Can Multiracial Adoption End Racism?

He has a new memoir, skin Folk. It's about his experience growing up in a large family with multi racial and adopted siblings in New Jersey during the nineteen seventies. But you'll hear all about it in the show. So let's get to it, don't all right? Man, this is this is a long time coming. I mean, I have I have the two white guys in my life that like, are unrivaled in personal significance. I mean, it's always all

about you. It's always all about you. I Mean, everybody knows Ben by now, but but nobody knows Matt, and most especially they don't know Uncle Matt. Because all the folks who know about Ben and I vacationing together. They've heard the Black Martha's vengeance story for our long time listeners. What they don't know is that these guys are like interchangeable, Like one week it's been and then the next week it's Matt. And my kids are like, hey, hey, Ben, Oh,

I'm sorry, uncle Matt. I mean, that's just how it is. So this is a very special episode of Some of My best Friends. Are you do the same thing, Khalil. I've heard you call me been a number of times. Fine, you know so, So Matt, what black friends do you mistake for Khalil. I'm just gonna have a sip of my sola here and wait, Matt, this has been. I agree with Khalil. We've been dying to get you on the show. You know, you are one of Khalil's longtime friends,

and through Khalil, you've been my longtime friend. You're brilliant. You two guys went to graduate school together at Rutgers. You had the same advisor, the amazing David Levering Lewis. You go into the same field. Like you guys both are historians. You both study race and particularly African American

history and you end up together at Indiana University. You both teach there and you've you've been friends since, and this is an opportunity for me to ask both of you about the experience in grad school, like what were your first impressions of one another? Who who was Matt and who was Khalil at this moment in time? And actually, Matt, since you're our guest, I'm going to ask Khalil to go first. Khalil, tell me who was mad at that moment? What do you think of him when you met him?

What do you think of him during grad school? Well, I mean, you know, I thought he was kind of a know it all. I mean, Matthew Pratt Caturoll was in nineteen ninety five, a first year PhD student, like like I was. We met in a seminar with one of our faculty members and it was a class on African American history. He had already gotten a master's degree. I was right out of accounting and didn't know very much.

And he used a lot of big words. I mean, the kind of words that you know, not only had I never heard before, but if I'm honest now, I'm like, what am I the only idiot in this room to doesn't know what he's talking about it, So I thought he was kind of a know it all, maybe even a little bit arrogant when I first met him. No, don't don't hold any punches, Khalil, like you know about you and and Matt. So you meet this guy, what do you think of him? Who was he at that

moment in time? He was charming and graceful and extremely opinionated. And I only got to see the opinions, none of the charm and the grace we were we were We weren't the most problematic people in the room for each other. I think there were other far more problematic personalities. Yeah, and how does race come to play into this? I mean, so Matt's white, Khalil's black. You're studying American history. I

do remember Khalil getting um, what's the word I would use? Uptight, worked up, excited about the use of social construction of race. This is a phrase we were using a lot in the classroom, And so I think I was inelogently making the argument that everyone has a racial experience, and therefore the study of race belongs to everyone and we should be much more careful about it. But Khalil heard that as and I think rightfully so, because again I wasn't

terribly elegant. Khalil heard that as a refutation of the idea of race at all, that race didn't simply didn't matter. Yeah, I had a lot to learn. I mean I was. I was sort of a bull in a china shop back then in grad school, just trying to make sense

of all this new information. And I remember at one moment talking to another white classmate of ours, a guy named John, who's a friend of ours, and John shared something and I'm admitting this, I think I've said this to matt at some point over the last twenty seven years since I've known you. But John's like, um, you know,

matt has a wife who's a woman of color. And I was like, fuck, no shit, because because he was like, you know, I mean, I won't say he was like a stereotypical white guy, but in a way Matthew presented to me at the time, as I've already said, as to know it all. And so it was intimidating to be jousting with this guy who definitely knew more than me at that point. I mean, I was shooting from

the hip based on the most recent weeks readings. But he'd already had you know, he'd already gotten a master's degree, and he was a convert to this, like you know, he was already born again. And I was still like stumbling into the church on Sunday morning, trying to figure out if I belonged. Listen, Khalil, you and I just read Matt's new memoir Skinfolks. That's right. I don't know you as well as Khalil, and so all of it

was new to me. But Khalil has just been calling me and he's so excited about about actually getting to know you better, even after all these years. Yeah, man, it's been it's been twenty seven years. And first of all, I feel like you cheated on me a little bit because because you've written, You've written this whole book. You know, I know so much more about who you are as a person, what you've been through, and I feel like

you were leading a double life. I mean, I've known you for twenty seven years, and he could have been telling you this stuff all along. Yeah, you know, like, what the hell? All right, so we haven't even sort of broken down what your background is. Can you tell us. What was noteworthy about your parents and the family that

they created in suburban New Jersey. Sure, thanks, Ben. My parents were both sort of committed liberals from the late nineteen sixties on, and they decided to adopt kids from around the world and raise them together with two quote unquote natural white kids in a large, blended family and set them behind a white picket fence as a kind of reminder to the country of the American promise, or the promise of diversity, or a post Jim Crow world.

