hapa

that’s me. half and half.

it feels like now, more than any other time in my life, that matters. i read an older opinion piece about a woman who identified as black and who very much didn’t want a dna test to tell her just how black (or not) she was. those are my own dna results up there. i guess that explains the white skin and red hair. the freckles. i’m 0.5% more white than i am not. 1% more the other direction and i could have had a different experience navigating through the world. maybe.

listen. white people don’t go about their days, walking around appreciating all the ways that life is made just that much easier for the color of our skin. but it is, isn’t it? it’s repeated quite often but white privilege doesn’t mean that you don’t have challenges in life. if you’re poor. or have a rough family background. if you’re gay. or have a disability. or just … any number of things, really. there’s an infinite number of ways that life can be tough. but at least the color of your skin isn’t usually one of them… if you’re white.

so whiteness. yeah.

in some way it seems pretty straight forward. one’s whiteness is often defined externally, by others. by how they see you, and by the way the world interacts with you. the life experience afforded to you based on the color of your skin. but if we leave our racial identity to others to define, well, that’s gotten us in trouble before in a variety of ways. for example, historically, light skinned black people who tried to “pass,” who identified as white, ran the risk of being outed by others upon revelation of even one drop of non-white ancestry.

back to me. the world perceives me as white, so i am white. and there’s some superficial presumption of an understanding, at least initially, of who i am based just on that … wait. it just occurred to me: we’re all lazy, aren’t we? not necessarily in an intentionally malicious way. but we’re all looking for short cuts for ways to quickly understand the things around us, including the people around us. so we look for clues, and quickly piece together a picture. and then, with more time, more intel, we adjust that story to piece together a more nuanced, more accurate understanding of the people in our lives.

the problem is that building up that more three-dimensional picture of a person takes time, doesn’t it? and who has that kind of time? and we meet so many people, and with the non-stop whipped up pace of things…

when you meet me, when you see what i look like, you’re likely to make some quick assumptions just based on the color of my skin. it’s human nature. yep. i’ve skated by in areas where people with a few more percentage points of non-whiteness might have a more difficult time of things. so you’d be right about that assumption. but you might be wrong if you assumed, based on the color of my skin, that you could picture what my experience of family is, what it looks like, for example, when the extended family gets together. (think”my big fat greek wedding” but with more karaoke.) and this plays out in every direction, with every possible color of skin. skin color tells a part of someone’s story – and some important parts of that story too. but there’s more to us all.

i’ve been thinking about how all this matters in the context of conversations around social justice. i have gotten used to being lectured to by people of color on matters where race is involved, sometimes with literal fingers wagging in my face. it’s almost like there’s a sense of credibility associated with being not white. or maybe that’s not quite it. maybe it’s more that there’s a slight correction happening when it comes to that silent assumption of white privilege. maybe, in the context of conversations of matters related to race, we want to turn down the volume of that white voice that has been dominating all conversations for too long. shhh. it’s our turn to speak.

so how is it appropriate for me to interact in this space? do i sit quietly in my white skin, with my 49.5% non-white self, accepting that now is not the time to be tallying DNA markers, or attempting to justify my right to participate by virtue of having a life experience, and family history that is slightly more pigmented than my other equally white appearing cohort? or do i casually (or not casually) work into the conversation that i’ve got this other part of me..?

actually, the more time i spend here ruminating on this idea, the more it appears to me that i’m spending way too much time thinking about how i fit in to all this. it’s so very only-child of me (another equally – maybe more? – important part of the story that is me!). these conversations are about way way way more than just what-about-me...