On Reconstructing Whiteness

Zdzisław Beksiński, 1981.

Of all the things that I've longed to write about, this post's subject matter might be the most complicated and convoluted. Without knowing where the tangled threads of this identity will lead, I still find it critically important to unpack the implications of my heritage as a white man: both how I personally engage, understand, and value my white ethnic identities, as well as how the current political and social climate forces me to grapple and wrestle with this whiteness. It is a journey not without pain, but like all questions of identity, a deeply meaningful one.

Each stream in my multivalent identity as a person of mixed ethnic backgrounds has developed in dramatically different ways, and at critically different points in my life. My Latinidad has stayed with me the longest, manifested as I was curious enough to critique the implicit racism I saw imbedded within the culture of my (mostly white) suburban school in Virginia and contrasted with the (explicit) segregation of the mostly black schools in the inner city. I was no crusader for justice back then, and the 90's utopic vision of a multicultural society, replete with appropriated urban slang and mainstream hip-hop, had not yet faded into the neurotic prejudice of the Bush years. I sought to understand Hispanic consciousness in the midst of contrast: the inner city of San Jose that would not recognize it, or the suburbs of Roseville which did not see anything else. It was not until much later that the thick heritage of Indigenous culture would awaken in my consciousness: manifested in the way my heart would burn with a mixture of heartbroken longing and all-consuming rage as I witnessed a group of Mikmaq First Nations dancers praise the Creator on the stage of the Urbana Missions Conference in 2012. It was not until 2015 that a few intentional journeys to Arizona and conversations with key family members brought me in touch with the proud, yet tragic history of Indian peoples in my blood. I am determined to visit the homeland of my Purépecha ancestors in Michoacán, and will continue to honor the spaces that my Chiricahua relatives once called home.

But whiteness is different. At any point in this country's history (in particular), whiteness has been defined differently. Depending on who was able to claim the precious identifier of white was the key to determining full agency in a nation operating under the facade of inclusion and opportunity. In fact, if you explore the history of race in America, one realizes that whiteness was constructed both to oppose the stain and taint of black and Indian blood (in determining rights like land ownership, voting, and citizenship), and to define standards of beauty, professionalism, and full participation in society. Historians like john a. powell recognize that through the state's designations of varying "blood quanta" and "ancestry proportions" an individual was able to change races merely by crossing state lines. Lurking behind these institutionalized oppressions were the societal stigmatization of interracial marriages and cross-cultural relationships. The sad history of Asian immigration on the west coast has particular resonance, where stories like that of US Army veteran Bhagat Singh Thind became icons for the agency of nonwhites. To be white was to be fully American. In fact, the very term "melting pot" became popularized to describe the journey of Eastern Europeans, previously designated as foregin "slavs" into the safety of homogeneous American (white) identity. The hard labor of Asian, Latin American, and African immigrants was never included in that melting pot, merely as "wood for the fire." Fast forwarding to our current state, and we see a horrific milieu of contrasts: the white nationalists like Richard Spencer using explicitly Nazi language to laud the election of President Trump, as well as others like Rachel Dolezal treating her whiteness as totally dispensable for the purposes of a political career. With the chaos of whiteness as a threat to human decency on one hand, and as a throwaway commodity on the other, is there any way to understand whiteness in a redemptive way? Does all dealing with white identity inevitably bring with it the pain and shame of white guilt and historical trauma?

