Deborah Lipp

In Spanish class, Arthur (the son) mentioned that Cubans speak Spanish faster than anyone; Puerto Ricans come in second. Some of the kids said that was ethnic stereotyping. But it’s not! It’s regional variations in the way language is spoken (and Arthur, who plans on becoming a linguist, is particularly interested in that). I’m a New Yorker; when speaking with my home office in Salt Lake City, I have to make a conscious effort to slow my conversational style. New Yorkers talk faster than those from Utah; that’s not an ‘ethnic slur.’

There’s this thing, called racism. We’re not allowed to do it. We’re not allowed to talk about it. So now kids know that there are words and phrases that are taboo, but they don’t know why, so everything’s taboo, even things that aren’t. No wonder people complain about “PC” language.

We won’t teach about racism. Teach about it? We won’t even examine it and discuss it so that we know what to teach. All we do is point in its general direction and say “DON’T!” And that is so completely useless that kids end up thinking that recognizing speech patterns is somehow oppressive.

Here are my thoughts on Blog Against Racism Day:

I’ve spent my life in a statistically improbable relationship with issues of mixed race. My first boyfriend was mixed race. I dated a biracial man for ten years. All five of my nieces and nephews are biracial. A close friend had a biracial son and he and my son grew up together. So the concept of race has always been in my life.

I am Jewish and sensitive to anti-Semitism. I have never felt totally white. I mean, clearly I’m a white chick, and if you put me in a room full of black* people, yes, I am very aware that I’m white. But I grew up in WASPy and Catholic New Jersey towns where I was often the only Jew in a classroom, or one of two or three. And I was aware of the invisible divide between us and the “real” white people.

I think that’s why they say Jews and Italians make good couples; we’re “swarthy” whites.

My relationship with my own whiteness and with people of mixed race has taught me that race itself is subjective. Now, some of my black friends object to that, because there is nothing subjective about being a dark chocolate brown color when people are looking at you. You can “pass” as straight if you’re gay, or gentile if you’re Jewish, but if you’re skin is the sweet complexion of a pot of fresh coffee, you ain’t passing. And I acknowledge that visible difference gives the issue of race a pervasive meaning that alters the experience of being dark in a world that values pale. I get the exhaustion of not being able to hide. (One reason I got a huge tattoo is to out myself as a member of a radical culture, to deny myself the ability to hide, a choice not without its drawbacks.)

But while acknowledging that sometimes race is as objective as black vs. white, it is also enormously subjective. My ex has skin lighter than mine, but considers himself black. I’ve seen him turn black. It was a very striking moment for me when I saw him walking towards the bus wearing a hoodie sweatshirt. It was cold and he put the hood on and zipped up. You never see a white guy putting the hood on. And I saw, like a morph, that he turned black. I’ve walked in black neighborhoods with him and seen him be black; worked in white environments with him and seen white people feel comfortable making racist remarks to him because they thought he was ‘one of them.’

My first boyfriend is, by coincidence, someone that other friends, whom I met hundreds of miles and a dozen years later, know. So I know that, over the course of thirty years, he has changed his self-identity. He is equal parts black, white, Native American, and Asian. He can pass as any of those.

So race to me is largely a box we put people in. Some boxes have privilege and some don’t. Some have the toys and the old boy’s network and the access and some don’t. There are ways of crawling out of the box, but those ways are either inaccessible or humiliating (like being ‘included’ in racist jokes). My ex hated the boxes. But I think that most of us love our boxes and are terrified of leaving them.

I don’t like walking in a neighborhood and suddenly realizing I’m the only white face. I feel scared. I feel visible. I feel, in short, like I’m not in my box. Boxes are safe.

I think we, as a culture, are racist for the same reason we are stupid, for the same reason we believe urban legends, for the same reason we torture innocent Iraqis. I think we want to know the categories, I think we just want to know something. And because of the terror of not knowing, for many people it feels much better to be violent in drawing the dividing line. What horror!

I have no solutions or wisdom or insight. I like the freedom to hang with my friends of different backgrounds and experiences. My late friend Winnie was free with her difference, and taught me an enormous amount about dwarfism. My friend Tony is free with his experience, not just of being black, but of having mostly white friends. I like to listen to the other voice. I like to acknowledge the difference, not just fall into “we’re all the same underneath,” which is sometimes a way of suppressing the fear of leaving the box.

*I’m not always comfortable with saying African-American. I know an African-American who is white: He emigrated from South Africa and became a U.S. citizen. Doesn’t that make him African-American? In a conversation about color, I think using the color words makes sense.