An enormous amount of people are oblivious to the issues associated with race. Up until a few years ago, I was one of them. Some people grow up with racial stereotypes and generalizations so deeply ingrained that they aren’t even malicious, but simply childish rationalizations for deeper issues. An example: thinking that African-Americans are “better at sports because their wide nostrils give them better air flow intake,” like the Fordham student who made it all the way to a college anthro class at Fordham before encountering the ridicule of his peers (one of whom related this story to me) for holding such a blatantly mistaken notion. Yet this isn’t the kind of racial obliviousness I experienced—over the course of my childhood, I grew up in so many settings that I failed to really recognize race as any kind of important factor. In my early teenage years, after recognizing that others were much more mindful of racial categorizations, stereotypes, and characteristics (however off all of these usually were) I derived a kind of pride from this ignorance, believing myself to be so un-racist that I could disdain such a primitive notion as the existence of racial differences. As I grow into the next, and hopefully not last, phase of my thought on the matter, I come to see that race is more important than I thought, and in dealing with race issues I earlier dismissed, I find myself for the first time really examining my own racial identity, and like so many others in the post-election age, rediscovering race.
I am half black, half white, full Jew. I guess. It’s not so simple, actually, as my black half is Caribbean, meaning it’s not so much black-straight-from-Africa-black as something like black-because-if-you-mix-enough-colors-together-you-get-black. My white half is Eastern European, which would be pretty straightforward but for the fact that that whole repeated Diaspora ordeal tends to append a parenthetical question mark when it comes to racial identification for the Jews. To add to my troubles, I grew up in a bunch of different places, including Martinique (French West Indies) Mauritius (off-shore southern Africa) Israel (somewhere in the Middle East, I think?) Vanuatu (I actually can never remember, I was like 2) and a couple other places. The ethnic makeup of my friends and enemies growing up was diverse to say the least—maybe that’s why living in black Martinique, I couldn’t understand why playground fights stressed that I was white (“am I? oh yeah, I guess so.”), or why I was encountering the word “nigger” in a Massachusetts suburb. Either way, the encounters with race that stand out in my memory from growing up are the ones that left me shocked and confused about how seriously people seemed to take something which to me and my family seemed to mean nothing. What I didn’t understand before was that it’s not that race doesn’t matter, it’s that race, for better or for worse, can strongly shape identity. And identity matters a whole lot.
While living in Black Muslim Niger as a Peace Corps volunteer, my dad bought a horse. Years later, after getting a job, getting married, and having two kids, my dad would bring me to Niger to settle a dispute over that horse’s successor. I was in 5th grade, and it was the first time my accepting eye could not overlook race, no matter how color-blind I thought I was. As the first white kid ever to walk the streets of Yekuwa, the village we were straight chillen in, I was no less than a sensational oddity. Actually, I wasn’t just odd; the bearded lady at the circus is odd. I was more like a bearded lady, except with like three heads, and instead of the circus where one expects to see strange things, it would be like I was randomly walking through your neighborhood. The point is, Yekuwa is about as ethnically homogeneous as the authors in DS’s curriculum. I caused quite a stir. Kids of all ages would swarm me, stare at me, touch my hair, touch my skin, then check their fingertips to observe the results. This got quite annoying, and I exclaimed to my father angrily that they should grow up and see that I was no different, really, just, well, different. Dad asked me to consider how strange I would consider a blue kid, and I insisted that I, in my infinite tolerance, would take it in stride. But what would I actually think if I had a class with a kid of blueish hue? If there were a whole race of blue people? The discovery of this people would not only create a completely unfunny Eiffel 65 resurgence, but it would probably make me rethink the nature of who I was by virtue of forcing me to consider who other people are. Therein must lay the problem of my upbringing: in seeing the Others and becoming so accustomed to them, I must have somehow stunted my ‘race vision.’ And when I looked in the mirror, all I saw was Me, without necessarily knowing what that meant in terms of the actual peoples from which I came.
I know many different cultures, and I can identify with a lot of them. Perhaps even more than most. But at the same time I feel like I have a lot of room for further self-exploration: knowing how to mix a Martinican drink or how to dance to Martinican Zouk does not make a Martinican. Yet I have actual, physical roots there, a family, a home, early memories, even love. And while for the longest time I didn’t consider myself really Martinican, or white, or American, or anything more than in just a matter-of-fact aspect, circumstantial to my existence but neither necessary nor especially relevant to it, I’ve come to that point in life where I realize that identity isn’t just who you make yourself. No matter who we become and what we make ourselves into, we’re still born with history, culture, skin color, facial features, and a place of origin…we still have part of our identities determined the moment we emerge bawling from the womb to a world that distinguishes between races and places importance on it. And I have no doubt that this can be a good thing, something that can anchor us, give us existential comfort, camaraderie in those similar to ourselves, a method of self-identification…if nothing else, at least a special relation to the specific history of a group of people pas the immediate branches of one’s own family tree. These are all things that may seem self-evident, but for a racially-self-conscious late-bloomer like myself, they constitute the newfound joys of rediscovering race.
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