I may have related this small anecdote to the IV public before. If I have, please forgive me.

A couple of months ago, I was needing change for the local newspaper and I asked (in Spanish) the guy behind the counter for change. Having eyeballed him as Latino, I was surprised to hear him answer me in English, "What! I look Mexican to you, man?"

I never bothered to find out what he really was, beyond human, but my little story illustrates how easy it is to eyeball and then assume further things about people. And, no....this is not a touchy-feely "diversity" essay telling everybody to "be more sensitive and not eyeball". The fact of the matter is, eyeballing of our fellow men is here to stay. You see it in central casting in Hollywood. It helps the story line to have recognizable entities. The fact that Cliff Curtis is from New Zealand doesn't stop him from actually looking like a Chicano. Henry Winkler, who is Jewish, looked Italian enough to be Arthur Fonzarelli (the "Fonz") on Happy Days.

In our daily lives we encounter hosts of people who uphold our eyeballing estimates and those who surprise us. This is the normal give and take of everyday life.

But the problem is not the eyeballing -- the problem is the strength, rigidity and importance of barriers between groups.

In Hitler's Germany, the art of eyeballing Jews took on new heights (or lows). But what would have occurred if one's Jewish identity in Germany was as important as one's Methodist identity in Kentucky? Maybe some isolated fanatics would have lived or died on "whether one could tell", but, beyond that, it would have been of no consequence. It is this reason so much ink is used on the status of North American "blacks", both here at Interracial Voice, and in the U.S. in general. The line between "black" and "white" (indeed, the line between "black" and anything else) is strong, rigid, salient, based on hypodescent and, generally, not subject to alteration by self-definition. Thus the eyeballing behavior assumes the importance of not merely ascertaining an ethnicity, but establishing a solid line basically separating two distinct universes. This is exacerbated by the fact that the historical basis of separation between "black" and everything else has been, not behavior or language or, for that matter, generalized culture, but physical, notable, "racial" differences (which can be eyeballed).

The de-criminalization of African ancestry can be said to follow the same types of logic as the de-criminalization of being Chicano or being Chinese American or being Native American. All groups deserve and require respect and equal protection under the law. All groups should receive dignity. "Blacks" need a little more. The rigid line separating them from others, the hypodescent, the myth of the "tainted blood" -- all of that has to go. And it's going to go, sooner or later, one way or another.

William Javier Nelson, Ph.D.

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