In Oklahoma, the love I feel for my mother is boundless, as is the rage I feel toward my father. I didn’t expect the latter to hit me so hard. I’ve brought to light and reckoned with so many of the things he did, but there’s more. There’s always more with him.

I recently learned that his side of the family pretended to be Chickasaw when they weren’t. My father’s great-grandmother lived on appropriated ancestral Chickasaw land in Tennessee and, later, on similar tracts in Mississippi. I guess the family started telling folks they were Chickasaw when they came to Oklahoma during the Land Run.

It’s not quite the Cherokee princess story some white families tell to this day—including some folks on my father’s side of the family who are desperate to be anything other than white—but it’s close. Taking someone’s land, over and over, and following their path from Tennessee and Mississippi to Oklahoma, doesn’t make you Indigenous.

My father also performed with his brother and his entire class in blackface in 1947 at Central High School in Oklahoma City. A few months ago, Ancestry unearthed photos of that performance that appeared in the school’s yearbook. Ancestry is apparently using AI to collect and analyze thousands of high school and college yearbooks. I’m thankful for AI in this instance for bringing to light something I would never have known otherwise. About him. About that side of my family.

Some may say that’s just the way things were back then. But who is speaking in statements like that, and to whom, and why? Who is being left out of statements like that, and why? Who is being spoken for or not spoken of at all?

My mother’s side of the family wasn’t like that. They didn’t lie about their Choctaw heritage, and they fought racism and segregation. During World War II, my mother’s family moved to California so her father could work in the shipyards. There was no segregation there. Kids played together. Adults worked together. Her family couldn’t stand moving back to Oklahoma after the war and to what they knew were backward laws and attitudes about race.

So it wasn’t just the times. It wasn’t just what people did. By that, I mean white people. These were choices white people were making—and in many ways, back then is right now. It’s today and tomorrow and all the tomorrows if we don’t put this internalized supremacy to bed, this othering, this skulking malice that seems to always be looking for people to harm. By we, I mean white people and anyone aligned with the ideology I’ve described.

I’m not saying anything new. It doesn’t mean it’s not important. This rage I feel for my father is a rage larger than me, and my father is larger than my father. But this is where it starts: in our families, in our homes—ones like mine where evil has taken up residence—then it moves to the community, to the county, to the state, to the country, and out into the larger world. We’re seeing that evil in corporeal form right now, diffused across many bodies, all of whom seem to share the same mind and the same hatred.

It’s amazing how quickly evil spreads. The only thing that spreads faster is love, but it has to be love in action. We need to act and keep acting. By we, I especially mean those of us who come from hate but don’t want to see hate in the world. This world, as my father called it, as if it belonged to him. It didn’t and it doesn’t. I won’t let him have our world.

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I should add: There was no segregation in California other than the abhorrent removal of Japanese Americans to internment camps (i.e., concentration camps) during World War II, which was absolutely fueled by racism.