111. What's My Ethnicity? (Complete with pictures over 120 years old)
I am mixed race with at least 3 ethnicities. No one has ever guessed correctly even one of them. Since people put so much attention on it, I would like to set the record straight.
For those that don’t have interest in my bizarre/unique origins, the short of my story is I am 25% Scottish, 25% Norwegian, 25+% Turkish, and something else. You will have to read on if you are interested in that last 25%. No one alive knows, but some day me or my sister will get tested to solve that mystery. I was born and raised (mostly by me, not my “parents”) in Santa Monica, California. I’m very California. There is no Iranian blood in my bloodline, so all those people who threatened to kill me (including sending me my home address) or doom $100+ million dollar projects because they assumed I am Iranian were kind of wasting their time. I don’t speak a word of Farsi, I don’t even know how to say Yes or No.
My mother’s father was a Norwegian sailor. He was born in Norway, but was transferred to family members living in San Francisco as a child, after their son (of similar age) died. There was no paperwork and the swap was kept hidden from both governments. His official name was Leonard Kline.
Here is Leonard and Marjory, with my mother when she was a baby in Santa Monica.
My mother’s mother, Marjory Kline, was a brilliant woman who couldn’t tell a lie to save herself. She worked as a nurse and would have to tell the doctors what to do on a regular basis. She used to tell me stories about medical malpractice and I would listen to that all day. My favorite story was when she was fresh out of nursing school and was invited to a big black tie dinner with about 500 participants.
Early 20s, white ballroom gown. 499 other white people in attendance, very affluent. One of them starts choking, a middle aged man. People started panicking, they didn’t know what to do. My grandmother, Marjory, runs over, throws everything off the table (expensive glass etc.), throws him on his back on the table, and gets on top of him.
If the whole room was not shocked already to see Marjory straddle this guy, she picks up a steak knife and plunges it into his neck!! Blood is everywhere and people are fainting as she cut a hole into his trachea, shoved her fingers in there, and pulled out the piece of meat that was blocking his windpipe. She saved his life and probably traumatized 498 other people almost as much. This was my favorite story and this is why my grandmother was my hero.
Marjory in nursing school right before she got polio, ~1933.
It’s also clear that she was very autistic. She was one of the first women to attend UCLA, and paid her way by entering every TV gameshow she could and winning all of them. Her social skills might have used some work, but if you ended up in the hospital, your chances would have been greatly improved if it was the one she worked in. She’s probably the main reason I braved nursing school at the age of 19.
Marjory was Scottish. Braveheart-class Scottish. She (and us) are all descended from Sir William Gray, who earned his noble status through service to his people and to the Crown. He was a draper before becoming a shipbuilder. He was knighted in 1890. This is important because of my father’s family below. William probably rolled in his grave when I was detained and interrogated in Manchester in 2012 without explanation. My top unpublished research papers, including Supremacy Goods, were stolen by British intelligence, forcing me to publish early.
I assume the whole bloodline had autistic traits. William had 7 children, including 5 daughters. The historical record lists 4 of them by name, and it seems our ancestor, Ernestine Gray, was the 5th. She was quite the wild child, which would explain the cover up. According to family lore, there was an argument over whether steam power should be adopted at their shipyard in Hartlepool. William didn’t think steam was practical, and he ended up losing a lot of money. Ernestine ran off to the USA to play piano, which apparently she was quite good at.
She ended up in Nogalas Arizona at the height of a mining boom. She would perform in a variety of locations, including houses of ill repute. I assume William did not want this news spreading. She also had a son, Alexander, out of wedlock there in Nogalas. From there she went to Hawaii (as a single parent, shocking!) and became the organist for the Queen of Hawaii until the Queen was overthrown in a USA led coup on January 17th, 1893. Her next stop was Santa Monica, California. She would play piano for the earliest silent movies when Hollywood was in its infancy. It was there that her son Alexander Grey would meet Emma and Dorothy Newkirk, the other 19th century wild childs in this story.
[Our oldest pictures, including Ernestine with the Queen, were lost in a fire in Landers about 30 years ago]
Alexander Gray, my great grandfather, ~1890.
Emma and Dorothy Newkirk were quite controversial in Santa Monica. They were champion swimmers at a time when it was considered inappropriate for women to swim competitively. They would wear men’s bathing suits and beat the men. They even managed to swim to Catalina and back, an extremely rare feat.