And of course it despite their best of intentions, it was an idea almost doomed to failure, and there were moments of high high comedy and tragedy along the way, and things went sideways, you know, especially in the teenage

years and beyond. And this was an opportunity for me, you know, now, almost at the age of my father when he passed away, to sort of reflect back on what that's meant for me and what it means for all of us, you know, Matt, I want to talk about this a little bit more in the sense of the politics of adoption that you explore in this book,

because it's it's both familiar to us. Some people think about the fascinating choices that Angelina Jolie and Brad pittmay Some listeners will know about Josephine Baker's adoptive family of children from many parts of the world and raise them in part in France and a place called a Milan

that we've been with our own family. But I think you capture a moment in time that I didn't really understand, a kind of progressive moment in early nineteen seventy on concerns about population growth and the sustainability of the earth. There's this organization called Welcome House, and your parents in some ways become kind of a poster couple for the choices.

Just talk a little bit more about about Welcome House, about this progressive moment, about this idea that we must conserve humanity and not just wastefully produce children in a

world that can't sustain life. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean there's a there's a longer history of adoption that you all must know where where racial matching took priority and it was quite common, you know, before the nineteen sixties for white children to be placed with white families and and to really limit adoption to a kind of national context

in a way. In the late nineteen sixties, you start to see that get broken down, and there are a number of progressive organizations, and Welcome House it's one of them that try to break the national instinct to match races.

So Welcome House, funded by or created by Pearl Buck, among others, and with a lot of support from both the black and white community, becomes the vanguard of this new international adoption program that brings together children from around the world old than children of different races, largely with well meaning white families. The impetus here is to really bring kids from disadvantaged or marginalized communities, are broken homes or war torn countries back to the United States and

put them in a white headed household. It's not intentionally a metaphor for a white headed, diversifying country, but it certainly echoes or rhymes with that national interest. And so it has all of the hallmarks of the nineteen sixties in the sense that it's a radical revision of what the country has always done with adoption, and it reflects a radical revision of what the nation state is supposed to be. But it's also still a white centered model of the way in which the family and the nation

should exist. Man. I mean, in listening to you and sort of reading your memoir, I just want to say for a moment how great it is. And it's very intimate and personal and grapples with race and all its complexities. But even what you're describing here, it's a story that captures sort of mid century America. It's a story that is caught up in Americans entanglement in Korea in Vietnam,

because two siblings come from Korea, one comes from Vietnam. Um. It is this this sort of ideology and sensibility that you're describing. A whole world, a whole history comes out in these pages. And Matt, you know, can you can you name your siblings and where they're from and name them as you name them in the book what you

feel most comfortable with. Thanks so much. Um. I have a younger brother, Bug, who comes from Korea, and as we know, entirely Korean, although you know, we're also revisiting what we know about Korean adoption at this exact moment, so you know, we only have the official narrative from the from the country of what Bug is or was. I have a younger brother named Mark, who's natural born white sibling. I have an older brother by forty five days named Bear. He's African American in Vietnamese, the son

of a US soldier in Vietnam. A sister named Anna who's mix of white and Korean, and a younger brother named Eddie who comes from the South Bronx African American Black. Yeah, I want to ask you something else about your folks, About your parents, Bob and Cheryl. Your dad's a dreamer, your mom's kind of practical. The book feels a lot like a love letter to them. I mean, it feels like it's it's this portrait of them, and I'm thinking about this response to whiteness that they have and this idea.

You're talking about a literal pick a fence, white pick offense. There's a white pick offense around your house in Subourban, New Jersey. I'm thinking about my own family, you know, white parents, and they settle us in the inner city, you know, and sort of in a on the South side of Chicago, and you know, there are all sorts of reason why that happened. Maybe it's way more Jewish, like I'm thinking about, like Jonathan Leatham's books in Brooklyn.

