Race is a very complicated thing for me to sort out. It is hard for me to think or talk about race without being provocative. The word itself, “race” is so loaded. For months, I have stopped checking the “white” box when I am asked for my race identification, just because I think using the term is a not so subtle claim for a privileged position.
Skin color is just a substitute for what most of us really mean. When I say that I am “white”, I think I am saying more than my skin pigment is rather light. “White” is a signal word that I am part of an honored group of people. In fact, it would be a lot simpler and more honest if we just called ourselves honored. The color of my skin is an accident of birth. The special honor given to me is a decision of society.
If I had been born in another part of the world, it is likely that my skin color might not bestow on me a mark of honor. There is a good chance that I would be considered an outsider, not “one of us”. The decision of my society to give me a position of honor because of the color of my skin is hardly different from another culture’s decision to tattoo my face as a mark of special distinction worthy of privilege and respect.
The provocative part of race for me is my conviction that when we talk about race, the emphasis is on people who have dark(er) skin. What is really going on has more to do with my being white than their being black. It’s about whiteness or the absence of whiteness. The practice of racism in all its perverted thinking has more to do with asserting that I am white than asserting that someone else is black. I am protecting my status of whiteness, my status of honor. “They are not like one of us.”
I think there are a lot of people who have white skin who think they are white, that they are honored. They are white wannabes. They don’t realize that the truly white, the truly honored people are an elite group. The rest of us with white skin are a suck-up buffer strip around them protecting their real position of honor, of whiteness.
Many of us attempt to live with the illusion that we are part of the honored group, and we do that by affirming our whiteness and separating ourselves from all those who were not born with whiteness. Skin color is a convenient way of keeping straight who want to be honored, and who are not to be honored.
Anyone who thinks they are born into a culture because of their skin color is buying into the illusion. There is nothing special about being either white or black. However, in our culture, we have created the myth that being white bestows a position of honor, just as though a tattoo was etched into our face as an infant. Being white is a signal of honor. I am working to distance myself from that way of thinking.