Garnish and All (Or, There and Back Again).

A few weeks ago I was asked, on the first day of a course, to write about the first time I became aware of my race. With a few weeks hindsight, it becomes interesting to note that I chose to write about an awareness of being part Latino, rather than the more dominant whiteness (or maybe its more interesting that this contradiction just occurred to me now?). I suppose there are several explanations for this—growing up with mostly white people means that there was somewhat less physical difference to become conscious of, which is a lot of what racial awareness is all about. However, I could have just as easily written about discovering the significance of being white, in any of the various stages this occurred. Instead, I chose to engage with the darker 25%. And despite this, I seemed to wind up analyzing whiteness, as thoroughly as if I had chosen it as my ostensible topic.

My narrative (and why I believe it is how it is):

“A friend of mine once told me that, to him, my Latino heritage was like the garnish of a meal. It’s definitely there—you know this because you see it—but it doesn’t really add anything to the overall flavor. Either way, I’ll taste like a white person.

It then seems somewhat appropriate that my earliest awarenesses of ethnicity were always prompted by others—their questions and the observations about my skin color. The influence of Latino origins in my own life has, admittedly, been much more aesthetic than cultural, meaning that for much of my life I’ve considered myself biracial, but mostly in the eyes of others. That it could even be any different was an awakening that happened quite late in my childhood.

I share a birthday with my father so it didn’t seem like so much of a stretch that we’d both get tan in the summer, even if my mother was noticeably whiter. The notion that this whole thing had to do with his side of the family didn’t come until I was almost 13 years old, living in the 87% white Ames, Iowa, and my friend actually asked, “so, like, what are you?” I responded, “tan.” Afterwards I asked my father about the question, and he struggled to remember what percentage was Nicaraguan and what percentage was Cuban and whether there were any other countries whose names he couldn’t remember. I had asked him, planning to have a more specific answer for my friend, but left feeling like I had nothing to say. He could’ve responded “tan.”

The divorce between my skin color and any accompanying cultural influence didn’t have to be so concrete, though. This was around the same period that I overheard a conversation between my brother and mom about an assignment he had in class, in which he was to write about a family tradition that celebrated the family’s heritage. She thought for a few minutes, seemingly unable to imagine any relevant rituals, then jokingly suggested that he write about the traditions of our cavemen ancestors.

The point stuck. While the dismissal was innocuous, lighthearted, and coming from a relentlessly compassionate woman, it was still a dismissal of culture. And the sarcastic treatment of simply the idea of our family having unique traditions defined us in opposition to anything I might consider “diverse,” or “cultural.” Traditions were things that other people had. My job, however was different: it was to be the referent against which only unknowable others’ differences could be understood. To stand upright in the center of Ames, a big white measuring stick.”

The essay is still, at its core, about being white.* It’s about biracial identity confusion, but an identity confusion whose roots I trace to growing up in an overwhelmingly nourishing environment, one in which my (still relatively light) skin color was not a source of prejudice because I was well-spoken, have a European sounding name, and was so generally well-behaved.

Yet still I chose to arrive at this topic though an attempt to engage with my minority heritage, rather than using whiteness as a guiding framework. As if I couldn’t comfortably write about what it meant to be white in a mostly white town without first acknowledging the countries that some great-grandfathers came from. And I had to realize that my sense of separation from the acknowledged “cultural diversity” of others was a symptom of my own privilege, before I could realize I was fundamentally writing about whiteness. I gave the Writing about Being Part Latino thing a shot: instead, frank thoughts about whiteness emerged.

It’s a pretty extraordinary process: starting to write about my minority experience, realizing I never quite felt like I had a minority experience, and then writing instead about the realization of not having a minority experience. Why was it so hard to just write about whiteness? I suppose—and bear with me here, I promise this won’t devolve into self-pity—that it’s the shame.

Truth is, there were plenty of traditions I could have written about. There was the advent wreath, the epiphany cake with a little baby inside, both Roman Catholic traditions. There were even more modern traditions that I expect to be passed down, if only through the secular family—frog cupcakes, for example. But none of these seemed particularly cultural; they had no sense of identity tied to them (jury’s out on whether some of this had to do with Catholic schooling). That why, growing up, for better or worse, I disqualified them from relating to anything I could have attributed to my race. There were no white traditions, at least none conceived of as such. So then, what is left for me to identify with about being white? Only the material privilege and social capital, and that’s no fun to talk about.

None of this is meant to lament my whiteness or victimize myself. Rather, it’s to propose that: to experience white guilt is not (necessarily) to undergo a trivial and/or condescending exercise in paying one’s psychological dues—it’s instead the result of a natural process through which ones tries to engage with his or her identity. It’s a form of cognitive dissonance, in which one decides what it means for oneself to be actively implicated in others’ suffering. It’s something that was apparently so unpleasant to deal with in the essay, I fear that came dangerously close to claiming an identity I have had minimal lived experience with (or, at least I tried to claim it).

So, what to do? Reading this, it might seem logical to reclaim whiteness in some way, visit stuffwhitepeoplelike, pick out the best stuff, and be proud. Not exactly—the thought makes me too nervous now, the legacy too volatile.

I’m more inclined to think that the rhetorical difficulty—impossibility?—of identifying as white, without answering “material privilege and social capital” when asked “what makes you white,” should be an invitation to talk about exactly these things. How they have affected our lives and what that means. This should not always be a self-defacing process, but we shouldn’t shy away if it feels that way. It is pretty ugly what brought us together.

Ideally, such conversations would be a step toward deconstructing the ways in which racial myths originated—fully talking about how they were created should also mean talking about how to break them down. However, even if this won’t happen immediately, we must still engage white individuals to imagine themselves as complicit in an oppressive system. This is necessary to imagine oneself outside of that system, destroying that system.

*To be clear: I don’t want my fairly casual use of racial identity labels to be essentializing. It is perfectly reasonable that someone identifying as Latino (or Hispanic-American, or biracial) could feel the same feelings I did. Similarly, the feelings I attribute to “whiteness” could be felt by one with any heritage or set of identifications. When I use such terms, perhaps I more closely mean: “whiteness as I understand it, and as it has affected my life in my own circumstances.” Or, if you want to get more technical, something like, “the set of systemic privileges, generally found in persons of light skin color, that have been maintained over centuries through shifting criteria for inclusion.”