That's not the choice that your parents make. They're not like I'm thinking about race and we're going to raise our white children in a diverse neighborhood. They create create diversity in an all white space. Can you talk about those choices and what they were thinking? They were both especially my father was a child of Jersey City and had always wanted to live in the country, wanted to live in the sort of green spaces of what was then the rural central part of New Jersey, and you

wanted to join a law firm out there. Met my mom, who was a legal secretary at the time, finishing college, and they moved even further out into the state, basically into the middle of nowhere, partly because you know, they wanted this green space, but I think also because they wanted to build a big family, big family in a place where, as you said, there weren't other big families like this, and being in the green spaces of the state really gave them a sense that they were they

were both practicing their commitment to a sustainable, healthy environment and practicing a commitment as well to a zero population growth initiative that they both cared very deeply about. So for them, the racial politics of zero population growth made it determined rather that they should bring this big family into the part of the state that wasn't paved over, concreteised, and that felt, you know, where they could feel the wind on their cheeks and smell the flowers and stuff

like that. Are they thinking about changing the racial ideas of their white neighbors around them. I think so. You know, certainly, my father was there. They're interested in the symbolism of the family, and it's very quickly, you know, the idea of the family expands from let's adopt two to let's adopt for over a period of about five or six years, very quickly, they get sanctified by neighbors. Your parents are saints, your you know, your parents are the heroes of this town.

And I think there's some there's something to be said for the way in which they both took pleasure in their neighbors commitment to our symbolism, and the way in which they doubled down on it. Matt, we're gonna we want to talk more about this memoir and about your upbringing. We're gonna take a short break. We'll be right back. We are back on some of my best friends with Matt Gutura, one of our best friends. That's right, you know. I am fascinated by the intentionality with which your parents

created this family. And I've heard you say often, Um, you know, we don't get the families that. How do you say it, Matt? I'm just gonna let you say it, because you've said it to me many times. There are many things I say, but I think, no, But it's about families you make. Say yeah, that the families you make matter as much as the families you get. And I you know, or you know, your families aren't born, they're made. That's right, That's right. And I've always loved that.

And there's a passage in the book early on when you describe your father taking advantage of the family dinner table. Six o'clock sharre Cheryl's bell has already rung in the neighborhood. Everyone's gathered, and your father tells this biblical parable of Noah that he sees as the kind of origin story for the family. Could you could you share that story? Yeah.

He relates the story of the assemblage and the Ark, the decision by Noah to protect the world species by bringing two of every kind on board the arc so that they can be released later. And I mentioned it in the book not just because my father was in the habit of sitting at the head of the table and reciting chapter and verse from the Bible, but because he would often say, sometimes with a wink and a smile, that what he'd tried to do is to bring together

two of every race, Khalil. You'll find this humors that he would He would usually say this in the context of a joke made to Sandy, because she was Sandy is Matt's wife. Yeah, yes, but I think I'd heard that growing up so often, this sense that there was a preservationist instinct, right, the arc is a vessel that protects, but there was also a kind of commitment to, you know, preserving something in the face of apocalypse, and a commitment

to a sort of religious mission for the family. And when you present that, Matt, I mean, it's easy to think about that also problematically of like collecting people and people of different races and so on. How are you thinking about presenting that in the memoir, You're like, you're showing your dad in this way. You're also talking about it that it's this bigger sort of mission that he has,

which is about population. You know, I think it's I think people are complicated, and I think it's entirely possible for someone to be well intentioned to do things out of care and love and feeling and several in several instances, the adoptions happen in moments of great national and even international urgency where where they hear something over a telephone or see something on screen and they feel they just

have to act. It's possible to do all of that and be all of that and also be you know, a political instrumentalist, to be tactical, and to think, to have moments of reflection where you think about the strategic and symbolic importance of the family you've you've created. And just for the record, I mean you passed over a

really significant moment. I mean, at least two of your siblings arrive under extreme darress, literally airlifted out of Saigon in the final hours of the Vietnam War, and another comes as a refugee, and you know, your parents get a call and say, is it possible that you can make room for another than they expected? Not they wanted a baby, but this is a teenager. They get Is

that correct? Yeah, that's right. I mean, in that particular case, they were they were filming an advertisement for Welcome House in city of Philadelphia, and we're having trouble presenting a kind of real emotional response on camera. They weren't actors, and they needed they needed to be prompted to feel

things on screen. And so the the officer presented them with a real world case, pulled a dossier out of the drawer and said, here's the story of this young, you know, preteen girl, and would you know she's she said, a moment where she's either adopted or she stays or she is forever, and you know, would you would you be interested? And they playing the part said yes, absolutely.

