Fractional Truths: Inheritance By Disguise
This is a story about ghosts.
But before we get to that, let me talk about America for a second.
If you’ve spent any time on the internet—or just talked to someone from Ireland—you’ve probably heard the complaints: “Ugh, Americans always say they’re Irish, they’re not Irish, they’re American.” And listen, I get it. I really do. I’ve met Irish-Americans who do the full-blown Plastic Paddy performance—Guinness shirts and Claddagh rings and Celtic knot tattoos with Gaelic phrases they can’t pronounce, swearing they’re “more Irish than the Irish,” like they’re auditioning for Riverdance 2: Electric O'Boogaloo.
And yeah, that shit is cringe.
But here’s the part a lot of Europeans don’t seem to get: America is not a country the way Ireland is a country. America is more like fifty fractal realities duct-taped together and called a nation. An Italian-American from Boston and a Norwegian-American from Minnesota are going to have completely different cultures, food, values, accents, and histories—and neither of them is having the same American experience as, say, a Black family whose roots in the U.S. go back to slavery, or an Indigenous family whose land was stolen in the first place, or even a third-gen Jew whose ancestors fled pogroms in Eastern Europe.
So yeah, I’m American. But that doesn’t mean the stories of where my people came from don’t matter. If anything, they matter more. Because this country is built out of forgetting—and you don’t stay whole here unless you remember.
This essay is about remembering.
But before we get to that, let me talk about America for a second.
If you’ve spent any time on the internet—or just talked to someone from Ireland—you’ve probably heard the complaints: “Ugh, Americans always say they’re Irish, they’re not Irish, they’re American.” And listen, I get it. I really do. I’ve met Irish-Americans who do the full-blown Plastic Paddy performance—Guinness shirts and Claddagh rings and Celtic knot tattoos with Gaelic phrases they can’t pronounce, swearing they’re “more Irish than the Irish,” like they’re auditioning for Riverdance 2: Electric O'Boogaloo.
And yeah, that shit is cringe.
But here’s the part a lot of Europeans don’t seem to get: America is not a country the way Ireland is a country. America is more like fifty fractal realities duct-taped together and called a nation. An Italian-American from Boston and a Norwegian-American from Minnesota are going to have completely different cultures, food, values, accents, and histories—and neither of them is having the same American experience as, say, a Black family whose roots in the U.S. go back to slavery, or an Indigenous family whose land was stolen in the first place, or even a third-gen Jew whose ancestors fled pogroms in Eastern Europe.
So yeah, I’m American. But that doesn’t mean the stories of where my people came from don’t matter. If anything, they matter more. Because this country is built out of forgetting—and you don’t stay whole here unless you remember.
This essay is about remembering.
Let’s start with my maternal grandfather. A man so determined to survive this country that he vanished in plain sight.
He was born to a jazz pianist father and a singer mother in Nova Scotia.
A father who was Scottish and Irish, and a mother who was half-Scottish, half-Black.
That's right, one of my maternal great-grandmothers was a Black Nova Scotian.
People tend to think of Canada as the polite upstairs neighbor to America’s blood-soaked history, but Nova Scotia has its own legacy of segregation, displacement, and racist policy—just with colder weather. The descendants of Black Loyalists, Maroons, and refugees from the U.S. settled there in the 18th and 19th centuries, only to find themselves marginalized, underfunded, and ghettoized in places like Africville, which the Halifax government later bulldozed in the name of “urban renewal.”
My grandpa's parents moved to the United States when he was young, and in order to not get arrested or lynched, they played a game a lot of mixed-race couples had to play back then: my great-grandfather pretended to be a widower, and my great-grandmother pretended to be the nanny.
Let me say that again. He called his wife “the nanny” in public so their kids wouldn’t be taken away or worse.
My grandfather served in the U.S. Navy during World War II—the Navy was segregated, but he joined a non-segregated unit because nobody questioned him. He made it through the war alive, met a Norwegian soldier, and saw a photo of his sister. He started writing to her. They fell in love through letters, and when the war was over, she immigrated to the U.S. and married him.
And that was that. She became the white wife of a white man. They had a son and four daughters.
My mother was born in 1950. She was 1/8 Black, growing up in a time when segregation was still law. So she stayed silent. She passed too. She married my dad, a white Southern guy whose brothers were in the fucking KKK. And yes, she knew that. And yes, she married him anyway.
Their marriage didn’t last, but her silence did.
I grew up thinking I was white. Just… white. German and Dutch on my father's side, Norwegian and Scottish on my mother's side. Nothing complicated.
