I was blog surfing and came across this on Echidne of the Snakes.
My heart got crushed when they asked the little girl "And which doll is most like you?" and she slowly, reluctantly, shamefully pushed the "bad" doll over to the interviewer. That hurt.
At parties, after the "What do you do?" question, everyone inevitably moves on to the "And where are you from?" question - the ethnic sense, not the geographical one. One of my favorite things to do is to make people guess. No one is ever quite sure where I'm from one way or another. I don't have a NY accent, which allowed me to be accepted much more readily out here in The West, when I first came out for University. The other girl on my floor who was from Long Island? She got razzed constantly. Guesses about race are never correct. Everyone immediately goes for some flavor of South American. Then they move over to Italian. Most unusual guess was Ukranian.
Nope, I'm a mix of Jamaican and Canadian, I respond with pride and glee. No one ever thinks about islands! Poor little islands! Then the guesser has to go into a little mind bend correlating my looks with their idea of Jamaican. Everyone goes right for the dark, black, Rastafarian look and that's as far from my mom as you can get without leaving the island! To say that I "pass" as other races is putting it lightly. And now there's Caitlin, who is 1/4 Jamaican and looks as Caucasian as the day is long. I felt conflicted over what to select on the Race/Ethnicity box when enrolling her in school because the concept of "Other" does not compute in our area of Colorado.
Race is a weird thing. Growing up, it was made very clear to me that I was Other. The obnoxious black kids in the neighborhood hated us because we were neither one nor the other. The white kids (Whom we referred to as The White Boys, so that will give you a clue that I identified as Other back then.) didn't have anything to do with us until they discovered that I was a *gasp* girl. Then it didn't matter what my mom was. In elementary school I was one of 3 Caucasian looking kids (Italian, Puerto Rican and me). My junior high (what's called "Middle School" in these here parts) was very diverse, but I don't remember any black kids there and then in high school they wouldn't believe me until they saw my mom.
Mostly alone in my otherness, I didn't think much about the race issue. Then I came to Colorado. That was an eye opening experience. I suddenly discovered that apparently White Folks really were in the majority in the US! Growing up in Queens, NY, I was always in doubt. My world was filled with people from all over, but mostly shades of brown. Out here, it was all White. And tanned. And they'd look you in the eye and smile at you as they walked down the street.
Unnerving!
Getting back to the doll issue, there I was without a doll to choose from. I didn't feel comfortable around the 6% of black folks in school and they weren't comfortable around me. Only a couple of the white kids even noticed that my skin color was different and said something mean about it. The rest didn't seem to care, so I hung out with them.
I still don't have a group that I identify with, one way or the other. I still select Other on forms. Like the girl in the movie, I'm sort of without my own culture*. How do I introduce Caitlin to a culture that I'm not fully part of? In some ways it's easy for her since she just accepts that this set of people are her relatives just as easily as she accepts this radically more colorful set of folks are also her relatives. We're all just folks until someone starts pointing out black and white.
What's your culture? How do you self-identify?
* Although trips to Jamaica are especially fun when you tell the cab drivers that your grandma is a local. The hard sell stops, the offers of cell phones to call the Ever Late mom begin. But that's a story for another day.
1 comment:
I understand your "choose a box" plight.
I was signing Marlena up for kindergarten when I was first hit with the reality of the race question. I had to choose a box for my daughter, and while I have always chosen white for me, or other if I am feeling political, she is Hispanic.
This really wierded me out, not because I have any problems with her being hispanic, but because it seems wierd that someone I literally grew inside my body would have a different race than me.
Further, her biological father is the source of her hispanic heritage. He is half german half Spanish. However, he never saw his father, who is where the spanish comes from, and was raised in white culture by his mother. NASCAR/Biker white culture at that. He doesn't speak spanish, has no spanish cultural background, and carries a German last name. Then there is the fact that he is rarely around and she has been raised by me and my family. We all hark from the germanic/irish countries, with just a touch of Cherokee Indian mixed in.
So here I was, filling out paperwork in the school with my daughter, taken aback to realize her race was different from mine.
I asked the lady behind the counter. "Which box should I pick for race? She is part Spanish, but has not been raised in Spanish or Hispanic culture."
She stared at me. Obviously this is not a problem for most parents. They just pick a box, which is basically what she told me to do.
Since then I have marked her as hispanic, white, and other, depending on my mood. She doesn't care, it took me over three hours on Martin Luther King Day to explain why racial differences matter in our culture anyway. (I am really proud that it took so long, she just doesn't see the difference between different skin color and different hair color. To her, people just are different.)
Maybe we should start a political movement to get rid of the box. We can all start adding our own box! Check the "human" box, for example.
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