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Kyle T. Mays (Black/Saginaw Anishinaabe) is currently an Assistant Professor in the departments of African American Studies and American Indian Studies at UCLA. He is a transdisciplinary scholar that works at the intersection of Afro-Indigenous Studies, Urban Indigenous Studies, and Indigenous Hip Hop culture. His book Indigenous Detroit: Indigeneity, Gender, and Race and the Making of a Modern American City is under contract with the University of Washington Press. His first book was Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America. You can follow him on Twitter: @mays_kyle.
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Kyle writes:
The Souls of White-Indians: A Letter to My White Indian Friend
“But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it? Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!” - W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of White Folks (1921)
What up doe? How you been? Boozhoo.
I am writing to you because I love you. Because, as a Black/Native hetero-cis male, who grew up with three urban influences — Cleveland and Detroit — in Lansing, Michigan, the capitol of Michigan, once the home of Malcolm X, I have long understood the complexities of race and racism, and I want to share some with you. I have the experience of a poor, urban, Black Native person. Even as I gain more cultural and social capital because of my education, I cannot shake off my upbringing, which I am very proud of.
I am writing because I hate white supremacy, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy. I hate all things oppressive. And I hate how they have injured us all.
Can we talk about what it means to be a White-Indian in the United States? It’s funny, using that phrase “White-Indian;” though I hear it every so often, it is barely used in academic circles, or not in the same frequency or manner as Black-Indians. I guess only the full bloods — the most authentic of the authentic Native people use it. Let’s talk about what it’s like to be Native but look white.
I know: there’s the problem of “pretindians” who have a long forgotten “full-blooded” Indian relative, and those who have a Cherokee princess great-grandmother. I’m sure you’ve heard of a few “scandals” over the last few years, those who claim an identity but it seems skeptical at best. I don’t want to talk about that; our conversations there are too saturated, too predictable. Black-Indian folks got problems as well. We can’t hide from state violence, or at least pass as white, and therefore be invisible from it, both as a structural choice and at one’s convenience.
A major issue for me, which I haven’t heard you speak on, even in private, is your own white skin privilege. Before you stop reading, please hear me out. You see, I’m often read as only Black, unless someone knows me as Black, simply because of my skin color. I’m cool with that. Like your Indigenous ancestry, mine, too, is invisible. But because I’m read as a Black male, the animalistic threat to society, I can’t hide. I can’t hide my blackness, no matter how white I sound. And I ain planning to. I can’t sweep it under rug if I put on white people’s moccasins. Society reads me as Black.
Here’s how my blackness works everyday. I get pulled over for a broken taillight, again; I deliberately keep my hands out of my pockets when walking through stores — that’s mostly because I’ve been accused of stealing a few times for walking around a store with my hands in my pocket; it was winter and they were cold, know what I mean? White people look extra nervous when I walk by them at night; the middle-aged person grabs their purse; their partner pulls them much closer to them when they see me approaching. Maybe the purse was falling off of their shoulders or they were trying to extend a courtesy by letting me pass. Who knows? But I know how I felt in the situation, which has happened my whole life.
I cringe when I read the crime alerts from the universities I have attended. Black male, between 5 foot seven inches and 6 foot four inches, jeans, dark shirt, BLACK. I’ve been stopped by police, at night, around campus, a handful of times. I can’t express the anger and humiliation or, to quote W.E.B. Du Bois, to remember that I am a problem. This is the world I experience daily.
But I resist. I wear a hoodie or slightly tilt my hat because it is a part of Black American (and Hip Hop) culture. I wear feather earrings because I am proud to be a Black-Indian. But then my peers ask me questions, first with the gaze — why does a Black male wear such earrings? More importantly, why does someone with white skin privilege, a Native person, ask me where I got my earrings? I garnish my body with a few tattoos, one on the back of my hand with my dodem (clan), so I can rep my clan. Admittedly, I also give a shoulder bump or two to the white boy walking like he owns the side walk, mostly cause this ain August 1955 in deep south Mississippi… I resist. But then I remember my family has always dealt with the paradox of being Black and Native — other Native folks calling us nigger. And it wasn’t in 1955 Mississippi. It was 1970s Detroit.
In academic circles, I have to always be calm and non-threatening so I’m not read as an angry Black man — a potentially career devastating label. That anger is pent up, always ready to burst but also not — I have too much to lose. I won’t even describe what it’s like to grow up poor and trying to adjust to what it means to exist in this middle class world. This is the soul of a Black/Native man — this is my everyday life.
Now, let’s talk about the soul of a White-Indian.