Emma in the 1890s, in a men’s bathing suit.
Dorothy racing in a men’s bathing suit in Santa Monica, 1890s. Both Emma and Dorothy were famous enough that they were shipped up to Alaska to perform for miners there during the Alaska Gold Rush in 1896.
Emma diving in Alaska, ~1896. Apparently sometimes her and Dorothy would jump from that contraption on the back of a horse! Don’t ask me how they got the horse up there. Those were wild times!
This is Marjory (center), her older sister Joan (left), her younger brother Tommy (right), Emma, and the Newkirks (Emma and Dorothy’s parents). William and Alice Newkirk lost everything in the great blizzard of 1886-7 in Montana. They survived a covered wagon trip to Santa Monica. They are descended from Glassblowers in New Jersey that were pre-revolutionary colonists.
The native tribes of Santa Monica would sit outside Alice’s house and watch her because they had never seen red hair before.
Emma was so beautiful that she won a “Venus de Milo” beauty contest in New York and her dimensions were used to make a statue for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Google only mentions a chocolate statue from the world fair. Maybe they left that part out when they told Emma she won.
Tommy, who she is holding here, was quite the heartthrob himself. He became a pilot and was shot down (KIA) over the Black Forest in Germany in WW2 fighting the Nazis.
I include this picture because the cliffs below what would later become Palisades Park are distinctive so this is immediately recognizable. Oldest sibling Nagda on the left would ultimately end up in an insane Asylum. Autism related?
My father’s father, Shukri Khan, was Turkish. Khan is not his last name, it was his title. He was apparently a man of great renown and a religious leader. Google suggests he must have been Sunni Muslim.
Shukri Khan. It doesn’t get more Turkish than this. This photo is ~140 years old.
Legend has it that Shukri sheltered an Armenian woman and her child from a Kurdish warlord that wanted to kill her. Shukri thought the warlord wouldn’t dare to cross him, but was wrong. The warlord killed Shukri but before the warlord could kill the woman, the warlord’s son fell in love with the woman. So things worked out well in the end for everyone except Shukri.
My father’s mother was a princess from Nakhchivan, but her whole family fled across the border to Tabriz around 1918 to avoid being murdered by the Bolsheviks. [This would later prove to be a very poor decision.] Thus that was the end of their active noble line. Still they would not allow my father to marry anyone that was not of noble blood. Since my grandmother was able to authenticate her lineage to Sir William Gray, the marriage was allowed to proceed.
Her name is lost to time. This photo is ~140 years old!
My father’s parents on the right. ~105+ years ago. The stern soldier on the left is my father’s mother’s uncle.
Apparently a cemetery in Tabriz was converted to a park and something was released. My father was left the oldest surviving male in the family (at approximately age 22?) and when a law was passed he was told he had to create a last name for the remaining family. He was advised to make it sound Persian, since even though Tabriz where they lived was all ethnically Turkic, the British had given Tabriz to Iran to destabilize the region. This supported their colonization efforts. The U.K. did this sort of thing all over the world and has caused a lot of the instability we have globally today by cutting up regions against ethnic lines. So that’s how we got Shokrizade.
While the pictures we have are old in black and white, it’s clear my father’s Nakhchivani grandmother was quite fair skinned. So I’m guessing that she was Azerbaijani, Great Russian, or Armenian/Ashkenazi Jew. I hold the latter as a possibility because of the history of Nakhchivan:
I’m not personally a fan of feudalism or nepotism and only want to be respected for my own achievements, not some real or imaginary privilege. Thus all the titles and stuff are fun facts but not intended to imply anything but my ancestry.
It should be noted that my father was intensely antisemitic. He also hated blacks, asians, latinos, and Persians. He wanted me to grow up to enter the USA military to kill thousands of Persians since he raised me to be good at that. My knowledge of medieval and modern military history is extensive, and I would learn later in life that before my father was declared criminally/violently insane that he had been working on a PhD with the topic of “The Origins of the Crossbow” at UCLA. So that helps explain why my father encouraged my study of military science from about age 6. I took a vow of pacifism at the age of 18 to let my father and the military know that his plan for me wasn’t happening.
It’s also important to understand that after his family died of plague, he was probably already on shaky ground mentally. In the 1950s the first democratically elected government in the middle east happened in Iran. Not being fans of democracies if they have our oil under their sand, Churchill and Eisenhower ordered the government overthrown and replaced with an autocracy. This is a style the USA has still not outgrown.
