My granddaughter Leyla was four weeks old when her mother was deployed overseas; her father had been deployed to Afghanistan before Leyla was born. So there I was, a mother who hadn’t cared for an infant almost 20 years, holding Leyla on the naval dock while our family waved goodbye to her mom as she shipped out.
For what turned out to be nearly seven years. Even after my daughter returned, she’d been injured and often wasn’t able to care for Leyla, so Leyla spent months at a time living with her middle-aged white Nana.
So Leyla was raised in a household that was political progressive and VERY active.
My family is multiethnic. My nephew Nikome “NikeeJS” is a rising star on the Asian-American hiphop scene. His father left Laos during a time of savage war, swimming across the Mekong River with his mother on his back, then swimming back to bring other family members who couldn’t conquer the distance and the surging waters alone. Nikome’s brother Austin is becoming a Buddhist monk, inspired by his Laotian father and grandmother.
My seven nephews and nieces in Utah, Ohio, Nevada, and New Jersey are all Mormon, and many of them have centered their lives around their spiritual beliefs.
Some of my nephews and nieces in Minnesota and South Dakota are Latino American, and others are Lao American.
My grandchildren are multiracial and multiethnic, claiming legacies from their Filipino, Turkish, African American, and “Heinz57” Caucasian (Norwegian-US Midwestern mixed with Native American and Tennessee hillbilly). The past three generations of their families included
- black sharecroppers in post-Reconstruction Louisiana, some of whom moved to Chicagoland in search of better lives
- a Lutheran minister from Norway who worked his way across the Atlantic from Norway as an indentured farmhand and later became a progressive state senator and representative
- my mother, Leyla’s great-grandmotherself, who self-identified as a proud hillbilly from the mountains of southern Tennessee who was white and Native American (Cherokee).
- multi-spiritual family members who embrace everything from Buddhism to Mormonism to Islam to Judaism to Catholicism to atheism to Southern Baptism to Lutheranism to Methodism … the list just goes on. We don’t have one family religion; for us, spirituality is a smorgasbord
- Leyla’s Filipino Canadian stepmom from British Columbia and her African American father from Chicago
- a Turkish grandfather whose grandfather WALKED thousands of miles from a Siberian gulag back to his home in Istanbul toward the end of WWI. He and his fellow escapees recovered in Poland, during which time the great-great-grandfather had several children with a Polish nurse
- cousins who are Mexican American, Honduran American, Sudanese American, Lao American, Turkish, and Turkish American
So … what is Leyla’s family? It’s a miniature United Nations. My Minnesota/South Dakota family is trilingual (all the kids speak Lao, several dialects of Spanish, and English). My daughter Sibel is bilingual and also is conversant in Turkish.
Our daily foods all put together at a reunion spread are incredible! Pancit, dobo, ceviche, tortillas, sweet rice balls, pho, baklava, kofte and kebabs, fried chicken, okra, hush puppies …. The table groans with the weight of foods from so many cultures and traditions.
Well, Leyla has turned 13. As she’s spent her growing-up years with her activist Nana getting involved in all kinds of causes, campaigns, and protests, she just rolls with the flow. We’ve been in a crowd somewhere and people came up to Leyla and start speaking Hindi, Urdu, Spanish, etc., to her, because she has that “could be from anywhere” look and is cheerful and comfortable in any crowd. She’s learned to say, “Mafkaro [sorry], I don’t know Hindi,” and “Lo siento, pero no hablo bien el espanol.”
Now she’s chosen to live with her father (African American) and stepmother (Filipino Canadian) and brother (all of the above) in Illinois. It’s a different personal culture for her and a different setting for a multiracial child who’s lived primarily with her white grandmother. It’s been an adaptation for Leyla.
Last week on the school bus from middle school, someone asked her very loudly, “What ARE you?” Leyla was perplexed. But she knows she’s a math geek, so she shot back, “Me? I’m multi-ratio.”
Of course, the kid who asked didn’t get the joke. But the bus driver had a laugh.
Leyla’s eager to learn more about being African American in the Chicago area and about being part of a Filipino/African American/Turkish/Scandinavian Caucasian family.
She’s also eager to talk with my daughter Sibel (who’s not Leyla’s mom), who is involved in the Black Lives Matter movement in Washington DC. And when she visits me, she asks people a lot questions about our local Black Lives Matter efforts. She also converses with willing folks about racial politics and how it interacts with postmillenials like her who identify more as “multi-ratio,” multiracial, and/or multiethnic.
While we were FaceTiming a few weeks ago, we both used our other computers to watch “Moving Midway,” a documentary by my friend Godfrey Cheshire. It’s a fantastic film that Godfrey started out as a little documentary about moving his Raleigh, North Carolina, family plantation home to protect it from encroaching development and large highway systems that might impact the home.
But something interesting happened in the course of his filming. One day Godfrey, who’s white and who saw his pre-20th-century family as white plantation owners, received a call from another Cheshire — a Cheshire descendant from Godfrey’s great-grandfather and one of his slaves.
No one in the contemporary Cheshire family knew that they had cousins descended from their predecessors and their slaves. It rocked the foundation of the documentary that Godfrey was making as he and his entire family invited the Northern Cheshires to visit Midway Plantation as it was being prepped for movement to a new area.
Leyla and I had a lot of great conversations after watching “Moving Midway” together, and she began compiling lists of other movies we should watch and books we should read.
Adolescence on its own is a transformational time. It’s fascinating to witness Leyla’s transformation from a kid who just followed her family adults around and ate what we cooked and wore what we bought her …. And now — well, who is she? What does she wants to be called? Who is she going to call her tribe?
Aside from racial and ethnic identity, Leyla’s putting together her generational identity. The generation born after 2000, the teens who are becoming aware and getting involved in activism and vlogging and blogging and Instagramming and Snapchatting have had a lot of monikers thrown at them: Gen Z, iGen, Posts, Homeland Generation, ReGen, Plurals.
So in March 2015, the network asked more than 1,000 kids who were born after December 2000 what they should be called, generating 544 names including the Navigators, the Regenerators, the Builders, the Bridge Generation, and the winner, the Founders.”
Whoa. This is a lot to place on the shoulders of an 8th grader who recently made a big move from the South to Chicagoland.
But Leyla’s taking it in stride. She’s curious about it all and she’s embracing her various identities. It’s not always easy — adolescence itself never is — but I’m proudly watching her develop into someone who doesn’t casually take on labels tossed her way and questions leaders and learns from people she respects.
So … what is she? My little Founder who had replicated my “Nana bag,” which includes everything that might be needed on an outing — from a clipboard with voter registration forms to Scooby Doo Band-Aids to ginger drops to Kleenex to various electronic device chargers — but her bag also includes a ball of twine (in case she has to escape from somewhere or needs to tie up a kidnapper), a little spray bottle and paper towels (in case she encounters smudgy windows and glass doors), and a Pusheen Cat pencil case (because pencils should be cool).
My little Founder who roams the thrift shop of her family’s various legacies and idiosyncrasies and races and cultures and musical tastes and interests in activism or nonactivism and then takes what calls to her and lets someone else have the things that she’s not into.
I love this girl. Whatever she is. Whoever she will be. My multi-ratio math-geek granddaughter who lectures Republican legislators on alternative energies, the evils of fracking, and the impact of global warming on their home state.
She’s just one of the wonders of the generation that’s rising up. And this generation doesn’t see the world in stark dichotomies. They have so much to look for — and we have so much to see as they graduate their growing-up years to take the reins of our families and our society.