On Mongrels and America

"Since races do not exist - though racism, damnably, does - mongrelism is our common lot. It may be a bitter one, as in the case of Merle Oberon, not altogether benign in such an instance as Queen Victoria, or fecund, as in that of Pushkin, but whether we want to accept it or not, we are all mongrels."

— Angus Calder

Merle Oberon (1911–1979) was a glamorous Hollywood and British film star of the 1930s and 1940s, born in Bombay to a mixed South Asian and European family. In the racial climate of early Hollywood, this background would likely have ended her career before it began.

So her studio invented a different woman entirely. Born in Tasmania, they said. European parents. Clean, simple, acceptable.

She spent decades performing two roles: the characters onscreen, and the invented self she wore everywhere else. Even close colleagues had no idea. The concealment was total, and it held.

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is widely considered the founder of modern Russian literature — the writer who gave the Russian language its modern form, who shaped what Russians understood themselves to be. His great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was an African child, likely from what is now Cameroon or Eritrea, brought to Europe as a slave, then adopted and educated at the court of Peter the Great, eventually becoming a military engineer and general. That ancestry runs directly into Pushkin, into the poems and stories that Russia called its own.

The nation's purest cultural touchstone. Mixed all the way down.

This is what Calder is pointing at: the things a culture holds up as essentially, irreducibly itself — its founding literature, its iconic faces — are rarely what they appear to be. Purity is almost always a retrospective fiction. The real thing, the living creative thing, tends to be a collision. Part this, part that, and then whatever strange third thing emerges from the two meeting.

Rock and roll is the American version of this story. It came from the collision of country and blues — the whitest and the blackest streams in American music running together until something neither tradition could have produced on its own came out the other side. Still restless. Still unfinished. Still, somehow, arresting.

That's America, really. Not pure. Never pure. Just the ongoing collision — of people, genes, languages, sounds, habits and tics from everywhere — producing something that keeps mutating and hasn't settled yet.

Calder called it our common lot. It might also be our best quality.