Then I hit 38. Took a DNA test on a whim. And a lot more Black ancestry came back than I was expecting. I stared at it for a long time, trying to make it make sense. I asked my mother, “What’s going on here?” And she said, without missing a beat, “Oh, well, my father was 1/4 Black. He passed as white.” Then she told me about my grandfather's parents: when I was a kid she'd told me my great-grandparents had been a jazz pianist and singer, but I didn't realize one of them had been Black. That literally never came up.
And I just blinked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her answer was sharp, rehearsed: “How do you think your father would have taken that information?”
And the thing is—she wasn’t wrong. My father would not have taken that information well. So yeah, I get why she didn’t tell him.
But they split up when I was eleven.
And I cut contact with him entirely when I was sixteen—because of abuse.
There were decades when she could’ve told me.
In my teens. In my twenties. In my thirties.
She could have sat me down anytime and said, “Here’s something you deserve to know.”
But she didn’t.
I was thirty-eight, staring at a screen, learning my family history from a fucking algorithm. I had to ask her for the truth. And when I followed up with, “Okay, but why didn’t you tell me after the divorce? After he was out of our lives?”—she wouldn’t answer.
Just silence.
Another inheritance.
One thing I knew about my family history was that my mother had been very close to her paternal grandmother, and my mother off-handedly mentioned a few days later that she'd seen very old photos of her grandmother's younger years and said, “She looked just like Halle Berry.” That sounds like something to be proud of, and yet she kept it swept under the rug.
Here’s the kicker, though: my mom wasn’t just hiding it. She was performing something else entirely.
She had a Black best friend for years—from the late 90s well into the 2010s—and for a while, I thought maybe she’d wrestled with her own heritage in private. But if she did, it didn’t leave her any wiser. She wasn’t progressive. She voted Republican consistently, even before it was fashionable to be rabid about it. She listened to country music and oldies and made snide comments about immigrants, “welfare queens,” and rap music.
And then in 2016, she went full MAGA. Started calling Trump “our only hope.” Started saying openly racist shit at the dinner table.
And then came the Latinaphishing.
I wish I was kidding.
She plays an online game where you can make an avatar and talk to people. She chose a curvy, dark-skinned Latina character and started voice-chatting with other players using a thick fake Spanish accent. She claimed to be a “Mexican for Trump” and told people she supported the wall. Said things like “I no want no more immigrants, señor, we need to build de wall por favor” in a Dora the Explorer accent.
I’ve never wanted to yeet myself out a fucking window more in my life.
Here’s a woman who is 1/8 Black. Who had a Black grandmother. Who hid all of it. And now she’s roleplaying as a racist caricature because she thinks it’s funny. Because she thinks she’s “passing.” Because she thinks the people she’s mocking will never find out.
My mother is a case study in internalized racism and inherited trauma metastasized into boomer delusion. And it’s horrifying. But it’s also part of my story. Part of what I inherited, whether I wanted to or not.
A few months after I said "WTF" about my DNA test and she dropped the “Oh, I’m 1/8 Black, so you’re 1/16” bomb on me like it was a grocery list item, we were in the middle of yet another argument. I’d moved back home in 2014 for a few years and dealing with her was fucking exhausting. She was now deep into the MAGA brainwashing, when she’d start parroting Fox News talking points and racist conspiracy theories like they were gospel, and I was done pretending I could keep my mouth shut.
She was going off about something—immigrants, or how Trump was going to save America from “degeneracy.” I honestly don’t even remember what the trigger was. I just remember snapping.
I looked her dead in the eye and said: “You realize that if this were 1818 instead of 2018 you would be called an octoroon and you'd be someone’s slave, right? Maybe a nanny or a governess or a cook—but definitely a slave.”
She froze.
Her face twisted.
And then she stormed out of my room.
No rebuttal. No apology. Just the sound of her feet retreating down the hallway, fast and furious, like maybe if she moved quickly enough she could outrun the truth.
She couldn’t.
I still hear that silence louder than any of the shouting.
During that same period, I was dating someone non-binary. They lived in the South, in a state that used to have a one-drop rule. And I remember saying to them, only half-joking: “If I ever move there and MAGA gets their way, they’re going to count me as legally Black and our relationship will be considered miscegenation.”
Because that’s how it would’ve worked. As a “hexadecaroon”—1/16—I would’ve been born free, technically. My mother, at 1/8, would have been a slave. But that line would’ve followed me everywhere. The mark of Blackness in a country that turned ancestry into caste law.
And yeah, nobody knows unless I tell them; I don’t pretend I live in that skin. What I do carry is the knowledge that if the clock were turned back two hundred years, I’d be treated differently for something I didn’t even know I was until adulthood.
