“You mixed, you Chinese, or you Mexican?” one of my sixth graders asked me after school one day in the middle of a group tutoring session. A friend elbowed her and cocked her head with a wide-eyed glare, and the whole group of girls erupted in laughter.
But then they all got quiet and looked at me, waiting, wanting to know. What are you? I was a first-year teacher in a rural, critical-needs school. I was an outsider to the community and culturally removed from most of the other teachers and students. I didn’t share a lot of personal information with my students, and I didn’t quite know how to respond. I was caught off guard by the way my student had framed my heritage, I was curious about the options she considered, and then it was time to answer.
“I guess you could say I’m mixed but probably not the way you were thinking of,” I said. “I have a lot of different countries in my heritage…Cambodian, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Algerian–do you know where that is? It’s in North Africa–”
“–we knew it. You mixed,” she said.
Another girl jumped in, “Well, if you mixed, then you all nigga!”
They all busted out in slap-happy laughter and crescendos of “Oooooh!”. I talked to them about the appropriateness of using that word with a teacher, but under my teacher persona, I was smiling. All the girls in the conversation were black. Does this mean they accept me? Does this mean they see themselves in me in some way? Does this mean they think we share something, that I am one of them? Or is it supposed to be an insult?
It wasn’t the first time my race had been brought into question.
I found a crumpled note on my classroom floor one day that said, “Mrs. Gray look like Jenerika. Hair like a lion.” The second set of handwriting wrote back, “Wait…she mixed?”
A year later I cut my hair with long, straight bangs, and when my students walked into homeroom the next morning, one voice said, “Look, there go Nicki Minaj!”
Where you from? What are you? It wasn’t new. Years earlier when I was in high school, a young black man was making a sandwich for me at Subway. He asked me, “Cheese?” …yes. “Toasted?” …no. “Mayo?” …yes. “You mixed?”
Or sometimes people just questioned the spirit of my whiteness. A black man once told me, “You have too much soul to be white.” But maybe he was just trying to hit on me.
In middle school, I didn’t think I was ever going to blend in with the other white girls around me at my private school in Mississippi.
Then again, it was middle school. Who feels like they blend in? But the pretty white girls…they looked very white, as white as they come, and with expensive matching clothing from a boutique called High Cotton. They went to cotillion, and in a few years they would make their debut as eligible young ladies at debutante balls. I did not.
My friends had light skin that burned easily while mine became a golden brown. The pretty white girls in our class had silky, shiny hair that looked like it had been spun by angels overnight. Angel hair. Yes, they had puddles of reflective angel hair, and I had pools of fat, black spaghetti.
In sixth grade our teacher told us to pull a hair from our head so we could look at it under the microscope. I was terrified that someone else in my lab group would look at my single hair through the lens and start laughing. My hair was so thick that I didn’t need to wash it every day like I knew the white girls in my class did. Would they think it was dirty? Could they tell it was different? What names would they call me? I worried my hair would look like a rope next to their delicate line of thread. Or a sharp, black wire. I had witch hair. I had hair that was more like pubic hair than what you would find on their heads.
I nervously pulled the finest hair I could find on my head and held it behind my back, running my fingers across it over and over to try to scrub off anything that would give me away.
Eventually I stopped being interested in looking like the other white girls.
I discovered that actually I had never met another person whom I thought looked like me. I gave up my flat iron straightener and embraced the wild mess of my coarse hair. In high school I let my thick, dark hair grow down the middle of my back. I often wore it in one long braid or as two hefty braids framing my face. Each of the two braids was heavier and broader than the single braid of one white girl in AP English with me.
Classmates sometimes called me “Pocahontas” or “Yoko”, and I didn’t think much of it. I liked the attention. The principal of my school once recited lines from Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” as he passed by me: “With her moods of shade and sunshine, / Eyes that smiled and frowned alternate, / Feet as rapid as the river, / Tresses flowing like the water…”
One of my friends made a sport of sifting through my hair strand by strand, like monkeys picking fleas off of each other. Her fingers always stopped when she found one of my “kinky hairs”, the kind that coiled tightly like a spring and felt barbed when you ran your fingers along it, sharp like a cat’s tongue. When she found one, we would marvel at it. We started a collection of them in a ziploc bag.
The hairs from the back of my head were strong enough to floss my teeth without breaking if I was really desperate. They could be used to tie a raft together if I ever got stranded on a desert island. “Spaghetti hair” is what my grandma used to call the mess when I was a little girl because I never let anyone touch my tangle of waves. Even wet, a comb or brush wouldn’t glide through it on the third, fourth, fifth stroke. Just to wash it still takes twenty minutes. The water slides off of the top layer like a duck’s feathers.
It made me feel special when people asked me about my origins.