Despite my prickly demeanor when engaging politics and the cynical/sarcastic tone that I employ nearly every time, I consider myself deeply optimistic about the ontological condition of humanity. Far from buying into the convenient Calvinist myth of Total Depravity, I believe that humanity's persistent mimetic behavior imparted through millennia of competition has created vast disparities and inequities and justifies the exploitation of the underclass by the ruling elite in control of the resources. Before you dismiss my (clearly received) rhetoric I must note that this thought has come to me through two important influences: the French Catholic philosopher René Girard, who wrote about mimetic theory during his long career in social anthropology, and my friend and mentor Ivan Paz, whose Master's thesis applied Girardian mimetics to the dynamics of incarceration and racial bias in the criminal justice system. I recommend that you check out their work, of course, but the key point is that humanity does not behave in unjust ways because of an inherent flaw of human nature: it is the received behavior linked to the way human relationships form and function. In fact, Paz notes that the myth of Ontological Human Sinfulness is responsible for most of the ways that religion has endorsed and upheld the injustice that we perceive in the evils of mass incarceration, warfare, and other forms of dehumanization. I mention this to make an important note about the dynamics of power: merely the ability to wield power and influence others, for good or ill, does not mean that a person is inherently good or bad. In fact, the biblical narrative points to the truth that humanity is created in "the image and likeness" of the Creator (Genesis 1:27), and is upheld by my church's dogged adherence to an ethic of protecting human life and dignity. Thus any form of oppression that I experience, or my people experience, should never lend me to dehumanize the other when I critique or push to remove that oppression. The evidence points to the truth that, despite the power that white America has wielded, whites are deeply traumatized, and do not know how to heal on their own. This trauma is perpetuated through the years, but as Native activist Mark Charles notes, "you cannot build a civilization on 500 years of oppression without traumatizing yourself."This includes the process by which I painfully examine my own ethnic identity as a white man. In the attempt to avoid doing violence to my identity, I want to identify my motives as not so much to apologize for my whiteness, but to reconstruct white identity in a way that can contribute to my own humanity and the humanity of others.

I must recognize my pain in the journey, as I examine the first time I was painfully aware of my skin color: light against the brown hues of the children of immigrants that made up most of my neighborhood. The blows landed on my chest and ears as I heard the same thing over and again: "Pinche güero." Fucking whiteboy. I remember hating the color of my skin, desperately wishing my pale skin would tan darker than the light olive that it would achieve. White was a pejorative, it was something that I felt I had to disclaim: "I look white, but I'm really Mexican!" would be a common refrain. Ironically my brother, finding his 'tribe' in the interdependence of his football teammates, would encounter more racial harmony as cooperation overtook the competition experienced most elsewhere at our segregated school. The conversations broke down in my first year of college, when I felt that the assault of my Latinidad reached its high mark as I found myself surrounded by an overwhelming amount of white, upper middle class, and conservative engineering students. As I found refuge in the InterVarsity small group for black and Latino students, one of the only such spaces on campus, I was able to allow those wounds to slowly heal as I could be seen for who I really was. Yet the internalized problems with whiteness did not go away. As I developed a more sophisticated understanding of systemic injustice, the aforementioned construction of race as a means to consolidate power, and the mechanics of white privilege, affiliating with such a culture did not seem attractive in the least. They were the enemies of my people after all: rounding up the survivors of the War of Extermination to march them to concentration camps far away, erecting border walls and fences to stop the flow of people, and their continued denigration perpetuated by the idea that we are dangerous, "Rapists...bad people." If that is what whiteness means, then no wonder so many people encounter guilt when coming to terms with their whiteness.