I’m sure white people share jokes with you that they would not otherwise say to their Black peers. That’s not your fault. They say this because you’re read as white. They might express their displeasure about the new hire, the person of color who isn’t qualified enough, and how, they ain racist, but…
I’m sure you get upset about that, right? No doubt your politics are on point, and you defend people of color during those perceived moments of whiteness — of purported white racial allegiance, even when you don’t have to. Big shout to you. Miigwetch.
In that moment, though, you re-remember how your Native identity is erased, which is a violent product of settler colonialism and white supremacy. You ask yourself, “Why would they erase my Native identity?” “Why did they assume I’m white, that I’m not Native?” You feel anger, hurt and shame. You reminisce about growing up as a child and not having your Native identity acknowledged; you’re still harboring that childhood pain — I know — me too. Like the teacher who told me I was Black and being “Indian was a waste of time. You shouldn’t be ashamed of being Black.” In case you were wondering, that wasn’t a grade school teacher who said that when I was 8 years old; that was a prominent Black Studies scholar at a university during my visit while I was considering graduate school. I can hear their words ringing in my ear, still.
I’m sure you have a well-rehearsed story about your family history — well-documented — about how long you’ve had Native relations, to explain why you look white. It’s a shame we have to go through that, huh?. But why don’t you talk about your white skin privilege? I know you deal with similar trauma of Native invisibility. People dismiss your identity outright because you look white; and that has a psychic affect I’m sure. But you have a privilege that I don’t, at all, and I have yet to hear you acknowledge it. Let me list a few examples of your skin privilege; you can operate in public spaces and enjoy the public and psychological wages of being white at your leisure. You can also access some material benefits of being white if you so desire. Remember, as David Roediger argues, following the work of Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction, the working class chose to be white. While you may not choose to be white given your Native ancestry and citizenship, by ignoring your skin privilege or leaving it unacknowledged, you’re not actively resisting it either, and thus, you benefit. You’re not considered a problem until you make yourself a problem, or visible, as a Native person; if you’re looking to rent or buy a house, you won’t be turned down for reasons unknown to you. The wages of whiteness are yours, until you begin to turn those wages down.
I know you are Native, and I accept you as such. You’re my homie, and I love you. I don’t care what you look like. But your silence on white privilege is disturbing; it vexes my soul. It’s like you want to run away from your whiteness, like you’re ashamed. Given the history of whiteness and how Trump has used it as a rallying point recently, I wouldn’t necessarily show pride in my whiteness. You write about how white people have systematically erased Indianness from history, from your own family, your body, as you should; we need that work, we need to recover those stories. I can’t run away from my blackness. How would my mom feel, a single Black mother from Cleveland, Ohio, if I only talked about being Native? I can’t even imagine it.
I see you in certain spaces. You’ll be the first one to present yourself in an “authentic” sort of way. I’m not mad at you. You’ll adorn yourself in Native bling — me too — and you rock it well. You’ll carry-on our languages by introducing yourself in yours. You’ll talk about the problems of Native invisibility, and share with your students the difficulties of living as a Native person during a time in which we have racist mascots.
I hear you always hating on white people for their lack of humanity. You hate on them more than I hear Black folks hate on them. The discussion of colonialism is important, and we need to continue to have it in nuanced ways. But we have yet to adequately also bring to the forefront a discussion of how whiteness works within the matrix of settler colonialism. Having white skin has benefits.
You will tweet with the hashtag #NotYourMascot. You’ll share with the world stories of Native appropriation and how white people appropriate everything. I appreciate it all, and the world needs to hear it.
You’ll even talk shit about those white cis-males, and how they’re always mansplaining. Actually, thanks for that. As a male, I try and call that shit out when I see it, even in myself, that way my sistas don’t have to bear that burden alone. I don’t always catch it, but I try.
Do you also tell people what it’s like to also have white skin privilege? Do you relay to those same people about how women of color and trans people of color are harassed, even worse, killed, both because of their gender/non-gender identity, sexuality and dark skin?
I’m assuming no, because it further makes your invisible Native identity more invisible. There is a certain level of power being a white-Indian. Even as you might speak so eloquently about what it means to be Native, how negative representations effect Native people, how Native people are rendered invisible, there are consequences in the framing. You might say that Native people come in all shades of color, but you cloak it within the rhetoric of multiculturalism, without acknowledging the structures of power rooted in whiteness and difference. White people likely equate your hypervisibility with power and authority that is not afforded to a Black-Indian. I’m not saying you don’t have to deal with other forms of violence, and your identity being silenced under colonialism is violent, but I doubt you leave the house each day wondering if your family will get the call that night… the call telling your family that you resisted arrest and were shot and killed.
