Saturday, July 20, 2013

I ain't white

All the media-driven "racial" strife made me look closely at myself, trying to find any evidence of white.  I failed.  At least on my skin.  My teeth are closer, and the sclera of my eyes, closer still... but my skin?  Not white at all.  I held a piece of white paper against my skin and it made my skin look very non-white.  In fact, I looked brown.  How can that be?

Even my pasty pale legs are not white.  I'm not really sure what color they might be considered.  Should I protest that the color of my skin doesn't have a common name?

So, I am not white.

I suppose "Caucasian" might be a more technically correct term, but although I can find the Caucasus Mountains and "Caucasia" on a map (I'm not an idiot) I have never been to that region and feel no connection to it whatsoever.  Because of that, referring to myself as "Caucasian" always seemed like a lie.

Ah, but perhaps they are labeling "the culture" with the name of a color that has no basis in reality.  In that case, which "white culture" are they referring to?  There are many, and I don't really relate to any of them.  Or, are you simply referring to any culture that isn't "black culture"?  But that wouldn't work either, since there are not only "black" and "white", but a great many variations of culture even right around here.

I guess no one is talking about me at all when they go on TV and try to get "whites" and "blacks" angry at each other.  That's good.  It's one time that being "no one" is just fine.
-

And please don't forget.

.

3 comments:

  1. Don't be silly, Kent. White and black are relative terms. You know that. Black people aren't black either--well most of them. (Some of them living on the equator in Western African by the Atlantic Ocean are pretty darned black.) They are brown, some darker and some lighter brown than others. Of course society tends to call Hispanic people brown.

    Caucasian is a general term which includes the lighter skinned Northern European peoples and the darker skinned people of the Mediterranean area: Arabs, Egyptians, Greeks, Libyans, Italian, and Spanish, among others.

    And of course, after thousands upon thousands of years of migration and mixing, there are no pure "races" anymore. But, yeah, for convenience of categorizing (profiling?) I'm white and you're white... which just means our skin is generally among the lighter tones available to humans, so to speak.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Relative terms"? "Black" and "white" would be the opposite ends of the gray scale, relative to each other and the shades in between. But humans are all various shades of brown, not gray. That would be like calling pink "white" and red "black".

    I might be light tan. Some parts much lighter than others. But I'm still brown, not white.

    I have known some "red heads" (whose hair was also not red, but a shade of coppery orange) whose skin was more pink than brown, but even they were not white in any meaningful sense of the word.

    It just seems really strange to me to call people white or black.

    ReplyDelete
  3. All of this reminds me of something that has bothered me when filling out some "govt" forms... They ask me to check my "Race" yet they never give me the choice of "human".

    ReplyDelete