I liked being mysterious, different, difficult to pin down. I also liked having the opportunity to share the story of my heritage, which had always fascinated me. “All in the last three generations,” I would finish my quick recitation of the countries and continents. I sometimes laughed when people asked about my background, the first to admit that I was “ethnically ambiguous”.
At a Vietnamese restaurant, I got mistaken for being of Korean descent. In Greece, I was often assumed to be Greek. In France, people approached me speaking French. A Lebanese man told me I could pass for Lebanese. I had the power to pass in and out of places and have people see themselves in me, adapting like a mood ring that responds to the temperature of your skin.
‘Am I really white?’
I remember filling out standardized test forms in high school and trying to decide: “Caucasian” or “Other”? A couple times I did mark “Other”, but then I felt like I was cheating. Was I just trying to be more interesting, more unique?I tried to balance the equation. My grandfather was half Cambodian, and my grandmother had some Arabic blood and grew up in Algeria. From the time I could spell my name, I would ask my grandma, “Nana, tell me about where you’re from.” “Tshhht…” she whispered to me one night. “We have some Arabic, but don’t tell anyone. My father never wanted anyone to know.”
I still felt like I didn’t deserve to mark a box other than “White” because I moved through the world as a white girl. I had the privileges of a white girl. Pretty much all my friends were white. My parents were white. I knew that if my family had known I marked “Other”, that they would have been surprised and maybe even upset. I would never tell them. But I somehow looked less white than both my parents. “The Asian look skipped a generation. You look more Asian than your mother,” family members have told me.
I couldn’t help but feel like “White” wasn’t an accurate description of me. I didn’t feel like it told the whole story of who I was. To mark “White” was to deny parts of myself and my family story that were significant to me. To claim whiteness felt like denying everything else. Who do I erase from my history when I call myself white?
I felt pride in my heritage that others in my family never spoke about. As a little girl with spaghetti hair, I would point to the sky and say “la lune”, and ask Nana things like, “How do you say ‘The pig is hungry’?” Le cochon a faim. Le cochon a faim. It became our joke, and we pulled it out when we needed it. I clung to these words long after I left her house. They made me feel like I belonged, like someone had told me something about who I was. I rolled the words around in my mouth, imitating the shapes her lips made, and whispered them in the back seat of the car. Le cochon a faim.
My pride in my heritage has affected the classes I’ve taken, the books I’ve read, the places I’ve traveled, the recipes I’ve learned. It has shaped who I am.
In college I took a Harlem Renaissance class and read Passing by Nella Larsen and Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset. I learned about the “color line” and people of mixed race who chose to identify as white or to risk moving between cultures at times. While I never wanted to equate my experience with those of the characters’, I could sense my own feeling of otherness and in-betweenness, but part of me felt like I was trying to pass as someone I was not. An impostor to anything outside of my whiteness.
I read post-colonial literature, too, and identified with the mixed-race children who were neither this nor that, fully at home in neither culture and completely accepted nowhere.
This was my grandfather’s story, as he was the son of a French-Corsican soldier and a Cambodian woman. He grew up in a boarding school built for the illegitimate children of French soldiers. He only spoke French and grew up following the same curriculum that schoolchildren learned in France. He joined the French army as a parachutist as soon as he came of age and spent his adult life after that in Paris, where he was a policeman but never felt fully French. As a child, he didn’t speak the language of his mother and the kids in the village around him; he would never return to Cambodia; and none of us would ever know what happened to his mother.
“I’m the product of a lot of French colonialism,” I sometimes say.
As I matured into womanhood, people stopped asking me about my race as often. Maybe there’s something about the way I dress or move or cut my hair or speak that associates me more with whiteness. Or maybe it’s just less acceptable to ask a grown woman about her ethnicity than it is to ask a girl.
Today I identify officially as a white woman.
I identify as a white woman because I don’t want to excuse myself from the history of the terror of white people. I want to acknowledge the privilege of my place in the world. My abiding experience has not been one of discrimination or racial profiling. I identify as white because I move through a white world with ease, and I’ve participated in a culture that wouldn’t force me to consider my race if I didn’t want to. I identify as white because if a black man had whistled at me just 60 years ago where I live in Mississippi, he could have been lynched.
I identify as white because when people write, “Dear White People,” I feel like it’s my job to listen.
I identify as white because my whiteness protects me. I am a white woman, the most delicate of flowers we preserve. Beautiful beyond wilting, I am the white flower pressed between the pages of a thick tome, peeled free with tweezers, and framed between glass.
I am the colonizer and the colonized, the ruler and the ruled.
I hold both in my blood. My wealth of opportunities have been handed down to me by the colonizer and the ruler, generations of white men whose power and dominance have carried me along with them.