There’s a certain vulnerability to addressing your whiteness: you have to deal with more contradictions between whiteness and Indianness, and that’s scary. You have to also face your worst fears of not being considered Native enough. It’s easy to hate on someone who does not have documented Cherokee ancestry, and sometimes that person needs to be called out. But can you also look in the mirror, and tell me what it’s like to have white skin privilege? Your silence on the topic of white skin privilege allows anti-blackness and anti-Indianness to continue.
Though you might be Indian, we might see you as such, that doesn’t mean people blinded by the rays of blackness and whiteness, see you as an Indian. Matter of fact, when was the last time you talked to a Black person from the hood with little (formal) education? They might not know Indianness, but they know whiteness, and how it benefits others and not them. It is at this point we should consider coalitions, however they might look, and speaking out against anti-blackness in Native communities is one thing you can do.
Just because you acknowledge your white skin privilege, it doesn’t mean you’re less Indian. It means you’re living in a world, a Black and white world, and dealing with the limits of our conversation about race, privilege, and sovereignty. You can add to it — shift the discourse. I hope you start standing up for Black-Native people, non-white-looking Native people, and other people of color, and those who don’t benefit from the adornment of whiteness.
Here is what we both know: we live in a settler colonial and white supremacist society, and, as Anishinaabe writer Leanne Simpson rightfully tells us, gender violence is at the center of it all. Through white supremacy, we know that having dark skin is bad, and having white skin is good — plain and simple. We can see this through many Native advertisements and discussions within our own communities. Perhaps we can see this mostly through police violence; it’s not white looking people getting killed in the streets or pulled over by the cops: it’s dark-skinned people, trans, men and women. From the settler colonial context, Native people are rendered invisible, with the ultimate goal of dispossession. Our bodies are dispossessed, our land, too.
I’m not here to anger you, or hurt you, I’m here to express my truth. One I hope you take with you from here on out. I would be doing both of us a disservice if I did not say that it hurts me that you can acknowledge Native invisibility, but don’t also acknowledge that you have white skin privilege. I live in a world where I always have to acknowledge my blackness. I literally have to make sure my Black body doesn’t upset the white man too much.
If we can learn racism and privilege and colonialism, we can also unlearn it, I think some call this decolonization. But decolonization can’t be a metaphor, for it will require that we open our minds, our hearts, to imagining a world where Nativeness can exist without the baggage of whiteness, colonialism and racism. Don’t worry, I will be there with you every step of the way.
Love Always,
Your Black/Native Friend, Kyle Mays.
I would like to thank Kenzie Allen (Oneida) for providing comments on earlier drafts. Any errors herein are mine alone.
What up doe? How you been? Boozhoo.
I am writing to you because I love you. Because, as a Black/Native hetero-cis male, who grew up with three urban influences — Cleveland and Detroit — in Lansing, Michigan, the capitol of Michigan, once the home of Malcolm X, I have long understood the complexities of race and racism, and I want to share some with you. I have the experience of a poor, urban, Black Native person. Even as I gain more cultural and social capital because of my education, I cannot shake off my upbringing, which I am very proud of.
I am writing because I hate white supremacy, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy. I hate all things oppressive. And I hate how they have injured us all.
Can we talk about what it means to be a White-Indian in the United States? It’s funny, using that phrase “White-Indian;” though I hear it every so often, it is barely used in academic circles, or not in the same frequency or manner as Black-Indians. I guess only the full bloods — the most authentic of the authentic Native people use it. Let’s talk about what it’s like to be Native but look white.
I know: there’s the problem of “pretindians” who have a long forgotten “full-blooded” Indian relative, and those who have a Cherokee princess great-grandmother. I’m sure you’ve heard of a few “scandals” over the last few years, those who claim an identity but it seems skeptical at best. I don’t want to talk about that; our conversations there are too saturated, too predictable. Black-Indian folks got problems as well. We can’t hide from state violence, or at least pass as white, and therefore be invisible from it, both as a structural choice and at one’s convenience.
A major issue for me, which I haven’t heard you speak on, even in private, is your own white skin privilege. Before you stop reading, please hear me out. You see, I’m often read as only Black, unless someone knows me as Black, simply because of my skin color. I’m cool with that. Like your Indigenous ancestry, mine, too, is invisible. But because I’m read as a Black male, the animalistic threat to society, I can’t hide. I can’t hide my blackness, no matter how white I sound. And I ain planning to. I can’t sweep it under rug if I put on white people’s moccasins. Society reads me as Black.