My father naively protested the coup and was thrown in prison. Prisons in the Middle East are on a whole different level. My father was tortured for 6 months before his family paid a ransom and he was exiled to the USA. I think if this unfortunate series of events had not happened, he would not have lost his mind and would not have tried to kill my mother in front of me when I was 2 years old.
This also explains why he hated Persians. People try to kill or unperson me because they think I’m Persian, which is a bit ironic. This has made my life very difficult. My father during the time I knew him was a white supremacist, despite being of Middle Eastern decent. He abandoned his name at his first opportunity so that he could advance in Western society. My sister also changed her name and her life got much easier (according to her). I should also note that he was not religious until his second wife converted him to Lutheranism when I was around 10. I grew up entirely without any religious influence prior to that.
You might find it interesting that my first name, Ramin, came from my very white mother. She loved anything foreign (including my father) and she fell in love with the name. This choice had nothing to do with my ethnicity. She thought it was a very pretty name. And people used to tell me that all the time prior to 1979 when the Ayatollah overthrew the autocrat that the USA had installed in Iran. This made the USA government upset and they demonized Iran and anyone associated with it to justify their campaign to recapture the oil fields. They were successful after invading Iraq under false pretences, but so far have had no such success recolonizing Iran.
I’m not Iranian, and the Iranians didn’t do my family any favors. All of my remaining relatives in Tabriz were tortured and killed by the Ayatollah in 1980. So I’m not taking sides here, I’m just calling it like it is. I have no skin in this war of colonization but I’ve been personally caught up in it since 1979. Getting regular death threats is why I have a minimal social media presence and don’t post pictures of myself or living biological/chosen family members on the internet that would put my loved ones in danger.
I was a very patriotic youth and used to save up all my money the whole year for 4th of July fireworks. As I’ve mentioned in other papers, I was credited with getting “Bomber” Bob Dornan elected in 1980 in West Los Angeles. I was courted intensely by both the Navy and Air Force. It took me a while to understand how colonialism had affected both sides of my family, and why my fellow Americans kept trying to harm/kill/unperson me. I eventually threw in the towel and now live very happily as an Australian even though my name seems to block me from access to academia and work here also. Since people flat out refuse to even meet me, even my followers, they can’t see how white I look. Similar to Austin, Texas. I’ve had some amazing Australians go well out of their way to defend me in the few situations where I’ve run up against racism and related threats, and the government has treated me fairly. One of those friends is a top of the line lawyer and another had her mother blown to pieces right in front of her by the Nazis in the last week of WW2. We were close friends for 4 years before she told me this. I think very few people know. My lawyer friend charged in to defend me in my darkest hour, when I was a whistle-blower. I didn’t even know he was a lawyer until he ripped off his shirt to reveal the “S” on his chest and started tossing my attackers all over the place. So they get it.
Given that the Digital Fairness Act that I worked so hard to support for the last 12 years is close to passing, I feel like the gaming industry is going to need me more than ever. I’ve had two projects explicitly fail (Civilization Online and World of Warplanes) due to my assumed ethnicity (these assumptions are always wrong). Another, Trion World’s “End of Nations” I’m 90% sure failed due to my ethnicity (it was widely known they were not going to finish that without me). I think it is reasonable to suggest that my perceived ethnicity has been on the order of a 1% drag on the industry over the last 12 years. Post DFA I would expect that to rise to over 5% if people can’t get over my name. My monetisation tech was built for a post-DFA world and the industry has no other tech to deal with the new regulatory environment.
I hope all this information about my family will help negate generations of prejudice. There’s only a few people left in my family tree. I have no children, the previous generation only produced my sister and I as Tommy was killed in WW2, and the Eastern half was executed in 1980. Autism seems to have prevented the rest (including my uncle) from having offspring. We would like to make the world a better place in the few years we have left before we are also history.
As usual, if you have more questions, feel free to hit me up in the comments.
[Edit April 2nd, 2025: A friend did some amazing detective work after reading this, and found my great great grandfather William Johnson Newkirk in the pictures above was buried in Santa Monica in 1935.
His mother died when he was only 5 years old, at the age of 33. His parents married in Salem, New Jersey. Frederick is confirmed to be Mary’s father:
https://www.beachcombingmagazine.com/blogs/news/new-jersey-the-birthplace-of-the-american-glass-industry ]