about who the father of her un-born child was... she achieved this by claiming that I had been afflicted with a skin-disease called "melanism".
My mother and step-father had four more children together in the space of nine years after I was born, and we grew up together in a middle-class household in white america where the subject of "race" was never discussed. My earliest recollections of having to be aware of race was when I was asked questions about the color of my skin by other classmates in first grade... "Why was my skin dark?", "Was I adopted?" race was certainly a hot-button issue in 1965-66 when I began school , but any awareness that my mother and step-father had achieved from growing up in their white neighborhoods in the 40's and 50's was insufficient in preparing them for raising a biracial child... and to complicate things, they were both in complete denial of their complicity in my mis-education. When I came home from school after having been asked questions by fellow students from my all-white school district, my mother then explained "the skin-disease story" to me... "other kids with this disease usually have dark blotches all over their bodies, so you should feel fortunate". When I would tell my mother about other boys and girls who would call me names or act aggressively for no apparent reason, I began to understand that I would get no further assistance from her to explain this rationale... my step-father was even more removed from the conversation and would only add, "You know what your mother said".
By the time that my step-father transferred jobs and our family of (7) had moved from the all-white Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Stow to the all-white school district of Portville in Western up-state N.Y. it was the spring of 1970 and I was in fourth grade, and already the veteran of many racial incidents and altercations between myself, classmates, and even some adults. My four younger siblings had also been told the same story, and had to explain the same things to their friends when asked why they had a brother who was black... "Hey, did your mother fool around a little bit??" I remember how much that hurt me when I heard it, and I'm sure that they felt just as badly when they did... nonetheless, this was a "subject" that we never discussed as a family, not once, at least in my presence.
I was taught through my observations of my mother and step-father to keep quiet about things that I wasn't sure about, and I was also taught to ignore the obvious.
As I matured into my teen-aged years and began to experience societies issues and insecurities in coming to terms with this countries racial in-equalities during the 70's, I felt an increasing need to rationalize and then codify the information that my mother had given me, regardless of what I was beginning to realize inside... I felt a growing discomfort/conflict, yet there was no one in my life to offer any other perspective... I had learned that black people were a part of society that we didn't talk about. ( There was a black family in my small town, and they were poor and lived in a run-down house near the river...I never had any opportunity or reason to associate with them)
I was a "B" student and also began taking an interest in sports where I was above average. Meeting other schools and student athletes were opportunities to then be exposed to populations that had not been inured by my story yet...I was just another black kid to them.
Communicating my experiences to my mother and step-father was difficult because they had no experience with racial prejudice, therefore when I had problems with other children it would be looked at as an issue that "I" had in getting along with others(as well as intra-family sibling issues).
Because "race" was being ruled-out entirely, by my mothers denial of my father, she could not logically use that rationale to explain any conflicts that I would have. My step-fathers complicity in this was to blindly support my mothers viewpoint.
The "white" viewpoint has always been that blacks(black society) were pretty well cared for, and what contact they did have would be polite and careful... What, with the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts being passed, the playing field had been leveled.(re: my mother and step-father's generation)
The feelings and comfort of my mother were apparently what was important, and her inculcation had to have been partly comprised of the idea that white society acted as the gate-keepers and care-takers of an infantilized black population.
questions:
How has black society formed its identity?
What role models have been used, and how does white society react to positive
black role models today? (Are they held to a more critical prism??)
Is there enough information readily available for black people to easily form a
positive racial identity?
Is it important that black society is able to connect accurately the dots of its social
evolution in America? and is it also important that white society can connect those
same dots??
What is White Privilege?
What is White awareness?
What is Whiteness?
What about Affirmative Action?
Is Race just a social construct?
How do we improve our society in America?
Is there any other way(besides the attrition of the old guard) to achieve this??
...** These questions are not rhetorical... I'd like to hear from those of you that have
courage... and the wherewithall, to provide feedback.
Dave Myers
www.discussrace.com
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