The intent of this post is to try to explain, as best I can, where I am coming from, racially speaking. As a matter of ancestry, I fall into the category generally described as "white." My genetics are one thing. My culture is quite another, which is part of why I thought this post was needed.
First, a few things that I am not: 1) I am not at all confused about my heritage, meaning I know full well that hanging with brothers and being married to a sista does not make me black (duh!); 2) I am not a "wigger" or other wannabe-brother, trying to assume certain "black" mannerisms in order to be hip, cool, or different; 3) I am not one of those dreadlocked white boys with the patchouli and the Bob Marley fixation (okay, Bob rules all Reggae, but you know what I mean), nor do I own a hackysack; 4) I am not a sociology major beset with White Man's Guilt; and 5) I am not...white.
Okay, I know I've already referred to myself as white. So bear with me for a second.
When I go out in the world, people look at me and (usually) see just another white guy, unless I'm getting on an airplane in which case I have about a 30%-40% chance of being taken for some kind of Arabic/Mediterranean person and subjected to some extra-search lovin'. Guess I have to blame my Spanish ancestors for getting intermingled with the Moors. At any rate, I go about my daily business, and people who have the typical American mindset, e.g. one that accepts the notion of "white", "black" and "other", generally put me in the white category. I can only assume that there have been times when I have received some sort of privilege for being "white", given that the concept of whiteness itself is about reserving status and privileges for the one group while denying the same for other groups. By the world's definitions, I am "white." But all of that is external, how the world perceives me.
Internally, in my subjective self-image, I don't see myself as "white", again not because I am dumb enough to think that after dapping up "x" number of brothers and pop-locking "x" number of times I have become "down" enough to achieve blackness. What I mean is that I am not subjectively "white" because I do not agree with or accept the validity of whiteness itself. Let me be very clear: I am not saying that I do not accept anglos, caucasians, or whatever other group or groups are referred to as "white", nor am I saying that I hate or even dislike white people or that I reject my own heritage. It is the concept itself that I reject, the political construct that is implicit in assuming the label of "white".
In order for me to be white, I have to accept that I am the majority, the norm, the average, and that others who are "not white" are something other than the norm. There's the white "us" and the everybody-else "them". When you look at the history of different non-English immigrants to America, be it the Irish, the Italians, Eastern Europeans, or Jews, there's a common narrative arc: when they first arrived, they weren't considered "white", e.g. "us". They were "them."
The "no Irish need apply" signs were hardly rare when large numbers of Irish started coming over. There's a reason why other than black people the majority of the labor for several major canal systems was Irish: because the job was deadly dangerous, and the Irish were expendable. It took decades for the Irish to be part of the Great White Us. It was the same for Italians. They came over and found themselves discriminated against in hiring and housing, and in politics, until they had somehow assimilated enough to "ascend" to co-equal white status. Poles, Czechs, same pattern. How many surnames in America are Anglicized versions of ethnic Polish names, or Czech names, or Russian, et cetera? The same thing happened with the Jews.
"Whiteness" is the notion that what is good and normal and virtuous belongs to one group. It is the notion that the only way to achieve status, to be worthy of a seat at the table, is to assimilate with the cultural habits of that one group. Don't be too ethnic with your name, don't go around asking for your strange food in eateries, don't stand out. Blend. Disappear. Surrender.
In some ways, the notion of "whiteness" has been very destructive for my family. My grandfather was Cajun, but we could never call him that. He saw it as a perjorative, an insult like "coon-ass", his version of the "n" word. He was placed in an orphanage at the age of 9 after his mother died. Up to that point he had spoken only Cajun French. At the orphanage, they forbade him and his siblings from speaking in Cajun. They would literally get beaten for using their native tongue.
To be Cajun was to be trash, permanent underclass. The Irish Catholic nuns at that orphanage forced assimilation upon my grandfather, and as far as I know he never spoke French again until he was on his deathbed, talking to one of his deceased brothers. When he married my grandmother, who was from south Alabama, he stopped pronouncing his name in the French manner, and instead adopted the Alabama version. My mother and her sisters were raised to have no accent at all. They watched midwestern network newscasters every night. That was the way to speak. In short, they were raised to be "white" at the expense of having no connection with their French heritage. The language is almost entirely lost in my family.
My father's mother also grew up speaking Cajun French, and for a long time we just assumed that she was Cajun. Like a lot of Cajuns, she moved to the city and abandoned her native language. It turns out that she was almost 100% Spanish by blood, but because she grew up in a Cajun town, that was what they spoke. It's one of those "you know you're from south Louisiana when" kind of things. She assimilated, married a white man from north Louisiana, and raised my father and his brothers as completely "white", again with no concept of their other heritage.
That is the "whiteness" that I reject, that overwhelming, Borg-like cultural mass to which all others must bow down in order to succeed. Dilute what you are enough, and you too can become white. Unless you're black.
I don't accept what it means to be white, because I refuse to accept the corollary, what it means to be black. I don't accept the idea that there is a permanent wall between whiteness and blackness, one that cannot be crossed over, the notion that black people can never ascend to be the same kind of "us" that the Irish and the Italians eventually became. I don't accept the notion that one's "pure" heritage can somehow be altered or "tainted" by African blood (hence my entirely ironic handle on this site). I don't accept that slavery was morally defensible because Africans were not people in the same way that the slaveowners were (and therefore not entitlted to Constitutional rights). I don't accept the notion that everything I have I have supposedly "earned", while a black man in my position must have been given a "preference" through affirmative action.
Whiteness as a concept is about absolution for unforgivable sins. Slavery was acceptable, because the slaves were not white. To the minds of the slaveowners, they were committing no sin, because it had been biblically ordained that blacks be the slaves of whites ("cursed be Canaan" and all that jazz). Their blood was "pure", the slaves were not (and mulattoes remained slaves because their white blood had been "tainted" by black blood, therefore they were lifelong property). So long as the slaveowners were white, they could not be guilty of oppression, because there were no "people" to be oppressed. It was only blacks. Jim Crow was acceptable, because, again, there was no denial of rights to "people" or "citizens." To be white was to be an American, with full civil rights, while to be black was outside of the scope of citizenship, beyond the protections of the Bill of Rights or the 14th Amendment. Whiteness is the lie that America told itself in order to sleep at night, unburdened by the contradiction between "all men are created equal" and the enslavement of others.
Most of all, I don't accept whiteness because I don't accept the idea that my wife and my children have one heritage, while I have another. I don't accept the idea that my wife and children are fundamentally different from me because they have African ancestors. I am part of a "we", not part of a "me" and "them". There is no separation, there is no boundary. There is only unity. In order for that to be true, there can be no "whiteness".
You want to know when racism will end in this country? When the idea of "whiteness" is dead and gone. Whiteness in itself is all about white supremacy. The very meaning of "race" as a concept is racism. To accept that term, that definition, that identity, is to accept all that comes with it. No one has to abandon their heritage in order to abandon "whiteness." You can be Anglo-American and accept that you are only part of the larger whole, not entitled to any special treatment because of your English blood. Whiteness is not about heritage or pride in oneself. Whiteness is about control, barriers between the norm and the other.
The only way for those barriers to fall is for the people that erected them and maintain them to let them fall. Abandon the ramparts. Open the Bastille. Let go of unearned privilege, and undue power. Set down the false crown of racial purity.
So...with all that being said, I have some episodes of the Boondocks that need watching.
Peace, y'all.
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