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.
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 so by implication encouraged her to begin her own process of situating herself along a cultural spectrum. But now she’s choosing her own connections, aligning herself with what I personally have worked to be critical of: whiteness. And it’s my fault. I have shared with her my own difficulties of being bicultural as well as my own realizations about how ethnicity is connected to power, privilege, class. But somehow I assumed that because I have been so sensitive to and critical of whiteness and its privileges (even as I tried to recognize those issues in my life), my daughter would somehow be critical of it as well. And yet maybe she is being critical, and she is simply making her own decisions about these issues, forcing me to consider the difficulties of supporting your children when their decisions run counter to your own.
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“I think graffiti makes things look ugly, and I don’t know why they do it.”