Yet to encounter what whiteness truly is for me as a multiethnic man, I must admit that its stream operates concurrently with the other strands of my identity. My whiteness is influenced by the emotional weight of my machismo manifested in the passions I bring to bear on all sorts of things. It is surely influenced by my sensitivity to stories, ecology, and sacred spaces imparted to me from my Indigenous culture. I lamented that I was disconnected from the experiences my father had getting to eat boiled cabbage and sausage made by his grandmother, who would gleefully chatter away in the cluttered consonants of her native Polish. To relate to the collective experience of white culture, I had to think of the genuine warmth and hospitality encountered in the Blue Ridge country of Albemarle County, Virginia, where my Dad's aunts would serve lemonade and cookies, allowing my brother and I to play outside in the fields and woods. Their potlucks and holiday dinners were thick with gravy, potatoes, biscuits and rolls, butter, butter beans, brussells sprouts doused in butter...you get the idea. These experiences have undeniably positive places in my memory, and speak to a genuine interaction with the same type of white southern culture that perpetuated the pushback against the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Are these nice relatives racist? Yes, but they are not bad people, no more than I am for holding the pain of my whiteness and resenting it for so long. Their racism, and the racism of most of the white people I know, is not built on prejudice (as far as I know), but is inherited as a result of the benefits they receive on account of it. That's just the way it is, and thus I have complicated feelings when I talk to my friends of color who "cannot be racist" because they are not white. See, I'm not white either...but I am...so, I can be racist, I suppose. And herein lies the more complicated kernel of identity that I'll be wrestling with for a long time. Should I pretend that this privilege does not belong to me? Do I continue to inhabit the coveted space of social media "wokeness" and leverage that to rail against the injustice that affects people like me? No, I cannot do that with a clear conscience, for I must remember that for all the ways that white people have harmed me and my people, I have that same power and I cannot ignore it. In a manner of speaking, the choice to acknowledge your power, and choose to lay it down for the sake of the other is firmly in line with the kenotic example of Jesus in his revelation of the way that God reveals his own power. No, white people are not thus closer to modeling Jesus than any other people, but just as my Native and Hispanic relatives embody Christ as the one murdered and suffering upon the wood of the cross, so too do my white relatives have the ability to model his self-emptying submission to humanity.

To my white friends that I have spoken crassly towards, or who have heard me rant about one thing or another that pissed me off: I see you, you are important to me, and you are created in the Creator's divine image. You deserve so much more than my reactions borne of anger or the vitriol of underemployed millennials who don't know what they're talking about when they write about this stuff (okay, that was a little mean, but you know what I'm talking about). My attitude, especially in the humor I employ as a defense mechanism, is more often bred by the deep pain I've experienced around my whiteness. I do not want you to feel ashamed of who God created you to be. Embrace your body, the beauty of your hair and skin no matter the hue and texture. You will see ideal pictures of beauty presented to you in the advertisements and catalogs. Those are not real. Look at yourself, glorious, naked, dripping in the steam of the shower. That is nothing to hate. In the pain that presents itself resist the temptation to judge yourself. Just because you hurt does not make you weak. I say this with certainty: even if you are plagued with eczema, psoriasis, cerebral palsy, schizophrenia, or anxiety, you are fearfully and wonderfully made.

I make peace with my past by learning more about it, and recognizing traces of my story in the stories of those who came before me. Some of these stories are hard to find, and harder to read. I must recognize that the common threads of my people have always linked them together, a redeeming process of discovering my own humanity in these disparate streams of ethnic consciousness. The Polish have been occupied and persecuted since the 1600s, but eventually threw off the tyranny of oppression in a peaceful revolution that saw the collapse of Communism across Eastern Europe. Their spirit of freedom and solidarity is something that inspires not just me, but people around the world. The Scots-Irish who found their way to Virginia fled the persecution of the British first in their native Scotland and then later in Ulster Ireland. The anti-institutionalism that they embody in their pioneer culture is still manifest in my skepticism of institutional governments. Overall it is a fascinating journey, but I am left sad that these stories remain mostly historical, and have little in the way of flesh and blood to them. I have to let my imagination speak, because I will never get to speak with my great grandfather, who made the long trek from his homeland to escape a life building railroads in Siberia. Perhaps on the Last Day I will get to greet him with a warm Jak się Pan miewa? and I will see my eyes in his. I can play soccer with the cousins who were killed by the Russian tanks, and later sing old folk songs from my grandmother's clan, who would have sung in the alien cadences of Scottish Gaelic. I would listen, smile, and simply say tapadh leat. They would make fun of my accent. "You sound like the guy from 300. That movie was terrible!" And we would laugh together.