But then also in their minds, we're thinking, well why not, Like what, why wouldn't we adopt another child, especially one whom you know has been endorsed by Welcome House and by an invitiate group. They were really quite taken with the story and and acted as a consequence. So so we want to know did this all work out? I mean, there was so much intentionality for your parents, m and what happened. It's a complicated answer. It's a very complicated answer.

But you know, the best way to start is to begin with I think what matters most, which is that I have five siblings I love, and I can't imagine my life without them, and I don't think they can imagine there's without me, or if they if they do imagine there's without me, they they don't tell me about it.

And I think that's being a good sibling too, right, right, And so you know, whatever whatever happened, and however challenging it's sometimes been, I think it matters that those bonds of affection are enduring, and that we feel very keenly that we are each other's siblings, and that there is such a thing as a wee that our family exists as an idea in the world because of our parents

imagination and courage. That's not to say, as you guys are both well aware because you've read the book, that things don't go sideways more than once, and that it

isn't a very difficult story. You know. It concludes with one one of my brothers in jail, he's presently incarcerated in during North Carolina, And it concludes with, you know, my own sense that there are moments where I'm I'm pointedly or politically estranged from my siblings precisely because of the bounds of race, that as we leave the house and as race comes to matter more in our lives, it also comes to shape when and where we can enter each other's lives and what kinds of relationships we

can have. It also concludes with you my near twin brother Bear and his assault at the hands of a group of white supremacists in North Carolina, and his close brush with death and his attempt to save our youngest brother from his own bad choices. Yeah, just even to remind everyone who's here in this, like when you say you're near twin brother Bear, Bear, who presents as black, and he's black and Vietnamese, but in America he presents

as black, and so he's attacked precisely because he is black. Yeah. He's forty five days older than me, And when we were younger, we were roughly the same size and shape and wore the same clothes, often in different colors. We got matched Christmas presence for years. I like to say that that Bear was the more talented, more charming, more athletic, and more intelligent of us, and certainly are our grades

and personal histories reflect that. So. Um. But but you know, we uh, we have as we have been apart over the last couple of decades. Bear's life, you know, living in the South is very different than mine. And uh. And it was in the midst of writing the book that and after our family reunion that Bear was assaulted while driving to work in the morning. They followed him into the parking lot of his job and tried to

beat him to death with a baseball bat. Damn, Matt, I mean that that is so fucked up, even in the way in the book you describe Bear trying to downplay it to you guys, it's just so it's so devastating. Yeah, yeah, I actually remember you telling me that, Matt. Um. I want to to talk just one moment further about the idea of your family as a symbol of what's possible in the future of a country coming out of the

Civil Rights era. I mean, this is a family that's being as symboled a word you use a lot in the nineteen seventies. In the nineteen eighties, a time when there's a Cold War, the Reagan era is pushing back against the gains of the Civil rights movement and this

idea of color blindness and proximity and integration. We are children, all three of us, of the MTV generation, where the idea that simply sharing social and cultural space together would solve the world's problems, and that there wouldn't be such

a thing as structural racism any longer. And as your book and story unfolds, you gradually tell the reader that your parents idealism was not enough, that you couldn't defeat structural racism, as you say, with good intentions and heartfelt correspondence. And I think that's a really powerful message for someone who both lived this experience but also who has dedicated their career to writing about it. Did Did I get

that right? I mean you you basically say that that all of these good intentions, even even and embodied in the closest of relationships that I have experienced, can't solve for this big issue. Yeah, I think you know. It's one thing to say that you you've created a family and that they love each other and they're committed to each other. But it's another thing to say that you've created a family as a symbol and it's meant to

win the war of hearts and minds. And I don't I don't know that our family was able to do that, and to a certain extent, it wasn't able to hold up under the real extraordinary burdens of that moment, you know, as you as you all have described on your show and elsewhere, that decade, the nineteen eighties into the nineteen nineties was a critically dystopian one in terms of race relations.

