But baby, there’s no such thing as passing. We’re all just pretending. Race is a complete illusion, make-believe. It’s a costume. We all wear one. You switched yours at some point. That’s just the absurdity of the whole race game.

A quote from “Caucasia,” the novel from author Danzy Senna, about a girl born to a white mother and a black father, both active in the civil rights movement. Birdie, the main character, doesn’t quite pass as either black or white, complicating things when she ends up fleeing with her white mother after her parents’ separation. “Caucasia” is about race, activism, mistaken identity, trauma, coming-of-age, and family. This book had the biggest impact on me of any book I’ve read in the past two years.

Check out this great interview with Senna on the occasion of her recent memoir, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”:

I came to understand that unless you really take it on—the problem of your family’s legacy—you will pass down the trauma (yours, your father’s, your grandmother’s, your great-grandmother’s) to your children.

February is Black History Month, and this quote from Senna seems to me to sum up the point of the whole month: if we don’t talk about our country’s racial history, we are doomed to pass the silences and traumas onto future generations.

I’m also taking this quote to heart for a different reason — I’m working on a biography of my great-grandmother, one of tens of thousands of victims of Stalin’s purges in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.  Government-sanctioned terror, social marginalization, racism, political repression: these things have been unspeakables.

But let’s not leave them that way.  Let’s interrogate. Let’s recall. Let’s remember. Let’s write. And when we have something worth celebrating (i.e. wonderful new nonfiction by Black or multi-racial authors), let’s celebrate.  Black History Month isn’t all about mourning, anyways.