Category: Thinking

Years ago, I read an essay about the cul­tur­al con­struc­tion of white­ness in Amer­i­ca; the author’s claim was that white­ness is defined as a void, eas­i­er to dis­cuss in terms of what it is not, rather than what it is. I can’t remem­ber if this was men­tioned in the essay, but I believe this loss is derived from the ubiq­ui­ty of white­ness itself. Try­ing to define white­ness is boot­strap­ping. Even the vocab­u­lary involved in such dis­cus­sions of eth­nic­i­ty is insuf­fi­cient to prop­er­ly address the issue. By virtue of their minor­i­ty sta­tus, it is pos­si­ble for folks in a non-white con­struc­tion to hone their self-aware­ness in terms of their asso­ci­a­tion with what­ev­er their minor­i­ty is. So a black folk has an eas­i­er time grap­pling with what it means to be Black because their black­ness is less promi­nent when com­pared to white­ness. This applies just as well to sex and gen­der roles, and even works in sub­cat­e­gories of white­ness based on coun­try of ori­gin.

I’m some­times envi­ous of peo­ple who have this kind of asso­cia­tive chance. I have no lega­cy to use to direct my self-def­i­n­i­tion. My fam­i­ly, awe­some as it is, shows no eth­nic traits, like a focus on food from the old coun­try, songs and sto­ries, or even knowl­edge of dis­tant fam­i­ly over in Europe. This is why that essay res­onat­ed with me so strong­ly, it seemed to be describ­ing my life exact­ly. Because my cul­tur­al back­ground is ubiq­ui­tous to the point of mean­ing­less­ness, I’m miss­ing out on an entire facet of exis­tence. This was like­ly the nascent impulse that made me so inter­est­ed in anthro­pol­o­gy.

Some­thing Alixa + Naima said the oth­er night sparked this thought process. In an amaz­ing poem about Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na, they made dis­parag­ing ref­er­ence to being white. After, they explained that it was­n’t a remark about race, but about a cer­tain state of mind they call “white.” To me it seems like this state of mind is the same as the ubiquity/void that I’m talk­ing about. It makes sense, but is also trou­bling. Their sense of cul­ture and lega­cy was very promi­nent in their read­ing, in direct con­trast to white­ness.

Yet where does that leave me? There is no Ital­ian or Pol­ish or Hun­gar­i­an or Irish or Jew­ish her­itage for me to lean on. I can­not adopt myself into any of those par­a­digms and be authen­tic. On the pos­i­tive side, this void leaves me free to define myself in any terms that I choose; except these always seem to remain in the void and the process gets awful­ly old after awhile. It is almost eas­i­er to just be mean­ing­less.