Beautiful on All Sides

The privilege of being white in the U.S. is that you don’t have to see race. But for a growing majority of people, ethnicity is fluid; it’s piecemeal, chosen, reclaimed, refused, relearned.

Photo credit: iStockPhoto

By Tomas Moniz

And finally this, when the sun was falling down so beautiful we didn’t have time to give it a name, she held the child born of a white mother and a red father and said, ‘both sides of this baby are beautiful.

— Sherman Alexie

My youngest daughter wants to be white.

Or that’s my fear. What I really should say is that my youngest daughter has entered the stage of seeing ethnicity for what it is — socially constructed symbols of meaning, ways of inclusion and exclusion; she now actively looks to associate things with ethnicity.

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“Why is it that those cars always play loud music?”

I wanna blame it on her schooling, on the media, but that’s a cop-out on my part. Because I have, in fact, actively helped her to see ethnicity, not to be afraid to talk about ethnicity, and…