Touring While Black

Hello, my name is Jake Uitti. I’m 38 years old and I live in Seattle. I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. I am 25% French, 50% Finnish, and 25% a mix of Irish and other European ethnicities. I hesitate to say I’m “white” because I believe the term is a stupid catchall that seems more in opposition to Blackness than a race itself. It’s a lazy, reductive idea, to me.

Black, on the other hand, is a necessary term as the result of a sad past. Many Black Americans don’t know their family’s heritage like I know my own. They can’t trace their family tree’s roots back as far as I can because those roots for many were cut, broken, and stolen as the result of the slave trade, which was a global problem made especially acute in America.