Not that there have been very many utopic ones, but the the eighties in particular, or a moment where everything goes sideways, and in this particular family, in our lives together, you know, it came to be that that white pick and fence wasn't enough, and stuff starts to seep in, and and we also go out into the world and start to have our own very individuated experiences with race. You know, I as as you know Khalil, I basically wandered around New Jersey like a like a drunk rascal,

begging to be arrested and couldn't do it. Right. We had a beer can as a hood ornament, right, Yeah, that's right. I tried. I tried so daring the New Jersey State State Police to uh to make something of it, and they wouldn't. They wouldn't. But but you know, for for Bear and for Eddie in particular, I think every every misstep, every every moment at which they might have been seen by the police, was a moment at which they were in fact seen by the police and by

many others, many other elements of the state. Yeah, Matt and Khalil, we're going to take a break and we're gonna come back and talk more about your whiteness. Matt awesome. All right, back with Matt Guturall. He's got this new memoir, skin Folk Man. I want to talk more about you in your memoir and how you wrote yourself into it. You're so smart about these issues. You're so careful in thinking about even how you can't speak for somebody else,

how you can't speak for your siblings. So much of the book then becomes about your sense of how you're experiencing this because you've put these natural limitations on not talking into somebody else's perspective. And you do this really artfully in many ways in the book, where you bring in lots of artifacts, photographs and other things. Sometimes you write in second person. You want the reader to imagine being in that space. But but you don't imagine yourself

into Bug and Eddie space. You do some interviews with Bear, your other brother with Anna two at times, and his mom and Mark and Mark and your mom and your father has passed away. So much of the book, or a lot of the book, is also you wrestling with what it means to be a white guy, to be white, even amid this family, and maybe especially amid this family. And you write about the ways that you're implicated in Americans racism, and I would say in especially anti blackness.

And there's a story that I'd like you to tell if you can, from the book. You get in a fight in high school and then Bear sticks up for you and sort of it brings a lot of racial issues to the surface. Can you tell that story? Yeah? I mean, I think one of the one of the challenges for me growing up was that I had two black brothers, and one of them was a kind of ideal. He was an all state linebacker, straight as student, you know,

very charming and garrulous person. Is Bear. That's Bear. And then Eddie, my younger sibling, was was more more challenging in some ways. So my physically smaller physically smaller and also got in trouble a little bit more and had a more difficult upbringing as difficult as Bears was being from from Saigon at that moment, I think Eddie's background was even more difficult and different, very different and powerfully

different ways. And also somehow they're wired differently. You write about Bear showing up at the house and just like I'm here, guys, and running around the house and being joyous like like here. There's just something about his affect right like his DNA. So so Bear had earlier in my life, as Bear was a kind of role model, he had failed to stick up for me on the bus because he had he commanded the respect of older siblings.

And on the way home from the bus a few years prior to this story, I got I was getting roughed up in the back and older boys were doing what older boys do, and they took my shoes and threw them out of the window, but they made sure to check to see that Bear didn't mind first, and he didn't say a word. He was in his own head, doing his own thing. And when we got off the bus, I chewed him out because he had totally left me

to dry it hadn't stuck up for me. So a few years a few years later, I'm older now, and I'm a teenager, and I've made some terrible decisions about friends. And we're sitting in the backyard of my parents' house. My parents are away somewhere. My mom, by the way, reading this passage, was wondering where we were and couldn't believe that we had a party. That's fine, that's what she read. Yeah, that's how she read the whole day.

So we're sitting on the back porch and it comes to Bear's attention that the weekend prior this, uh, this very large Italian American kid from Big Joey Big Joey, had punched me upside the head among other friends. Big Joey was from Scotch Plains. He was like a world class wrestler, fighter, scrappy kid, and he was being used as a doorkeeper at a party and wouldn't let me in.

Me and my friend's end. And so Bear, after hearing this story from us that Big Joey had punched me in the head, grabs a kind of mouth breathing dude from down the street and they get in Bear's classic two forty z Primer Greg remember that car and race down the driveway to go find Big Joey and kick his ass. And in that moment, I, of course, I'm super proud because Bear has failed to stand up for me the past, and here, here I am thinking, and now he's going to do it. He's going to go

stand up for me. And it's at that moment that my my friends decide to call Bear the N word. They're like that he's going to go get him. You know, we set that N word loose and um and it was just such a and that hadn't happened before with them. It wasn't a comment they'd made about Bear. It wasn't it wasn't something that had It was probably a very predictable moment, but it wasn't one that I myself had predicted.

