Deborah, the Two-Headed Doll

I think a lot about what it is to be white in a diverse society. I believe that whiteness is a lot more complicated than simply the colour of my skin, or what part of Europe my ancestors hail from. Theorists call it a “socially-constructed identity”, not something that simply is, but something that has evolved slowly throughout history and that is constantly changing. I don’t believe there is just one white story either. We whites do share many common privileges, in Canada, and around the world, this is I do not deny. European colonialism carried its power and privilege everywhere it went, and its legacy is a powerful White Paradigm that sits deep in the sub-conscious. But there are a thousand and one histories wound up in the label of “white”, and anyone who sees herself as white has a story of her own. I am going to start unraveling my white story with my ancestors.

Rail fenced farm land

I was born on a farm near Peterborough, Ontario, and we Harrisons can trace our family tree back to Richard and Jane Harrison, the original settlers who left Tosside, England in the 1850's. Tosside was in a poor region of Lancashire in northern England, on the edge of the Gisburn Forest, and not far from the place where the infamous Pendell witch trials took place in 1612. Richard’s ancestors were farmers and trades people, and 5 generations of his descendants have farmed in Smith and Emily Townships since he immigrated here. Jane was Irish, but little else is known about her origins. My paternal grandmother also had Irish ancestors, but when the family came to Canada, they are said to have changed their name from Kerr to Carr to mask their Irish heritage and “pass” as Welsh. Curious, these silent Irish women in my family tree. And they are not the only women in my family tree with forgotten ancestries, but I will talk about Francis later.

Irish settlers figured prominently in the establishment of the City of Peterborough, but land west of the city was largely farmed by English settlers-descendants when I was a child. The dominance of British culture was everywhere at that time, and is still very strong in me. When I am at family reunions, I can feel its presence, reminding me of where I come from. Their reserve, their love of manners, and so many other deep cultural traits that are hard to define all started to come into focus for me when I lived in Montreal. I felt the surface of my British heritage take on more definition there, as I became a minority in a French Canadian context. The “two solitudes” were still fairly separate from one another then, and I was one of the few bilingual Anglophones (English speakers) who worked in French Canadian networks in the early 90’s. I can remember conversations with Québécois colleagues about the nature of working between French and English communities, how they differed, how English Montrealers were more task oriented and practical, the French taking more time to dialogue and establish larger frames of reference before moving to action. I lived there for 14 years and my deep interactions taught me a lot about who I was and where I came from in a way that was completely invisible to me when I lived in Toronto.

Before Montreal, I think I saw myself quite simply as Canadian, WASP at best, and I knew nothing about cultural diversity. Of course growing up in the 1960's where I did, farming people still led very traditional, insular lives. I have memories of relatives and neighbours getting together to help harvest, men going on the moose or deer hunt, the women and children gathering in one household till they returned, growing and raising most of the food we ate, and attending the little United Church my great-grandfather built, sitting in the same pew every Sunday. Television had little place in our lives, as we mostly played outdoors, in the fields, forests, and hills, and in fact media in general seemed to have very little influence on my early life. I grew up a family-centred child, even community-centred child, in a fairly small world. Anthropologists might define my culture as “collectivist”.

2-headed doll, black and white

This is Deborah, the two-headed doll that Francis, my American maternal great-grandmother, made for my grandmother Doris at the turn of the 19th century. She is representative of the dolls made by progressive families at that time to show their support for desegregation. However, the faded cloth of the white doll compared to the black doll, and the dainty white facial features compared to the somewhat gruesome smile on what is supposed to be an African face, these things tell me a deeper story about perceptions of African Americans in the early 1900's.

I was always told my mother's side of the family was Scottish, but some unusual events led me to discover some years ago that the woman who made this century old doll wasn't born in the U.S. Adopted, Francis Rosenberg was actually born in Germany, and was Jewish descent. It explained a few things, like the lactose-intolerance that is shared by my grandmother, mother, myself, and my daughters. Or my Palestinian boss who used to swear I was Jewish - he was from Jerusalem and said he should know! And perhaps why someone painted “Jews go home!” on my mother’s house on Waterford St., Peterborough when she was a child. Yet not one word had ever been spoken to me about her identity before. And so I call the doll Deborah, the original Jewish spelling of the name I carry. My mother wanted to name me Deborah, she doesn’t know why, but my father registered me with the Anglicized version, Debra, on my birth certificate.

This doll teaches me about the dominance of whiteness, not only in my family tree, but in Canadian society. She is my first step in unraveling how I learned about race - the story of how one identity slowly consumes others until the others fade away, hidden under skirts, names changed, ancestries suppressed. I think of all the lessons I have been taught about Aboriginal peoples and how their identities were suppressed, oppressed. I understand this process better when I look at Deborah.

I remember vividly the first time I learned about how the concept of whiteness took shape throughout colonial history. I was always very interested in the history of African American people, slavery, and the civil rights movement. I was in my 30's, doing some work in race relations in Montreal, and was reading a book about how whiteness evolved in the U.S. from an original reference to British and Germanic peoples, to gradually include other European settlers coming to the new land.

I was shocked to learn the Irish weren't originally accepted as white, nor were Jewish Europeans (Ashkenazi), not until much later. Irish and Jewish, my own ancestors, not part of the white club, hidden under Deborah's white skirts. I was shocked! I felt betrayed, wondering how this had been kept from me all those years. I had one of those "disorienting dilemma" moments that transformational theorists cite, the 'aha' moment when a whole block of preconceived ideas become suspect, and leave us open to new ideas.

Deborah is a symbol of my white consciousness. She reminds me of how privileged I am, even though I come from Omemee, a somewhat marginal place. And she reminds me of the ancestors in my own family tree who lost (or maybe gave up) their ethnicity (and maybe their faith) to belong to white, British society, and to the Harrison family. There is nothing to be done about it now and I have no intention of going around saying I am Jewish. I think that would be dishonest. I am proud of who I am, but I am a sad that some of my ancestors got lost along the way. This is one story of white Canada.