Here’s how my blackness works everyday. I get pulled over for a broken taillight, again; I deliberately keep my hands out of my pockets when walking through stores — that’s mostly because I’ve been accused of stealing a few times for walking around a store with my hands in my pocket; it was winter and they were cold, know what I mean? White people look extra nervous when I walk by them at night; the middle-aged person grabs their purse; their partner pulls them much closer to them when they see me approaching. Maybe the purse was falling off of their shoulders or they were trying to extend a courtesy by letting me pass. Who knows? But I know how I felt in the situation, which has happened my whole life.
I cringe when I read the crime alerts from the universities I have attended. Black male, between 5 foot seven inches and 6 foot four inches, jeans, dark shirt, BLACK. I’ve been stopped by police, at night, around campus, a handful of times. I can’t express the anger and humiliation or, to quote W.E.B. Du Bois, to remember that I am a problem. This is the world I experience daily.
But I resist. I wear a hoodie or slightly tilt my hat because it is a part of Black American (and Hip Hop) culture. I wear feather earrings because I am proud to be a Black-Indian. But then my peers ask me questions, first with the gaze — why does a Black male wear such earrings? More importantly, why does someone with white skin privilege, a Native person, ask me where I got my earrings? I garnish my body with a few tattoos, one on the back of my hand with my dodem (clan), so I can rep my clan. Admittedly, I also give a shoulder bump or two to the white boy walking like he owns the side walk, mostly cause this ain August 1955 in deep south Mississippi… I resist. But then I remember my family has always dealt with the paradox of being Black and Native — other Native folks calling us nigger. And it wasn’t in 1955 Mississippi. It was 1970s Detroit.
In academic circles, I have to always be calm and non-threatening so I’m not read as an angry Black man — a potentially career devastating label. That anger is pent up, always ready to burst but also not — I have too much to lose. I won’t even describe what it’s like to grow up poor and trying to adjust to what it means to exist in this middle class world. This is the soul of a Black/Native man — this is my everyday life.
Now, let’s talk about the soul of a White-Indian.
I’m sure white people share jokes with you that they would not otherwise say to their Black peers. That’s not your fault. They say this because you’re read as white. They might express their displeasure about the new hire, the person of color who isn’t qualified enough, and how, they ain racist, but…
I’m sure you get upset about that, right? No doubt your politics are on point, and you defend people of color during those perceived moments of whiteness — of purported white racial allegiance, even when you don’t have to. Big shout to you. Miigwetch.
In that moment, though, you re-remember how your Native identity is erased, which is a violent product of settler colonialism and white supremacy. You ask yourself, “Why would they erase my Native identity?” “Why did they assume I’m white, that I’m not Native?” You feel anger, hurt and shame. You reminisce about growing up as a child and not having your Native identity acknowledged; you’re still harboring that childhood pain — I know — me too. Like the teacher who told me I was Black and being “Indian was a waste of time. You shouldn’t be ashamed of being Black.” In case you were wondering, that wasn’t a grade school teacher who said that when I was 8 years old; that was a prominent Black Studies scholar at a university during my visit while I was considering graduate school. I can hear their words ringing in my ear, still.
I’m sure you have a well-rehearsed story about your family history — well-documented — about how long you’ve had Native relations, to explain why you look white. It’s a shame we have to go through that, huh?. But why don’t you talk about your white skin privilege? I know you deal with similar trauma of Native invisibility. People dismiss your identity outright because you look white; and that has a psychic affect I’m sure. But you have a privilege that I don’t, at all, and I have yet to hear you acknowledge it. Let me list a few examples of your skin privilege; you can operate in public spaces and enjoy the public and psychological wages of being white at your leisure. You can also access some material benefits of being white if you so desire. Remember, as David Roediger argues, following the work of Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction, the working class chose to be white. While you may not choose to be white given your Native ancestry and citizenship, by ignoring your skin privilege or leaving it unacknowledged, you’re not actively resisting it either, and thus, you benefit. You’re not considered a problem until you make yourself a problem, or visible, as a Native person; if you’re looking to rent or buy a house, you won’t be turned down for reasons unknown to you. The wages of whiteness are yours, until you begin to turn those wages down.
I know you are Native, and I accept you as such. You’re my homie, and I love you. I don’t care what you look like. But your silence on white privilege is disturbing; it vexes my soul. It’s like you want to run away from your whiteness, like you’re ashamed. Given the history of whiteness and how Trump has used it as a rallying point recently, I wouldn’t necessarily show pride in my whiteness. You write about how white people have systematically erased Indianness from history, from your own family, your body, as you should; we need that work, we need to recover those stories. I can’t run away from my blackness. How would my mom feel, a single Black mother from Cleveland, Ohio, if I only talked about being Native? I can’t even imagine it.
