Hello, I know you do a lot of racebent aus and other headcanons with the cap crew like askbucky and I was wondering what you'd think about a Bucky who, on top of having one Jewish and one Christian parent being a white passing or lighter skinned half black kid and how that would add onto his sort of split identity long before becoming the winter soldier because of the things he's kept to himself like his trauma from being experimented on by Zola in Austria or the death of his sibling in askbuck.
Oh wow, what a lovely ask! :D I wish I had time to give you a fuller answer, but … racial identity is pretty complicated, eh? I mean, firstly, there’s the whole “how much was Jewishness considered a race back then” issue, (even Rita Hayworth, with her Spanish mother and Irish father, wasn’t “white enough”).
And then you get into the biracial/multiracial passing business. It’s something that’s been on my mind because Baby Rutabaga is technically half-Chinese and half-White, but the way race is constructed here, she looks 80% white. Which means that she won’t get the “but where are you *really* from” questions, but she’ll get the “what are you?” questions.
So coming back to Bucky, it’d be pretty interesting if his mother is Jewish and his father is black. Like, what if both of his parents are passing, and they meet in some nice dance hall and hit it off. But there’s always something about the other person that seems a bit off, but also a bit familiar. Something that they can’t quite place. Something about the way their rooms are sparsely decorated, the fervor in how they immerse themselves in New York life, and the oblique way they talk about their upbringing – full of love for their parents but short on details. And then one Christmas George Barnes finally gets up the courage to bring Winifred to meet the rest of his extended family, fully expecting Winnie to be disgusted and leave him. But instead something in Winnie relaxes, and he sees a new smile on her. It all makes sense when she takes him to *her* family’s Seder the next March, and he finds out her name didn’t start out as Winnifred. And so, one thing leads to another, and they get married, move their sparse belongings together, and try to live the White American Dream of middle class respectability. They have children, and while they bring what they can of their family heritage into the household, there is always the injunction of Never Tell Anyone. And so Bucky grows up in a house with no family photos but a lot of new gadgets and consumer goods, and at school he gets very good at telling people what they want to hear.
(And then George first loses everything in the stock market and then loses his firstborn son, and Bucky finds it harder and harder to stay at home. So he finds a job, starts doing extra tutoring at school, and stays with Steve on Saturdays.)
