RETCON ME WHITE

A Paleface Gets Kicked Out of the Tribe by Western Science

During a recent milestone family get together* a deep, dark secret as to my own nature was revealed. It’s an origin story event—and most normal people don’t have too many of those. I didn’t quite pull a Blue Beetle, wherein my having been bathed in vita-rays, then finding a suit of magic armor, then finding a magic amulet and then proceeding to fight crime while in the dual identity of a police officer was suddenly exposed to public scrutiny and made front page news, Maybe it wasn’t quite even on the scale of a Black Hood: having been framed for murder, torture murdered and then dismembered, only to be reassembled by someone called the Hermit; and then later to be exposed as a police officer playing both sides of the superhero law after his lunk headed Irish cop partner rips off his Black Hood; and then becoming a private detective for a dozen or so issues before his magazine was renamed Laugh Comics**. Nope. Not even that startling at all. But it was stunning news. At least to me.

We all have a back story. Most of ours are fairly short. They are little bits of family dogma, recorded incidents and occasional oft repeated whiffs of fancy told as truth. (I’ve had a few of the latter in my day.) These help us define who we are—or who we think we are—or what our place is in what we think our world is. For most real people, these bits of trivia are static. You aren’t going to change birthdays, or places of birth or parents ever if you are in any way normal. Few of us are going to pull a Power Girl and start as the cousin of Superman circa WWII only to later not be from that era, that world, nor later even lose one’s loose affiliation with the Man of Steel outside of similar archetypical abilities. Few of us are going to slip from dinosaur to reptile to creodont—only to have creodont classified away except for some varieties of ancient jackal, unless one really was an ancient jackal to begin with. Most of us will not experience a Crisis on Infinite Worlds or reevaluation of fossil classifications in any place outside of business. (When it comes to your career life, all bets are off.) Right before the ends of our time on Earth it may dawn on many of us how truly insignificant the majority of our endeavors have been (hear me, Hugh Heffner), but most of us will spend the vast portion of our existence contentedly eating to the beat without an instant spent over-contemplating mere pedestrian context.

In short, few of us get retconned. The RETCON is the rewriting of one’s back story. In general, it only happens in fiction, usually to comic book characters who are now experiencing adventures while still in their mid thirties for several decades. (I guess it’s worse for Archie and Dondi.) Nothing core should change for a real person. Implausible switches in context ala Pudd’nhead Wilson, wherein the slave and master switch places, are fairly unheard of. The last may indeed come first at some later date in some later place, but here and now you probably are where you are going to be metaphysically. Reality is freakishly consistent.

More common is that some peripheral bit of one’s back story either loses its luster or is simply revealed as non fact at a really inopportune time. We call this an Elizabeth Warren Moment.*** For years current senator Elizabeth Warren was under the impression that she was part Cherokee. It was a story told in her family circles, a way of explaining the clan’s rather high cheek bones. (Congenital deformity does not have the same zing as red skin heritage, I guess.) Warren bought this to the point of listing herself as a partial native American on her college’s biographical sketch. Unfortunately it proved to be BS and her listing came back to haunt her during her election contest against a former male porn model. It shot her credibility in a lot of ways, even though it may not have been entirely her fault.

I too have had an Elizabeth Warren Moment. In fact I have had the exact same moment, sans the male porn model and the experience of running for office. (As God is my witness, I will never enter any contest against a male porn model, former or otherwise.) For years my family has laid claim to not so slight Cherokee heritage. To hear the family historian tell it, my clan is descended from a multitude of half breeds: people with half Cherokee blood marrying other half Cherokees because those are the only folks that would have us. Family legend states that when the Indian Office came to our fair lands, which are now on the bottom of Kentucky Lake, to move the natives off to the Trail of Tears our particular clan was saved due to the fact that the authorities could not sort native from European amongst us and thus moved on. It’s a touching story, with tinges of Moses thrown in for spice.

It is also utter bull pucky. Western Science has recently revealed that I, an absolutely verified member of the clan, have not a drop of native American aboriginal blood in me. Not Cherokee, not Illini, not nothing. By rights, I should show up as 12,5% or something in that range, but instead I have none. And I am my father’s son as my father is his son. And all of the other genetic tests seem to confirm the rest of my ancestry, as it is known.

So much for my NAACP membership. As it should turn out, I am WHITE. And all of my ancestors are WHITE also. I’m sort of a B Class white person, the type directly descended from people who don’t cook very well. I am about one quarter pasty faced European islander (brit/scot/irish/celt), the type of people easily dominated by the Romans and 3/4ths the type of eastern European historically dominated by the Russians (slav). Add in an overlay of Jew, which also slants eastern European and I’m done. I might as well call myself Nigel Yugoslavia now that my Squanto phase is done.

It turns out my clan was hardly dodging the Indian Office at all. More likely they were pointing out the Cherokee in hopes of stealing their oh-so-valuable tobacco farming land—all of which has man-sized carp swimming above it today. If it is any consolation to the Cherokee, my clan remains as dirty poor today as they were back then. Today they live in a jungle where their no longer subsidized tobacco farms once were and regale themselves with stories of how they saved themselves from fates worse than their own stupidly staying in an area devoid of prospects.

I will now embrace my B Grade white heritage. Excuse me while I boil the ever living hell out of a perfectly good steak. 

  

*Wonderblog policy is to not directly speak of one’s self, except in the abstract. This keeps the Wonderblog from being a personal journal. Because that’s sooo freaking important.

** Or it could have been Jughead. The MLJ/Archie Comics lines of descent are difficult to plumb. Case in point is Pep Comics, which was a recycle of the naughty girls Flapper Fiction pulp Pep Stories. At some point Black Hood became Laugh and Laugh subdivided into Laugh Comics and the Jughead’s Laugh Comics.

*** Just for total Kismet Value, I was presented with a copy of Senator Warren’s new book A Fighting Chance at this same event.