I see you in certain spaces. You’ll be the first one to present yourself in an “authentic” sort of way. I’m not mad at you. You’ll adorn yourself in Native bling — me too — and you rock it well. You’ll carry-on our languages by introducing yourself in yours. You’ll talk about the problems of Native invisibility, and share with your students the difficulties of living as a Native person during a time in which we have racist mascots.
I hear you always hating on white people for their lack of humanity. You hate on them more than I hear Black folks hate on them. The discussion of colonialism is important, and we need to continue to have it in nuanced ways. But we have yet to adequately also bring to the forefront a discussion of how whiteness works within the matrix of settler colonialism. Having white skin has benefits.
You will tweet with the hashtag #NotYourMascot. You’ll share with the world stories of Native appropriation and how white people appropriate everything. I appreciate it all, and the world needs to hear it.
You’ll even talk shit about those white cis-males, and how they’re always mansplaining. Actually, thanks for that. As a male, I try and call that shit out when I see it, even in myself, that way my sistas don’t have to bear that burden alone. I don’t always catch it, but I try.
Do you also tell people what it’s like to also have white skin privilege? Do you relay to those same people about how women of color and trans people of color are harassed, even worse, killed, both because of their gender/non-gender identity, sexuality and dark skin?
I’m assuming no, because it further makes your invisible Native identity more invisible. There is a certain level of power being a white-Indian. Even as you might speak so eloquently about what it means to be Native, how negative representations effect Native people, how Native people are rendered invisible, there are consequences in the framing. You might say that Native people come in all shades of color, but you cloak it within the rhetoric of multiculturalism, without acknowledging the structures of power rooted in whiteness and difference. White people likely equate your hypervisibility with power and authority that is not afforded to a Black-Indian. I’m not saying you don’t have to deal with other forms of violence, and your identity being silenced under colonialism is violent, but I doubt you leave the house each day wondering if your family will get the call that night… the call telling your family that you resisted arrest and were shot and killed.
There’s a certain vulnerability to addressing your whiteness: you have to deal with more contradictions between whiteness and Indianness, and that’s scary. You have to also face your worst fears of not being considered Native enough. It’s easy to hate on someone who does not have documented Cherokee ancestry, and sometimes that person needs to be called out. But can you also look in the mirror, and tell me what it’s like to have white skin privilege? Your silence on the topic of white skin privilege allows anti-blackness and anti-Indianness to continue.
Though you might be Indian, we might see you as such, that doesn’t mean people blinded by the rays of blackness and whiteness, see you as an Indian. Matter of fact, when was the last time you talked to a Black person from the hood with little (formal) education? They might not know Indianness, but they know whiteness, and how it benefits others and not them. It is at this point we should consider coalitions, however they might look, and speaking out against anti-blackness in Native communities is one thing you can do.
Just because you acknowledge your white skin privilege, it doesn’t mean you’re less Indian. It means you’re living in a world, a Black and white world, and dealing with the limits of our conversation about race, privilege, and sovereignty. You can add to it — shift the discourse. I hope you start standing up for Black-Native people, non-white-looking Native people, and other people of color, and those who don’t benefit from the adornment of whiteness.
Here is what we both know: we live in a settler colonial and white supremacist society, and, as Anishinaabe writer Leanne Simpson rightfully tells us, gender violence is at the center of it all. Through white supremacy, we know that having dark skin is bad, and having white skin is good — plain and simple. We can see this through many Native advertisements and discussions within our own communities. Perhaps we can see this mostly through police violence; it’s not white looking people getting killed in the streets or pulled over by the cops: it’s dark-skinned people, trans, men and women. From the settler colonial context, Native people are rendered invisible, with the ultimate goal of dispossession. Our bodies are dispossessed, our land, too.
I’m not here to anger you, or hurt you, I’m here to express my truth. One I hope you take with you from here on out. I would be doing both of us a disservice if I did not say that it hurts me that you can acknowledge Native invisibility, but don’t also acknowledge that you have white skin privilege. I live in a world where I always have to acknowledge my blackness. I literally have to make sure my Black body doesn’t upset the white man too much.
If we can learn racism and privilege and colonialism, we can also unlearn it, I think some call this decolonization. But decolonization can’t be a metaphor, for it will require that we open our minds, our hearts, to imagining a world where Nativeness can exist without the baggage of whiteness, colonialism and racism. Don’t worry, I will be there with you every step of the way.
Love Always,
Your Black/Native Friend, Kyle Mays.
I would like to thank Kenzie Allen (Oneida) for providing comments on earlier drafts. Any errors herein are mine alone.