So no, I don’t go around saying “I’m Black.” That’s not my lived experience. But I’m also not blind. I’m old enough to see how racism shaped my mother. How it choked my family’s stories. How it bent their lives around survival. And if MAGA ever gets their way and overturns Loving, and “states’ rights” becomes code for bring back the one-drop rule, then yeah—that’s a thing. That’s a very real, very terrifying thing.
And I’m not going to be quiet about it.
He was born to a jazz pianist father and a singer mother in Nova Scotia.
A father who was Scottish and Irish, and a mother who was half-Scottish, half-Black.
That's right, one of my maternal great-grandmothers was a Black Nova Scotian.
People tend to think of Canada as the polite upstairs neighbor to America’s blood-soaked history, but Nova Scotia has its own legacy of segregation, displacement, and racist policy—just with colder weather. The descendants of Black Loyalists, Maroons, and refugees from the U.S. settled there in the 18th and 19th centuries, only to find themselves marginalized, underfunded, and ghettoized in places like Africville, which the Halifax government later bulldozed in the name of “urban renewal.”
My grandpa's parents moved to the United States when he was young, and in order to not get arrested or lynched, they played a game a lot of mixed-race couples had to play back then: my great-grandfather pretended to be a widower, and my great-grandmother pretended to be the nanny.
Let me say that again. He called his wife “the nanny” in public so their kids wouldn’t be taken away or worse.
My grandfather served in the U.S. Navy during World War II—the Navy was segregated, but he joined a non-segregated unit because nobody questioned him. He made it through the war alive, met a Norwegian soldier, and saw a photo of his sister. He started writing to her. They fell in love through letters, and when the war was over, she immigrated to the U.S. and married him.
And that was that. She became the white wife of a white man. They had a son and four daughters.
My mother was born in 1950. She was 1/8 Black, growing up in a time when segregation was still law. So she stayed silent. She passed too. She married my dad, a white Southern guy whose brothers were in the fucking KKK. And yes, she knew that. And yes, she married him anyway.
Their marriage didn’t last, but her silence did.
I grew up thinking I was white. Just… white. German and Dutch on my father's side, Norwegian and Scottish on my mother's side. Nothing complicated.
Then I hit 38. Took a DNA test on a whim. And a lot more Black ancestry came back than I was expecting. I stared at it for a long time, trying to make it make sense. I asked my mother, “What’s going on here?” And she said, without missing a beat, “Oh, well, my father was 1/4 Black. He passed as white.” Then she told me about my grandfather's parents: when I was a kid she'd told me my great-grandparents had been a jazz pianist and singer, but I didn't realize one of them had been Black. That literally never came up.
And I just blinked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her answer was sharp, rehearsed: “How do you think your father would have taken that information?”
And the thing is—she wasn’t wrong. My father would not have taken that information well. So yeah, I get why she didn’t tell him.
But they split up when I was eleven.
And I cut contact with him entirely when I was sixteen—because of abuse.
There were decades when she could’ve told me.
In my teens. In my twenties. In my thirties.
She could have sat me down anytime and said, “Here’s something you deserve to know.”
But she didn’t.
I was thirty-eight, staring at a screen, learning my family history from a fucking algorithm. I had to ask her for the truth. And when I followed up with, “Okay, but why didn’t you tell me after the divorce? After he was out of our lives?”—she wouldn’t answer.
Just silence.
Another inheritance.
One thing I knew about my family history was that my mother had been very close to her paternal grandmother, and my mother off-handedly mentioned a few days later that she'd seen very old photos of her grandmother's younger years and said, “She looked just like Halle Berry.” That sounds like something to be proud of, and yet she kept it swept under the rug.
Here’s the kicker, though: my mom wasn’t just hiding it. She was performing something else entirely.
She had a Black best friend for years—from the late 90s well into the 2010s—and for a while, I thought maybe she’d wrestled with her own heritage in private. But if she did, it didn’t leave her any wiser. She wasn’t progressive. She voted Republican consistently, even before it was fashionable to be rabid about it. She listened to country music and oldies and made snide comments about immigrants, “welfare queens,” and rap music.
And then in 2016, she went full MAGA. Started calling Trump “our only hope.” Started saying openly racist shit at the dinner table.
And then came the Latinaphishing.
I wish I was kidding.
She plays an online game where you can make an avatar and talk to people. She chose a curvy, dark-skinned Latina character and started voice-chatting with other players using a thick fake Spanish accent. She claimed to be a “Mexican for Trump” and told people she supported the wall. Said things like “I no want no more immigrants, señor, we need to build de wall por favor” in a Dora the Explorer accent.
