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Discovering My Race: A Stark ContrastPosted by admin on July 3rd, 2009

The theme of the July issue of The Sun magazine is race.  Funny, because that seems to have been a big theme in my life for the past three or four years.

Are you wondering why race is such a big deal to me if I’m white?

That’s precisely the paradox I’ve encountered.

My husband’s experiences as a Hispanic male, who often gets mistaken for African-American or biracial, have flooded my world with new realities.  I’ve learned that race is as relative a concept as age.  It doesn’t really matter if someone belongs to a given race, or even if that “race” is actually a race; it only matters how we treat them because of what we believe their category to be.  Hispanic, for example, is not considered a race in biological terms.  There are white, black, and red Hispanics.  About the only thing they share is language, and even in that arena there are more differences than similarities.  Yet, the burgeoning Hispanic minority in the U.S. has given the majority another reason to feel threatened, and another group upon which to project our xenophobia.

In true genetic terms, race is a no-thing.  All members of the human race are almost exactly alike (over 99% genetically similar).  According to the Human Genome Project, most genetic mutation is relatively new and has occurred among populations rather than across them.  Races, and the hatred thereof, are social constructions that have changed over time.

Tim Wise, author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, says in his interview with The Sun:

“We are naturally predisposed to notice height, weight, eye color, skin color, facial features, hair texture.  But there is a difference between that and having antipathy toward other groups.  Also, the focus on skin color doesn’t make sense to me.  We have elevated its importance because powerful elites decided to do so.  Skin color hasn’t always been a primary concern.  The Greeks viewed the African kingdoms as far superior to Europeans, whom they thought were slow and stupid, even though they were closer in skin color to the Greeks.  In the colonies that would become the United States, white indentured servants and African slaves worked, lived, slept, and played together — and some in the Virginia colony even conspired together to overthrow their masters.  The elites needed a way to divide them, so they extended the notion of supremacy to servants of European descent and passed laws to segregate the races.  In a way segregation laws themselves are proof that racism isn’t natural.  If people naturally refused to associate with other races, there would be no need for laws to keep them apart” (6).

There are many other noteworthy quotes in the interview, the full text of which you can read here.

This section struck me, though, because I vividly remember being shocked during my sophomore year of college, when I learned that there had been white slaves in the colonies.  I felt like important identifying information had been withheld from me.  In middle and high school textbooks, we learn that blacks and whites played separate roles in early America because that makes it easier to maintain the balance of power and keep race relations in a box.  Whites are supposed to feel guilty (but take no action) and blacks are supposed to feel bitter (and also take no action).  After all, it’s the past…right?

In textbook-free reality, the construction of race as a divisor very much defines the present.  The problem is that it defines the white man’s world as secure, which provokes no inquiry and makes it impossible for a member of the influential majority to understand life at the bottom of the racial food chain.  We don’t even have the parameters with which to build unbreakable associations with minorities because we simply don’t see the world in black and white — we don’t have to.

When I was living in a dorm during my junior year of college, my husband (then boyfriend) would drive across town to see me.  He would always be hesitant to come late at night, and I didn’t understand why.  One night, though, he said he was on his way and didn’t show up.  I finally got him on the phone and he said he had been pulled over three times in a row in Winter Park (a rich suburb of Orlando), supposedly because he had a taillight out.  The true reason, which he knew better than I, was that driving an old Toyota Corolla through a Lexus town signified to police that he did not belong.  I had heard his stories about unjust run-ins with the law in the past, but didn’t completely get it until that night.  From then on, we drove through Winter Park in my Jetta, and he was safe by association.  It made me sick, but I felt hopeless and still do.

Our son looks white.  He has blue eyes and fair skin (though a few minutes of sun makes him tan like his dad).  His light brown hair hasn’t grown in yet, so we have no idea if he will look even slightly biracial.  When he was born, our friends and family were surprised that he looks more like me than like his father.  And, I wonder, were they secretly relieved?

We can only guess how he will define himself in a world that requires racial definition first and foremost.  Will he, like his mother, be immersed in and oblivious to white privilege because no one knows that he is part Cuban, part Puerto Rican?  Or will he surround himself with the symbols and tools of his Hispanic heritage and be singled out for it like his father and grandfather are?  It is a cruel miracle of sorts, that the chance meeting of chromosomes can produce two or more intensely different realities by virtue of phenotype.

Every day, I walk a line between the world of racial buzzwords (“tolerance,” “diversity”) in which I grew up and the world in which everything is characterized by race.  The latter is the one I never knew existed.

Perhaps I engaged in “white denial,” as Wise says, and I wanted to believe that I live in a just society.  I think it is more abstruse, though, and that I have a lot of catching up to do with my husband and everyone else who peered through a darker lens than mine in their formative years.  There is a lot that I simply don’t know, and never will, no matter how much I want to.  Continuing to share my ignorance and opening myself up to bad news will be a lifelong process.  For the first twenty years of my life, I stood on a foundation of certainty that my future would unfold in a positive direction, without searching for the origin of this assumption.  I now know that a large part of that transparent assumption lies in my literal transparency.

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