Preview: Martha S. Jones on The Life Shift – March 4, 2025

Matt Gilhooly
00:00:00

Hello, my friends. I want to share a special preview of Tuesday's episode with historian and author Martha S. Jones.

This is really a conversation that made me feel quite different after we were done recording, and it was definitely moving. And I'm so grateful to have the Life Shift podcast to be able to have these conversations. So I really can't wait to share it with you in full.

And so that's kind of why I'm coming on here to share a little preview today so that you can hear a little taste of Martha S. Jones. In this conversation.

She takes us through her journey of navigating identity as someone who grew up in a biracial family during the civil rights era.

And her story is really of confronting painful moments and using them as opportunities for growth and finding her identity in the most beautiful way and leaning into that to become the woman she is today.

In this preview, you'll hear her reflect on this pivotal classroom experience that really forced her to question her sense of belonging and how she came to embrace the complexities of her identity and really, truly the healing power that she found through storytelling. The full episode comes out on Tuesday, and trust me, you don't wanna miss it. It is such a beautiful conversation, and I'm just so honored.

So here's a taste of my conversation with Martha S.

Martha S. Jones
00:01:41

And I take the front of the room. I'm sort of shaking, you know, with my little index cards in front of me. There's no iPads, people.

I've got my little index cards and I begin to present.

Up stands a classmate, Ron, who is really outraged that I am standing in front of the class and purporting to speak about someone as important and profound as Frantz Fanon. And he lets everybody know in explicit terms that he thinks I don't belong. He thinks I'm not a person who should be. If not, maybe I.

Maybe I could sit in the class, but I need to be quiet and not sort of take, you know, responsibility for these ideas or the learning that was going on. And class ends. I finish the report, you know, a class ends, and I go back to my dorm room, you know, really, really shaken.

But I share this as I do at the beginning of the book, because in some ways, it was just an indelible moment that let me know that the questions that I had once thought were teasing were deeper or much more profound than that, that my presence really troubled people. So much so that someone would interrupt a report and stand up in a class and object.

It also connected to questions that I also had about who I was and how I fit into a world that seemed to be divided between black and white. And so, as painful as it was, it also set me on a course of, you know, you know, self exploration, of learning more about my own family.

My parents seemed to fit more or less neatly on one side or the other of some imagined color line. But children whom today we would call mixed race, today we would call, you know, multiracial, those categories didn't exist. I hate.

I don't know, I hate to tell people that, but I think it's important, you know, that those kind of categories didn't exist. And we live a kind of a life that moves through many kinds of worlds.

But the thing I didn't expect, this is the thing I want to say, because it still surprises me, is that somehow on the other side of all that very kind of meticulous, I hope, thoughtful, you know, reflection and probing, I found a sense of humor. I found the humor in it. There is a way in which, of course, race in America is as. As serious, as grave, you know, as powerful a set of ideas as any.

Regretfully so, in large part, but very powerful. And that must be taken up with due care and respect.

But somehow I really began to see how absurd some of it is, you know, trying to, you know, the infinite ways in which this country has tried to create boxes, put us in boxes, draw lines. I used to be afraid of the people in my family who tried to defy the lines.

I had a great grandmother who from time to time passed as white when she wanted to shop in a department store or go to a movie. And I was embarrassed about that for the longest time.

But after writing this book, I admired her and had to laugh at some of what she pulled off because she was really, in her own way, flaunting all the rules and no shame and self consciously so and no shame. I began to see the absurdity and find a kind of wry humor in a lot of that that I had never, ever.