But alongside that experience, have I not lived shadows of my inheritance as the colonized and the ruled, too? My territory claimed, my voice suppressed, my truth negligible. My matriarchs’ history living deep in my cells, in the story of my genes. My grandma who was doused in gasoline by her father. My mom who lost an art scholarship to pregnancy and motherhood. My great grandma whose body grew the children of a man in a uniform who returned home to his country without them.
She speaks to me across the generations. I hear her. She speaks to me through the power I lost to white men who didn’t believe me, didn’t respect me, didn’t see me. She speaks to me through the power I was never taught was mine because it was never my mother’s or grandmother’s either.
I got the education they didn’t–the first woman in my family to graduate from college, never mind graduate school. I got the respectful, emotionally-intelligent partner they didn’t.
But first I had to walk through the fire of their stories. I had to live through emotional and sexual abuse like it’s a rite of passage for women in my family, and I’m the one who got through. I got through early enough to start a family on the other side of it.
Are there other reasons I identify as white?
Do I wear this whiteness like a uniform? Easier to put on in the morning? Reporting for duty. It comes with a badge, too. Extra security clearance.
Do I check the box “Caucasian” for the same reason we tell people “I’m fine” when they ask how we are? Because to explain the rest of the story would be more than what we’ve agreed to share in passing.
Am I worried that claiming “Other” would be another reason for someone to tell me I’m too complicated, too sensitive, misperceiving reality? Where is the line between my truth and my potential self-deception?
By even considering a non-white identity for myself, I worry about hurting people who have been historically oppressed and still are today. What about people who are “actually mixed race”? Is my voice replacing theirs? Am I honoring the real challenges of their experiences? How do I authentically share my experiences without giving whiteness more power?
Then a voice cuts in and tells me: You are you, though. This is your experience. It is real and valid, too. You are trying.
White is what I get when I write everything ‘I am’ in pencil, take an eraser to it, and scrub away some of the words. It is the blank space left behind on the page, full of potential and possibility. It’s also the smudge. If I run my finger across the paper, I can still feel the marks left by what was written deep in me. My finger tracing the words is the whiteness, too.
I can’t run from my whiteness, but I don’t need to let it erase the other parts of who I am.
‘Not like other white women’
There was a janitor at a private school where I taught. I stayed late enough working in my classroom most days that I still sat at my desk when he came through with a vacuum strapped on his back. He often stopped and made conversation with me. I learned that he was also a pastor and helped his wife run a daycare. We got to know each other so well that we shared lessons of marriage and God and raising children.
Johnny was a black man with a white smile that gleamed from the darkness of the late afternoon light at my classroom’s doorway. He called me, “My queen” when he greeted me as he walked in, which both flattered me and made me a bit uncomfortable. There I was, a white woman sitting behind a desk, and there he was, a black man cleaning my room and calling me “queen”. The word both brought us closer in familiarity and created a space between us.
One day he walked in and leaned against the railing by my door. His smile hung suspended in the air. “You’re not like other white women,” he said. “There’s something different about you…your hair, your smile, something about the way you carry yourself. Where are you from?”
I told my story.
He’s the last person who separated me in some way from whiteness. One day he stopped coming round. After a few days, I asked the security guard, “What happened to Johnny?” “Oh, I think he found another job, a better opportunity.” I never saw Johnny again and never got to say goodbye.
My queen. My queen. I am queen of a place where you can’t travel. I am queen of a box you can’t check. I am white, and I am other. I am queen of the story I tell. I am queen of a boundary I define with my words and leave open with my heart. And what about my great grandma who gave up her babies to a colonizer’s school that became an army, an army sent to defend the occupation of another colony? Am I her queen, too? Do I rule over her or am I her daughter, a sister to her?
My queen.
Would my Cambodian great grandmother claim me?
Would she be proud of me? Would she feel like her pain was born for something good? Or would she walk right past me, I too unfamiliar to be recognized as her own? Too much like the man whose country ruled hers.
I hear her voice. The voice of a weed mowed in the field. Never catalogued. Was she ever treasured in someone’s hand? We survived her, and we don’t even know how to say or spell her name. I am the flower; she was the weed. My queen.
Will my voice break the space where it was pressed between two panes of glass?
If I am the flower, I am the wildflower. Planted by the wind.
What are you?
I don’t know, but I’ll tell you my story if you’ll listen. Will you tell me yours, too. Who are you?
Dana Rhyne says
I’ve been reading your blog for a while & not commenting. Your words are so powerful! I usually feel like I can’t be eloquent enough to respond to them.
I am pretty darned white. I have relatives that look mixed, but my Ancestry DNA test removed any doubt – pretty darned white. I’m currently reading “Waking up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race,” by Debby Irving. It’s not the book for everyone, but as a white woman who grew up in the south, I’m finding it very enlightening.