INTERRACIAL VOICE

Essay

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By William Javier Nelson

It has been said that no one can guarantee the actions of another. Certainly, the pages in the annals of Interracial Voice are full of the utterances of those who, while believing that control of the thoughts and actions of others is a low percentage proposition sometimes, nevertheless try to nudge them a bit.

I am going to follow that directive a little here. My thoughts flow from two young people with whom I am very close: my son and my step-daughter. They involve the semantic abominations "white" and "black" which have so plagued the United States.

My son is a very light-skinned young man who, in my country, would be called "blanco" (white) as a mostly descriptive term. The fact that I am brown is irrelevant. My step-daughter is very dark in complexion and identifies as being racially mixed. Moreover, she would rather that people who are brown identify as such, especially if that mixture has been part of their formative experiences.

I have always thought that people in this country are all wrong about race. However, a lot of people can say that. My concern is with the nature of the terms, "white" and "black." To my way of thinking, if a person is fair-skinned (and that is a subjective term), I can't see why they couldn't identify themselves as "white" (much like my son). It would not matter to me if African ancestry (or any ancestry) were present. Where I differ from many people in the U.S. is that, for me, "white" means at most (or least) a description of one's appearance. Moreover, to me "white" lies mostly in the eyes of the beholder. A German friend of mine once called my "white" son brown, probably because he has a different frame of reference. "White" certainly DOES NOT connote to me what it ideally does for racists in the US:

(1) MEMBERSHIP IN A "CULTURE"

(2) MEMBERSHIP IN A GROUP PROHIBITED FROM HAVING "BLACK" ANCESTRY

(3) MEMBERSHIP IN A GROUP WITH A CRITERIA FOR "PURITY"

(4) MEMBERSHIP IN A GROUP WHICH REJECTS OTHERS WHO ARE NOT AS "LIGHT"

(5) MEMBERSHIP IN A GROUP WHICH IS "GENETICALLY" SUPPOSED TO BE DIFFERENT FROM OTHER HUMAN BEINGS

(6) MEMBERSHIP IN A GROUP WITH SOME SUPPOSED POLITICAL AGENDA AS "WHITES"

(7) MEMBERSHIP IN A GROUP WHICH SETS ITSELF AS DIFFERENT AND ABOVE OTHER MEMBERS OF THE HUMAN FAMILY

Of course, these are racist criteria and, of course, there are "whites" of this country who do not subscribe to any of this. But enough of this nonsense is around as a cultural norm-set to separate North Americans.

The "black" descriptor is not much better. Rather than a description of appearance, it has been appropriated as a political mind-set not only bent on combatting the "whiteness" described above, but subsuming all those with "black blood" into the combat group, frequently resulting in trivializing a lot of cultural traditions and practices (i.e., what does a Melanesian have to do with hip-hop?). Moreover it is IMPOSSIBLE to maintain a "racial" group pride in a group which appropriates by default instead of maintaining cultural standards unique to that group. "Black" North Americans have a solo criteria for membership in their group: "black blood." Language, traditions, culture, music, cuisine are all relatively unimportant. If this were not the case, black North Americans would not have tried to "make their own" the young "Blackanese" woman who described her experiences in her own webpage off IV. They were not concerned with anything inside her soul and they were certainly not concerned with her experiences in any culture. The main rub was: are you liable to be eyeballed and then dissed by the ever-evil "whites." So there are thus "black" Jews, "black" Hispanics, "black" Chinese, "black" Vietnamese, etc. In the North American way of thinking, ALL of these people have some sort of unity -- unity of being rejected by another group ("whites"). The tragedy, of course, is that the European settlers started this mess. I suspect that if Africans (or Indians, for that matter) had been initially treated precisely the same as European immigrants to the U.S., what we would have now would be North Americans of varying phenotypes. Period. Certainly not the whining practitioners of victimology most North Americans have become. The other tragedy is, really, an irony and a directive: the people who started one-drop/black/white are long gone. The people who are alive and trying to deal with it didn't start it. They have two choices: continue the idiocy of black/white/one-drop, or straighten it out.