Pink Thunder: Dealing with the Whiteness

I was hanging out with some friends sipping wine maybe a year or 2 ago and I was talking about coming to terms with my mixed heritage specifically the Indian part. One of my friends who happens to be white said:"Yeah, well, you're going to have to deal with the whiteness too someday!"

My eyes turned into saucers. There was...an awkward brief silence punctuated by my friend saying: "Seriously, you are the lightest skin black person I've ever known." She looked around at the rest of our friends in the room who were also all white. "I mean, is it just me? It's just sort of obvious!"
There were some averted eyes and shrugs in the crowd.

I took a deep breath and said, "Well, I'll get to that when I get to it."

Time has passed and well, I guess I'm getting to it. The thing is, some of the white ancestors that I know about don't exactly have the best family PR. Also, to be part white in America generally means you're not white at all. It's like the white gets negated or trumped with whatever else it's blended with. It's like it doesn't count. Unless of course you look white. Chuck Norris is half Cherokee (2 of his grandparents were full blood). He was even picked on in OK as a kid for being mixed race, for looking different. But then he left that place and found greater welcome in a wider, more diverse society where he looked white enough to "pass".

I will never be mistaken for being white, although both my grandmothers have. And unlike being part native american, there's not a ton of culture left over. There are a few things, mostly food oriented. So what does it mean to my life to be part white? I don't know. It feels like a whole other layer to peel back or 2 or 3 since the white part of me involves quite a few different ethnicities including Jewish, French, Italian, Spanish, English and Scotch-Irish. Although not all of those counted as white in the 1800s or 1900s in America. Ha. Who knows: maybe black will be white too someday! That's the way it is in Brazil -- whiteness isn't exactly an ethnicity. Instead it's more of a class.

That's not my dream though. I'll tell you a secret: us mixed race folks tend to chuckle amongst ourselves and whisper conspiratorially to each other -- "someday everyone will look like us!" That is, if people can pull down artificial barriers to love.

Comments

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Posted by: The North Face | July 13, 2011 at 11:12 PM