#identity

I have been watching videos lately from a young woman who travels around Russia.

She goes to places I would like to see myself someday: Siberia, Lake Baikal, the Ural Mountains. Her videos are quiet and beautiful. There are trains, snowy roads, apartments, forests, meals, conversations, long stretches of landscape.

What struck me most recently, though, was something almost completely unrelated to the scenery.

She cannot monetize the videos.

Google deactivated Russia-based AdSense accounts in August 2024, and YouTube still says that creators with Russia-based AdSense accounts cannot monetize their channels. The restriction is one of a long series of measures connected to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

That makes sense at the level where we usually discuss international affairs.

Russia invaded Ukraine. Other countries and international companies responded. Sanctions and restrictions followed.

But then the abstraction travels downward.

Eventually it reaches somebody filming Lake Baikal.

That is where the situation starts to feel different.

A Country and the People Inside It

It is easy to talk about countries as though they were people.

Russia invaded.

America threatened.

China wants.

France objects.

Iran retaliates.

We do this because it is useful shorthand. Governments really do act on behalf of states, and those actions have consequences.

But nations contain millions of people who may have had almost nothing to do with those decisions.

A few days ago, after work, I ran home, got sweaty, got tired, got peaceful, and then took my dog for a walk through Wellons Village.

This was not an expedition.

I was not seeking danger, revelation, personal growth, or anything else that could later be packaged into a lesson. I had Solveig on the leash and nowhere in particular to be. She was in charge of navigation, which meant we were following the ancient canine transportation system of turning toward whatever smelled most promising.

This often takes us into Wellons Village.

Wellons Village has a reputation. People get shot there. Things happen there. I know this.

It is also ten minutes from my house, and Solveig knows, with the absolute certainty of a field biologist, that people in the area drop food on the ground.

So we go there.

That afternoon I was feeling remarkably good. The run home had burned off whatever static had accumulated during the workday. I was tired in the clean way. The world seemed basically acceptable.

Then Solveig found a chicken bone.

We were standing at an intersection waiting for the light to change. At the base of the crossing pole, amid the usual urban archaeology of wrappers, grit, and things a dog should probably not eat, there it was.

A chicken bone.

I was dealing with this important development when a man I had passed a minute earlier came back toward me.

I had barely registered him the first time. He had been talking to himself, or perhaps to somebody who wasn't there, or perhaps to the universe at large. In that part of town, this did not qualify as breaking news.

At the core of our societal structures lies a carefully maintained illusion: a rigid Black-and-white (and often Black/brown-white) framework meant to sort, separate, and subjugate. This binary system didn’t emerge by chance—it was crafted through policy, propaganda, and prejudice to keep power consolidated and communities divided. Yet, the lived truth of identity almost always defies such neat categorization. In my own experience, that truth surfaced unexpectedly through subtle changes in skin tone—a physical manifestation that led me to question the validity and implications of racial labels as historically and socially constructed entities.

Historically, groups like southern Italians, Greeks, and Eastern Europeans occupied ambiguous racial spaces in American society—sometimes perceived as “not quite white” due to their darker complexions and unfamiliar cultural practices. My own ancestry, roughly 30% southern Italian, reflects this complexity. With Mediterranean features and skin that tans deeply, I found myself questioning the contemporary idea of “whiteness” and its connection to legacies of colonialism and slavery. This category often felt at odds with my personal values and family history.

The change in my appearance was purely coincidental, stemming simply from spending more time outdoors. However, over time, it became clear that these natural shifts had profound implications within the simplistic racial binaries of American culture. The more my appearance changed, the more uncomfortable I became with being neatly categorized into a single racial identity.

I stopped for pancakes at a diner just off Route 9 in Plattsburgh, NY (ZIP: 12901, for my fellow map nerds). It’s one of those places where the menu hasn’t budged since about 1983—and neither have the prices, bless their hearts. As I drowned my short stack in syrup, I overheard the table next to me stumbling through their breakfast order in hesitant French, earning bemused smiles and gentle confusion from their very-much-English-speaking server.

Here’s the kicker: Lacolle, Quebec, is a breezy 40-minute drive north. Cross that line, and French flows effortlessly—c’est naturel. But in Plattsburgh, French feels oddly out of place, like cowboy boots at a vegan potluck.

Contrast that with Texas, where you can be miles and miles from the Rio Grande and Spanish is as comfy as old denim. Of course, Texas spent a significant chunk of its formative years as part of Mexico—history has deep roots, deeper even than pecan trees. In fact, there's still a quiet undercurrent among some Texans who feel the border never quite landed right, culturally speaking. Texas is practically its own country—Tex-Mex traditions, bilingual street signs, and communities where crossing linguistic boundaries happens every day without a blink.

Why the stark difference in Plattsburgh, then? Historically, the border between the U.S. and Canada was largely shaped by treaties between distant governments rather than by cultural or economic tides. The northeastern U.S. border, once delineated, hardened into an identity line. Economics played its role too: trade, jobs, and daily life largely stayed separate, preventing cultural blending.

Chapter I

Not every forest has a witch, but every witch has a forest. Sometimes they live there, but other times not; a city witch or warlock might be perfectly content to visit the forest only every month. After a long few weeks of breaking into the blood bank for some occasional rations, of charming rats to climb up to sip from people’s drinks and then spit them in her glass for a refreshing cocktail, and of climbing trees at night to reach the greatest possible height for some restorative moonbathing, there’s only so long witches and warlocks can wait before heading back to the forest to commune with Mother Nature from whom their powers emanate.

But if the forest is so much healthier for magic people, why don’t they live there all the time? Only for the same reasons that a human doesn’t live in the woods: it’s harder to get access to good-quality candy and chocolates, of course. While witches’ and warlocks’ powers extend over many domains, creating satisfying confections has proved a perennial difficulty for all but a few because most of their hearts are so rotten and withered that a spell cast for the sake of delight falls short in all but the most isolated cases. In fact, the reason most get so weary and grumpy past a certain age is that they spend all their energy trying and failing to make a perfectly normal chocolate bar, no better than the ones you can buy at the corner store for one or two dollars, or else some other treat, such as nougat or cotton candy.