Are your ancestors from Europe? Have you always thought of yourself as white if the subject came up? On an employment form? Or a census questionnaire? Listen. You don’t have to be white. Even if your skin color is light, if your eyes are blue, if your hair is blond, it doesn’t matter. These things don’t make you white. They tell you a little about where your parents, and their parents, came from. But they don’t make you white.
Each twig and branch has its own cultural bark and buds–language, customs, work, smells, food. The shape of the thicket, if you push way back through time and over the curving earth, is your path heritage, your journey to here and now. It might lead back through Asia into India and Afghanistan, or down through Indonesia across the Banda Sea to New Guinea, or from the southern tip of the Americas up through Alaska into Siberia and down to Iran, or into the welling foothills of the Carpathians, then over the Asian steppe. Together we claim five billion paths over millions of years. But each of those paths seems to lead to our ancient home in Africa.
Yet all racial constructions crumble at their edges: Nazi formulas for Aryan purity (what makes a Jew or a Gypsy), the equations that defined race in the antebellum south, apartheid, and the ever-changing rules of the U.S. census. In each case, racial ideologues and apologists have scrambled for a system to make sense at the edges of nonsensical racial divisions. And human populations are full of edges, edges where Semites blend in with Greeks, Arabs with Nigerians, Spaniards with Moroccans, Caucasians with Tartars, and southern gentry with African slaves.
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I continued. “I mean, my father’s Polish and my mother’s Mexican. Does that make me white?”
“Well,” she said finally, “do you relate to yourself as being white?”
Minority groups in our country have their own joking ways of referring to members who adopt the ways of the white majority: there are Oreos (black on the outside, white within), Apples (red on the outside, white within), etc. What do these appellations mean? Aren’t they evidence that whiteness is more a state of mind than a physical phenomenon?
I didn’t know what to say. People are touchy about race. I wanted to ask him, “Is Alice white?” Has Alice, at age six, been placed within the power-defining superstructures of race? But I can’t think of any good reason for Alice or her dad to identify themselves as white. I can think of a lot of good reasons for them not to.