I’ve never wanted to yeet myself out a fucking window more in my life.
Here’s a woman who is 1/8 Black. Who had a Black grandmother. Who hid all of it. And now she’s roleplaying as a racist caricature because she thinks it’s funny. Because she thinks she’s “passing.” Because she thinks the people she’s mocking will never find out.
My mother is a case study in internalized racism and inherited trauma metastasized into boomer delusion. And it’s horrifying. But it’s also part of my story. Part of what I inherited, whether I wanted to or not.
A few months after I said "WTF" about my DNA test and she dropped the “Oh, I’m 1/8 Black, so you’re 1/16” bomb on me like it was a grocery list item, we were in the middle of yet another argument. I’d moved back home in 2014 for a few years and dealing with her was fucking exhausting. She was now deep into the MAGA brainwashing, when she’d start parroting Fox News talking points and racist conspiracy theories like they were gospel, and I was done pretending I could keep my mouth shut.
She was going off about something—immigrants, or how Trump was going to save America from “degeneracy.” I honestly don’t even remember what the trigger was. I just remember snapping.
I looked her dead in the eye and said: “You realize that if this were 1818 instead of 2018 you would be called an octoroon and you'd be someone’s slave, right? Maybe a nanny or a governess or a cook—but definitely a slave.”
She froze.
Her face twisted.
And then she stormed out of my room.
No rebuttal. No apology. Just the sound of her feet retreating down the hallway, fast and furious, like maybe if she moved quickly enough she could outrun the truth.
She couldn’t.
I still hear that silence louder than any of the shouting.
During that same period, I was dating someone non-binary. They lived in the South, in a state that used to have a one-drop rule. And I remember saying to them, only half-joking: “If I ever move there and MAGA gets their way, they’re going to count me as legally Black and our relationship will be considered miscegenation.”
Because that’s how it would’ve worked. As a “hexadecaroon”—1/16—I would’ve been born free, technically. My mother, at 1/8, would have been a slave. But that line would’ve followed me everywhere. The mark of Blackness in a country that turned ancestry into caste law.
And yeah, nobody knows unless I tell them; I don’t pretend I live in that skin. What I do carry is the knowledge that if the clock were turned back two hundred years, I’d be treated differently for something I didn’t even know I was until adulthood.
So no, I don’t go around saying “I’m Black.” That’s not my lived experience. But I’m also not blind. I’m old enough to see how racism shaped my mother. How it choked my family’s stories. How it bent their lives around survival. And if MAGA ever gets their way and overturns Loving, and “states’ rights” becomes code for bring back the one-drop rule, then yeah—that’s a thing. That’s a very real, very terrifying thing.
And I’m not going to be quiet about it.
Finding out I was 1/16 Black didn’t make me feel like a different person. It wasn’t like suddenly claiming an identity. It was like realizing someone had stolen a page from your family history book, and you’d been reading the edited version your whole life.
And it started to make certain things make more sense.
For example: I was born with strawberry-blonde hair, which darkened to auburn in childhood, and then turned fully silver by 35. My mother had the same auburn-red hair. So does my older half-brother, her son from a previous relationship. Everyone always said it must be the Scottish in us—and sure, that’s part of it. But it turns out that hair came from her father. The one who was 1/4 Black. The same grandfather who had to pass as white to join a non-segregated unit in the Navy.
Our hair wasn’t just red, though—it was frizzy. Not the soft kind of frizz you see in shampoo commercials. The kind that grows out before it grows down. The kind you fight with in the mirror. The kind that makes people stare and strangers ask stupid questions. I got made fun of for it in every decade of my life, until I came out as transmasc, at which point I finally said fuck it and cut it short. Not because I think men have to have short hair—plenty don’t; it helps me pass better as male, sure, but more importantly, it’s one less war I have to fight every morning.
And when I was 23, a Black friend and I were hanging out and talking about using the same hair products and she asked, dead serious, “Are you mixed?”
I laughed it off. I didn’t know.
But something in me paused—like a piano key half-pressed. Like maybe my body remembered something my family wouldn’t say out loud.
As another example of things making more sense:
After the war, my grandparents bought a small farm and lived a quiet life. My grandfather was a quiet man—didn’t make eye contact, rarely spoke unless he had to, obsessed over wood carvings and jigsaw puzzles. Looking back, I see all the signs of autism, undiagnosed and untreated, because back then nobody had language for that either. I suspect his father—the musical genius jazz pianist who married a singer—might’ve been autistic too. Maybe that’s part of why he didn’t care what people thought of their “unconventional” relationship. Maybe that’s part of what I inherited too.