And it just floored me that I had a that I had chosen such a terrible set of friends, but b that we had just unleashed Bear in his two forty Z to go find Big Joey and Scotch Planes and kick his ass and and the Wii and the Wii we just set him loose, meaning like you're you're on the side of those guys. Yeah, no, I I am. I am a white guy sitting there. Um. And the and the way in which the three of us were

suddenly estranged from Bear. Um, you know, that's a That's another one of those very powerful moments where I felt like Bear was family. But but there was a line that that weird Chris cross of skin and kin that I haven't been able to figure out for much of my life. Fortunately, you know, as you guys know, Bear was just enjoying a country ride and really didn't have any intentions of going to Scotch Plains and taking Bear

is a really smart dude there too, smart smart. It's like going to Kunarsi right to look for subcat who who has threatened your younger brother? You don't do that as a black guy going to an Italian neighborhood in the nineteen eighties. Yeah, no, he was, He had other things in mind. I think he just wanted to go for a ride. So, Matt, I'm thinking about moments in

my life too. I have obviously don't have this with like a brother, and Khalil and I never experiences together where somebody like you know other you know in that way. Although not to interrupt, you. You did get you did get robbed once with some other friends. And when they took your old chain and punched you in the face and gave you a double black eye. I came over like the next afternoon. He opened the door, and you looked at me like I had done something wrong because

I wasn't with you. That was that was just my standing as kicked face. I wasn't looking at you that way. Yeah. Out all all my friends stood and watch. They were like, damn got beat up? Is not me? Yeah, but Matt, I was thinking, like, so you haven't experienced too of going to college. When I went to college. You know, I grew up in a mostly black neighborhood in Chicago. I go to college it's predominantly white. I got some friends on the basketball team who are white guys. You know,

I befriend them because I'm so great at basketball. They want to be my buddy. Um. They all pledge a fraternity, a white fraternity, and they're like, why don't you come? It's free beer, you could hang out. I'm like, man, I'm you know, I'm eighteen or whatever, nineteen. I'm like, great, this sounds amazing. It is free beer. I'm hanging out. You know, it's great. I go back a second time and I hear guys in the basement just like playing a game. They're like running around and shouting the N word.

It's like part of a game they're playing. And like, from my own white experience, I had never nothing like that had ever come across my experience before. And I decided that moment, I'm like, well, I will never come back to a fraternity again in the history of my college experience. And I never did. That was freshman year.

I like cut off this whole social avenue because I like, I was like, I can't, I can't be part of this, and I sort of probably extrapolated and thought, like any white person in an all white space might be doing this, I'm just going to avoid them. I'm really proud of you, man, as the first time I've heard that story, but that makes me really proud. I had a very similar experience myself,

you know, growing up in this particular family. Even my high school, which was largely white, was kind of West Side story high school, like white Italians versus white Irish kids with a couple of African Americans and Latino's mixed in. But I went to West Virginia University, which was way too much college for me. Crazy. I mean, I'm talking

about University of Rochester, you're talking about West Virginia. It was the number one party school in the country at the time, and I was such a terrible high school student, so West Virginia made a lot of sense to me. Is really one of the only options that would take

me at the time. And I have to say it caught me off guard the casualness with which people use the end word, both both in the sort of dramatic way that you were describing, but then also just like in everyday speech, as if it was a descriptor, like the color blue, or to call the wet you know, call it windy outside or something like that. It's just a regular thing. And I hated it. I absolutely hated it. And my reaction was to like check out, to be not part of the culture, which also is not I'm

not saying that's an ideal thing to do. I wasn't trying to change it. I wasn't trying to confront people. I just was like avoidance. I don't want to be part of that world. Well, I agree, I checked out completely. I was I left the university after the first semester. I went home and went to community college rather than to return. I won't I won't make it entirely principled. I mean I was also a way stroll and a drunkard,

and you know, basically bombed out of the college. But I think a large part of it, the sense of estrangement, the sense of distance, and the sense of alienation from the culture, was that it just felt like I was in a in a black and white movie about Jim Crowland.

This is this is why I love you guys so much, because I imagine that all the white guys in my life who are colleagues or like, you know, some kind of friend from back in the day, would just not admit to being in the circumstances that you guys have just described being surrounded by people using in word at one point, Matt, you describe it is like, you know, these people know the worse so well they can go bubbles out of it in their mouths. But I just

love the turn of phrase. But but this is this is really important for black people in general, and it's certainly important for me because I think it explains a lot about the country. We live in just in terms of attitudes and perspectives and why our politics are so fucked up. And I don't I don't want you to. I don't want us all to sit with the idea that this is an old fashioned thing. Either like it. This continues to be true. And I don't know if

it is for Ben or not. But if I'm alone in a room with a white person and that person has a grievance, I could just be sitting there eating my lunch and the grievance is going to come out, and I continue to play the play the role of the person who is in the room with the person who might not use the N word, but who will say I got passed over for a job, or that really should have come to me, or I think my

