my friend m., who is of mixed race and is lightskinned, told me a story about hir life. ze was with a white friend and the topic of race came up. m.’s friend said, “you know, its weird, i see you as white at this point.” m. was flustered by this, and rightly so, even though ze is partially what the average american would deem “white”.as another mixed person who passes for white, ze asked me for my opinion.
many white people have the privilege to see themselves as raceless. many white parents teach their white children that race and color doesn’t matter, because they are just human. this line of thinking passes on intergenerationally and between peers, making white people pretty damn uncomfortable with talking about race.
in the case of m.’s friend, i didn’t want to defend them, but give m. some context to what they may have been trying to say. to white people, “white” equals human by a slew of operational definitions, as stated above. m.’s friend was essentially giving hir a backhanded compliement. the compliment: “i see you as a person and my friend, and even though we may have some differences we can still get along”. the backhanded part: “you aren’t like other people of similar ethnic backgrounds to yours that i have experienced, so i am projecting my ideas of both people of color and white people onto you and have decided that you are actually white”. this is in line with the practice of defining another’s race in contrast to yours: it puts them into a box while simultaneously defining your own race as whatever isn’t in the box.
another thing m. mentioned was the struggle and issues ze faces as being a lightskinned person. m. feels like ze is strattling the worlds of both people of color and white people and never feels completely right in either. i commented that our society is still obsessed with the concept of boxes and how people can fit into them. people like myself, who pass as white, are regarded as such without any kind of examination as to what we might “be” exactly. i never get people coming up to me on the street looking fascinated, harassing me with a barrage of questions like, “what are you?” or “are you like spanish or something?” like m. and many lightskinned mixed/biracial/multiracial people are. while my white background is hyped, m.’s nonwhite background is hyped – because we attempt to put people into one or the other.we still don’t have a largely circulated idea of what it means to be bi/multiracial here. m. also faces the opinions and judgments of nonwhite people because of hir color. it is assumed that ze has had a better, easier life by virtue of having one white parent and that ze will be better liked and received in society. while the latter is statisicially more likely to be true, it can still be damaging to someone who doesn’t actually experience this.
* i would also like to add that we still don’t really have an operational definition of what “white” exactly is, and this complicates the whole thing further. what country of origin must one claim to therefore be white? are italians white? or the irish? we don’t have strictly defined beginning and ending points for the concept of white, which can lead many people to use the label as white without questioning it, or reject it for themselves while others project it onto them. overall, we need to start talking about this shit – or else we’ll all just keep putting each other into homemade boxes and creating mental distinctions between ourselves.