What I know for sure is this: despite the stereotype of rural people being uneducated hillbillies, my grandfather believed in education like it was oxygen. He couldn’t go to school himself—my mother once said that as yet another off-handed remark, like it explained everything, and I think it does. He wasn’t allowed to go to school, but he made damn sure his kids did. My mom was valedictorian of her high school class. Got a scholarship to Wellesley. Two years in, she got pregnant with my brother and dropped out—but still, she’d made it there. She made it because he’d drilled into her that intelligence was the only thing the world couldn’t take from you. And maybe—just maybe—that was his way of fighting back against the racism that said he wasn’t allowed to learn.
Oh, and then there’s my stepdad. Just to complete the trifecta of “what the actual fuck.”
He’s half Quebecois and half Oneida. Has enough Native ancestry to actually qualify for federal benefits. Could get free healthcare and a stipend from the tribe.
But he won’t. Because, quote: “I don’t take handouts.”
Also, he’s racist as hell.
Like, thinks immigrants are ruining the country, tells jokes about Latinos and Asians, uses the N-word kind of racist.
I’ve never understood how a man who isn’t even fully white himself can be that virulently racist. But it just goes to show: internalized white supremacy isn’t about logic. It’s about fear. Shame. Status. And people like my stepdad cling to whiteness like a life raft, even when they’re not actually in the boat.
Which is why I’ve always found the phrase “only white people can be racist” to be reductive at best and completely unhelpful at worst. Anybody can be racist. White people just have institutional power on their side. But bigotry isn’t limited to any one group—it metastasizes wherever people are taught to hate themselves.
In that sense, he's perfect for my mom, two self-loathing mixed race people.
Another piece of the puzzle: I’m Jewish. A convert, not ethnically. I came to Judaism because I wanted something real. Something rooted.
And part of what I love about Judaism is the reverence for ancestors. The idea that history matters. That we learn by remembering. That we light candles for the people we’ve lost and tell their stories to keep them alive.
So I feel I owe my great-grandparents the same kind of remembering.
Not to claim a racial identity that’s not mine. But to not participate in the erasure they were forced into.
To say: I see you. I know now. I won’t forget again.
That’s the kind of Jew I am. The kind who doesn’t erase the past, even when it’s messy.
Some people reading this will still say, “So what? You’re white. Why are you bringing this up?”
And to them I say: because history matters. Family matters. Truth matters.
Because silence is the seedbed of bigotry. And when we refuse to name our ghosts, they keep haunting the next generation.
I’m not pretending to be Black. I’m not putting it in my bios or marking it on censuses or using it to benefit from affirmative action policies. I’m not joining spaces that aren’t mine. But I’m also not going to act like my great-grandmother didn’t exist because she was inconvenient to someone’s idea of what I’m “allowed” to acknowledge.
I think it’s weird as hell that I can say “I’m 1/16 Irish” and nobody blinks, but if I say “I have 1/16 Black ancestry,” suddenly it’s cultural appropriation. That’s not justice. That’s a different kind of erasure.
I’m not asking to be included in anyone’s trauma. I’m asking to be honest about my own legacy. Because pretending racism didn’t touch my family—didn’t shape my mother, my grandfather, my entire identity—is a lie.
So here’s what I believe:
Ancestry is not a costume. It’s not a badge or a label or a vibe. It’s a responsibility.
To remember. To tell the truth. To listen to the past, even when it hurts.
I will never know what it’s like to be racialized Black in America. But I know what it’s like to be the child of someone who buried that part of themselves. I know what it’s like to be raised by people who thought shame was safety. I know what it’s like to look in the mirror and see someone you weren’t allowed to know.
So I’m lighting a candle for my great-grandmother. For the jazz singer who had to pretend to be the nanny. For my grandfather, who joined the Navy under a lie just to serve a country that wouldn’t have served him. For the silences. For the shame. For the bloodlines that run deeper than the bullshit.
This is me naming my ghosts.
And this is me telling them: I see you now.
DECEMBER 2025 update: In November 2025, as Trump began building a $400,000 palace at the White House while the government shutdown meant people on food assistance received delayed and reduced payments, my mom (who is retired and on assistance) finally admitted to me that she regretted voting for him, I had been right about him, and she apologized to me for her bigoted views including transphobia. It doesn't undo the damage she did, but I felt it was appropriate to mention here that sometimes people can change.
(My stepfather, unfortunately, is still a bigoted asshole.)
(My stepfather, unfortunately, is still a bigoted asshole.)