work is better, or I think I'm more important. And we're talking about adult you know, male academics, Khalil, who work in our industry. This is, you know, a part of the every day that's still still very much with us. So I read something in your book, I have to say brought me to tears. And this conversation we're having about the inward amongst white people is hard enough, but this was personal and so I first of all, the fact that you had been taunted part of your life

just because you had black siblings. But another part is that somehow, as you describe, people associated you with blackness, could you tell the story of how you experienced being basically described as a black person because of some physical trait of yours. Yeah, I was about twelve years old,

so this was. There were a series of incidents when I was younger, including one and I talked about in the book where I was chased through a small town in New Hampshire and a group of kids who had seen our family come into town were shouting the inn word at me and cornered me behind a general store,

behind a strip mall. And that was dramatic enough. But by the time I was about twelve thirteen in middle school, had acquired a nickname end Lips, using the end word at the front, and it became a kind of it became a kind of drum beat in my every day when I was you know, at a very you know, middle school is hard enough, and nobody loves middle school, so and you certainly don't want to be on display when it was generally an all white school, So you know,

The only experiences with color we had as a as a collective body were my siblings and me, and that nickname really became a thing like it it it was. It was a serial problem, meaning it happened daily. You said, you just show up in spaces and people would just start calling you that. Yeah. I I shut down, I stopped talking. I didn't I didn't want to leave the classroom. I didn't want to go to the classroom. I didn't

want to go to school. It was very difficult. Um, you know, I I it's just a small taste, of course, of other people's reality, but it was difficult enough. It's so I mean, so now you're an adult and an intellectual and an academic, and you can think about the complexity of this. I mean, there's a way where you wanted to be even closer to bear and and like your sense of the racial differences to eclipse them in

some way. But this is also you're being racialized by the white community and sort of you know, stricken out of that community. Could could you unpack that even more

for us? Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, you know, And I tried to be very candid about this in the book, as difficult as that might have been, my instinct at the time wasn't to where this as a badge of honor or or to say that that you know, people were seeing the similarity between Bear and I and that we were we were obviously connected, but instead to run in the other direction and to just you know, look for a kind of racial clarity and um and

a resolution that would make this nickname go away forever and make the taunts in the hallway stop once and for all. So I think, you know, my parents were wise counsels. We had a lot of tearful conversations about this, and it didn't ever seem to get better or to go away. And eventually I asked for a surgical correction. So I was taken for a plastic surgery consultation and then given surgery on my on my lower lip to

try to make it look wider. There's no other way to really say that, um, and you know, hold myself up in my room while it healed, and hoped that it would make the problem go away. And then, of course, as these things turn out, it didn't. In the and the nickname stuck with me really all through middle school until I left for a different high school. I love it, lips man that the lips are the best, the best lips on white dude that I have ever encountered. You're awesome.

I don't even know what to say to that, but listen, this is this is such an amazing story. Did you and your siblings talk about this well? And I want to just ask you that quickly, like you spend a whole summer with a bandana around your face, as your as your mouth heeled, and and so what did your siblings say about all that was going on? You know, I was way too ashamed, ashamed of that first instinct right to sort of run in the other direction, way too ashamed of that to talk to any of my

siblings about this. And I'm sure my parents came up with a an anodyne explanation for why I'd had a surgery like that. And what about today? What about unpacking about it with them today? Well, I'll see what they say when they read the book. Oh my gosh, are you kidding me? You guys, your mom and dad, I'm this is for real. You guys manage to pull this off without ever saying to your siblings what you've been through. I think so I don't. I don't know, I don't

know what they said. I think. So that's incredible, amazing, man, I mean, this is this is another reason why this book is so incredible, because the complexities, the absurdity. This is our show, the absurdities and the complexities and challenges of race in America. It's all on display in this incredibly intimate but also you know this public family that is variegated, as you say, racially. Um, I want to ask you something about your sister Anna, and it's something

I've been thinking about from the book. So you go, your whole career in some way is dedicated to the history of race in America and in some ways studying African American history. And I can see it coming out of your dynamic with Bear in a lot of ways and thinking about you know, so much of your experiences confronting anti blackness. But there's another way where from your own family experience, you could have become a historian of

either Asian history or Asian American history. Two of your siblings, are you know, two and a half of your siblings or from you don't have Asian heritage, and and you don't that's not what you study, and there are these moments in the book where Anna is like, hey, guys, what the fuck what about me? You want to know what I'm experiencing? And you know, so she's Korean and white, so she's like, I'm out in the world and like, Korean people think I'm not Korean, they make fun of me.

