Pieces & Memories

Yield is written for Europeans

Yield is a modern Norse story with European values, marketed to Westerners.

It is a fictional story; though, all of its key characters were inspired by real people, companies, and events.

This begs the question about the appearance of characters like Erik—who is a fictional character, inspired by me.

When figuring out how to describe him, I wondered if I should write him as a white man—but I realized that, if I had, what would that psychoanalytically say about me in retrospect and how might that harm the self-esteem of any random black-dominant descendants of mine?

But then I realized I couldn’t write him as a black guy, either. Not practically, at least—for almost everything about Erik runs counter to what the average person (even black people themselves) envision the average black man to be like, as well as the negative stereotypes surrounding black men as fathers, husbands, and people who have served their country.

If written as black, Erik would be hard for many audiences to believe, relate to, and thus take seriously. Even though individuals like me do actually exist; I have empathy for the common reader’s experience in how rare we are.

In order for me to make Erik more believable in that case, I would have to provide some kind of exposition in the writing about the genetic mutations between the types of black people (especially when discussing mixed-race black people—such as the bone density when swimming issue that Erik does not suffer from that most black people do), why Erik is Norse despite what he looks like, why he revels in arctic warfare the way he does, etc.

Few of the most critical contents of Erik’s character are black, generally considered as black, or claimed by black peoples.

Meanwhile, as a writer, I am simultaneously called to answer these questions:

• Do I want to Erik to suck the attention from the main character over this topic?
• Is Erik’s racial makeup really such an important part of the story or the point of the story? (Which would also beg questions about Sigurt as well, being as though Sigurt is Erik’s son.)
• Do I want a broader Western reader base to feel like my writing is part of the anti-European sentiments? That I mean to intentionally contribute to some anti-white, pro-race mixing agenda in which the white phenotype is most often rendered recessive in the children?
• Did I write this story out of insecurity—to create some unrealistic propaganda image of how most black men are to prove something?

The answer is no to all of those questions. All of the above.

There Was No Hidden Racial Agenda

Yield was simply a literary love letter to my own children, written with deep love, gratitude, and respect for Europeans as well as reverence for European mythology—and I am the only black-dominant person in my entire house simply because that’s the way the dice rolled while conceived in my white mother’s womb.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

It’s a Norse story, reflecting a modern Norse family, written by the one-off “black” sheep of the family.

Nine out of ten of us Nortons may be phenotypically European, so I write for them…yet, I also don’t want the one “black sheep” of us every generation to feel unloved for simply having been born.

Therefore, if I explicitly describe Erik as a white man, I would subtly tell future generations of my bloodline to reject themselves if they were individuals like myself who so-happened to have been born phenotypically black-dominant.

It happens.

Mixed-race Vikings did, indeed, exist—they would have had to if Norsemen traveled to distances far and wide to battle with foreign tribes and claim their women as spoils of war.

People like me were rare, but we did exist. And someone like me writing a story like this has an ocean of contextual difference from someone like a pro-black trying to make money off of a culture they have no actual connection to, while attempting to steal cultural credit through the revision of history.

Some of my descendants in the future may have skin and hair that may more closely resemble blacks, but everything about their neurology, bones, upbringing, etc. might be European (or, at least, non-black).

And that can tear them up inside, to feel like they’re considered less of a Norton on that premise alone when researching their great-great-grandfather who wrote this story—and I don’t want them to feel that way.

Besides, our last name, “Norton,” literally translates to “of the North” or “North Town” or “of the Northern Tribes.”

Despite what I look like at first glance, I am Michael of the Northern Tribes. And I did not get my last name from slavery.

So, it doesn’t matter if someone makes fun of me (or us). If someone calls themselves socially rejecting me or my writing on that basis. Socially, we may be different things to different people, but objectively we are Western more than anything else—regardless of who says what.

Meanwhile, as Erik and Sigurt are classifiably European heros, by opening this tale to the world during a time in which the European identity is under attack by left-wing politics in mainstream media—I considered how my intent may be good in the story’s writing, but it is not a matter of my intent but the outcome of the messaging…whether unintentional or not.

The moment I opened this literary love-letter to Europe—it belonged to Europeans. I do not imagine my mostly white readers would have paid hard-earned money just to be insulted. They are loved, too.

Give Erik The Appearance You Want Him To Have

If written literally as a true story, Erik would be a light-skinned black guy with thin, clean, shoulder-length dreads that were developed from a disciplined crochet method rather than the notoriously less hygienic neglect method.

Meanwhile, Sigurt would be a blonde, straight-haired, green-eyed, white child—because his mother was white and Erik’s recessive European genes would have fused with the mother’s European genes to create a European-dominant child.

In real life, while walking down the street with my children, people often wonder if my children are truly biologically my own. (They are.)

…but I did not want to distract readers with any of this throughout the story. If it really matters that much to them, they can read articles like these.

Instead, the focus should be on Sigurt’s maturity arc and moral development as a person—not why he looks one way while his otherwise hard-to-believe-exists father looks another.

If Yield ever becomes a movie—it would probably be better to make Erik a white man; however, that which is not explicitly described about certain characters in the book is left undescribed for a reason—that was by my design as the writer.

The way I refrained from describing Erik but for key elements of his character was me granting the reader permission to project whatever they want in the void I left in that contextual space.

If you, as the reader, want to envision Erik as more literally accurate to me as a light-skinned, mixed-race, black guy, you are welcome to.

On the other hand, if you would like to envision him as a Hitler-perfect Aryan, you are also welcome to.

What matters more to me, as the writer, are two things:

• The moral lessons and wisdom within the book; and,
• That you, the reader, most likely white, were truly loved when this was written—even if it arguably wasn’t a white man who wrote it, during a time when mainstream media wanted me to hate you.

Even if you don’t consider me one of your own, by blood you are one of mine—and I honor that.