Fernanda Foertter

I relate to Wonder Woman very much. I’m Brazilian, she’s Amazonian. She flies an invisible plane that flies silently and cannot be detected by hostile forces, avoiding unpleasant conflict. I, well, me too. Let me explain.

This is Maria, my great-grand aunt. I’m told she was over 100 years old when this picture was taken circa 1970’s.

Her very dapper brother Nestor is pictured below, circa 1920’s:

These are my great-grandparents. As I write this I can’t quite remember her name… but our family has joked over the years about about our dental troubles coming from her. Here they are together a mere three decades post end of slavery in Brazil (1899). Maria, his older sister, I’m told was born a slave, but that he escaped that fate.

They had my grandmother Emilia

She is still alive and 90 years old (longevity runs in the family it seems). A seamstress, this beautiful face caught the eye of a certain blue eyed soldier later turned trucker, Alfredo.

His grandfather, Ferdinand, had migrated from Germany just as slavery ended, to replace free slave labor in the fields with cheap immigrant labor.

Anyway Emilia and Alfredo gave birth my mom Vera

Sporting a very cool Afro, that caused quite a stir during that time. Of the many hair stories, while visiting early 80’s apartheid South Africa on business, she was asked, -aggressively, to separate from her group and board “the other bus.” Her white coworkers refused to allow it. But, she told me, “the event was so shocking I didn’t leave my hotel room and missed the trade show.”

A few years earlier my mom caught the eye of a handsome Amerindian (South American native peoples) man…a computer programmer btw!

And they made a baby who inherited her mother’s curls subdued by her fathers’ dark straight hair, thick eyebrows… and a double dose of computer programming genes. (Mom was a master at DB macros back in the day)

And somehow genetics gave me very light skin: my invisible jet.

My invisible jet has given me the ability to hear what otherwise might be said only in “polite company.” These are real quotes I have heard from people:

• “She’s only here to meet a, you know, quota” in reference to a black student.
• “They kill more of their own than police do” heard this one at one of my workplaces.
• Reference to ratio of white/non white kids in schools, to imply safety.
• References to “urban” youth as a pejorative stereotype.
• Mocking accents with exaggerated “hip hop” movements and speech. From a former police officer
• Statements that racism “exists on both sides” from otherwise progressive democrats.

My invisible jet has allowed me to escape any race related discrimination. Or at least any I could identify.

And when you marry someone with European ancestry and your kid ends up looking like this,

people assume you’re perhaps just a different kind of European… you know… “probably Italian?”

Fernanda… Where’s that name from, is it Italian?

So from slavery, to the prohibited interracial relationships of my great-grandparents and grandparents, to apartheid busing, to casual comments, an other institutional racial injustices earlier generations have suffered, our family has not yet escaped the consequences of racial inequalities.

But my children are more distant from these than anyone has ever been in my family. I don’t expect my red headed babies to experience racial discrimination in their lifetime. And the saddest part about it is that their liberation from racial discrimination isn’t due to social progress over time, but to slight genetic variations over four short generations that erased their external afro-descendent phenotype. In short: gone are the curls, and the melanin. And curiously, so are the effects of racism.

My invisible jet allows me a peek inside the minds of people who are unaware of my family history and who would have otherwise lumped me in the “other” category. Because of this, I believe that our current state is suffering not just from institutional forces or even unconscious bias. We are very much still in a conscious state of hate.

Putting this conclusion into context: Charlottesville didn’t bring out just a “few bad apples.” It brought out a few loud apples, the tip of the iceberg on hate, and I fear we have a lot more hate-iceberg to melt before we can consider our nation remotely over racism.