Japanese people hate Korean people, so I get it from them. I'm not even sure what she gets from white people. But there's like these two moments in the book where it just erupts, and I wonder, like that says so much about about beyond the black white dad, which is something you call it in the book. You know, many of us don't see this third way, whether you're Latino, Asian, something else, Like you're sort of admitted from the conversation a lot of times, and your book and your family,

I would say, also illustrates that. Yeah, I think that's right, you know, Anna. Anna is the moral voice of the story in several critical moments, and most particularly in that chapter towards the end of the book where you know, we've all grown too comfortable and too sloppy, using race as a kind of comedic subject in house, as if as if the family itself allows us or gifts permission to us to be cheeky with the subject. But we've

also grown too far apart in a way. We've been out of the house for a while now, and and it's a moment of of of great challenge for me personally when when we're we're in a dark space commiserating about our father's passing and Anna calls me out on something I say that's anti Asian, not anti black, And at the time I'm a I'm a thirty year old man,

Like I'm not a twelve year old boy any longer. Um, well, let me ask you about this, Matt, because there's like there's a moment in your life when you're like, I'm going to study the history of race in America and I'm imagining that emerges from your family. Can you talk about that and talk about why it becomes it's more centered on blackness then say on Asian nous. It's a great question, Ben, thank you, That's all I wanted, And

the show we're done for the day. Guys, I mean, I don't I don't think, Um, I don't know that I would necessarily say that's true about my own work. Yeah, tell me, tell me I didn't want to. I made an assumption, you know, in the um in the earliest stuff I put together, I was much more interested in people who didn't fall inside the white black binary. So somebody like gene tumor. You know that the first book I wrote, Coloration in America, was all about gene tumor

and all about tumors determination to be outside that diet. Yeah. But a black poet, well, yeah, that's not how you would discall himself like he he described himself as a sort of mixed race novelist, the first self conscious member of the American race, like he was, the comblination before Tiger would exactly. But that has to certainly come from your own sense of family. I mean, like even you describing that is is somehow the the dream and the

experiment that your your family is engaged in. Yeah. I think I think you know you're onto something there. And I'll have to sit with this a little while. You know, we do live in a world where the white black dynamic dominates everything else. And I think a part of what I have really struggled with is why why, Like why that? Why? Why? That doesn't mean that I have to look away from it. I'm not, um, trying to

provide an alternate narrative. I'm just trying to understand how we got to this fixation on white and black as the not just the two determining polls of the conversation about race, but but really the color scheme through which we understand it and talk about it. Yeah, yeah, you have this. Uh, it's this really powerful line near the end of the book where you say, the not so secret truth of white people is that most of us,

deep inside hate people of color. Yeah, and that's just I mean, those those are strong words, but I think I have to say clear, the hardest word and that sentence to write, was the word us. Like I think, yes, I think the original draft of the book, I did not have the word us. I had you know, is they or yeah? Yeah, and uh. And you know it was only you know, revision as a as an important process.

So it was only going back and reflecting on pronouns and thinking about where I am in the book that I've changed it to us because I am definitely you know, a part of that that tribe. Man. Matt, congratulations on this amazing book. It's courageous in a lot of ways, very courageous writing this, and even to hear that sort of whatever personal fallout is gonna it hasn't happened yet. You're still awaiting that, and I'm curious to hear about it. Well.

Thank you both so much for having me on, thanks for your interest in the book, and thanks to your listeners for getting this far into the podcast. Hey man, I'm really proud of you. And like I said, we have a lot of drinking to do to catch up on some of these stories, so I look forward to that soon. I'll look forward to it. Love you guys, Love you too, Love you too. Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalil, Jibraan Mohammed and

my best friend Ben Austin. This show is produced by Lucy Sullivan. It's edited by Sarah Knicks with help from Keisha Williams. Our engineer is Amanda Kawan, and our managing producer is Constanza Gayardo at Pushkin. Thanks to Leitao Mulad, Julia Barton, They're Fame, Carly Migliori, John Schnars, Gretta Cone, and Jacob Weisberg. Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow chicagoan the brilliant Avery R. Young, from his album Tubman. You definitely want to check out his music at his website,

Avery R. Young dot com. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin pods, and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And if you like our show, please give us a five star rating and a review and listen. Even if you don't like it, give it a five star rating and a review, and please tell all of your best friends about it. Thank you.

I was thinking how awesome it would have been if when Matt said he hadn't told the siblings yet about all that stuff and when they were kids. Yes, if we could have been like, all right, Matt, we brought them on the show. Here. They are some of my best friends. As Oprah, I love it