Part 3 of Kristi’s Ongoing Conversations with Herself: Race

10-23-10

Growing up, I never gave much thought on the expressions or impacts of race on my immediate environment or my person.  At least not past that which the learning of history required or the ability to think through TV talk shows.  Racial experience was always something that happened outside of my limited scope of the world—on TV or in books or something.  Being white and growing up in a predominantly white area made my experience, my lens, essentially race-less.  There were small groups of non-white people around me—first the children of Native American heritage that went to my high school and a large Hispanic minority in my second high school—and while their presence wasn’t invisible to me, it wasn’t highly visible either.  They moved around me more or less indifferently and I indifferent to them, not realizing that our fundamental cultural differences were not allowing me to connect with them and to unconsciously seek the friendships of those with whom I was similar.  Thus I never really thought my race meant anything, I being the same as all those around me.  I never really saw racial difference, but cultural difference.  Only in my adult life have I realized that the two main environments of my childhood—Vernal, UT and Wenatchee, WA—were and are not homogenously white, and that any sense of non-whiteness exists there.  In my racial naivete, I associated “race” and “non-Whiteness” with “black” and since there were no, or very few black people any of the places I lived, I perceived no experience of “race” or even, racial privilege.  I knew that a history of racism gave me opportunities that I could be born into, opportunities that previous white generations would bestow upon me as a result of racial discriminations written into laws and cultural consciousness; but I didn’t feel race operating on me everyday.

If my entrance into anthropology changes the angle of the race lens for me, Women’s Studies exploded it with vibrant color.  Anthropology attuned my eyes more critically to diversity, but Women’s Studies made me see and understand new depths of race—how I exist in this world, my place given to me and how the world reacts to me based on race.  My entry into anthropology was facilitated by a deep, unexplainable interest in people’s lives—not their personal ones, per say, but their collective ones.  I was fascinated by the different way we found to live with few important similarities.  With this budding interest and an increasingly honed eye on “diversity,” I realized my life and the people around me were not all that diverse in lifestyle or origin.  My anthropological knowledge was coming from books and texts and professors, not experiences and people.  Even the practitioners of anthropology often comment about how anthropology is still a white man’s endeavor and are always critical about how few diverse viewpoints and backgrounds there are.  So it was with anthropology that I realized my lack of racial diversity in my life—how “white” my life truly was.  In Women’s Studies I came to know what that meant.

For those unfamiliar with something like Women’s Studies or feminist theory, you may be surprised to learn that it is not all about women or women’s rights.  Properly defined (I think, anyway; there’s a TON of literature on the proper definition of feminism), feminism is the attempt to challenge, understand, and confront unequal power relationships between groups—to think through why certain groups are oppressed and why others are privileged.  This includes not only gender relationships, but those of race, class, disability, socioeconomic, nationality, any identity that renders one person or group of persons less than another.  And so, race is a big part of Women’s Studies and feminist theory.

I realize now that the ability to go through any part of life without a thought to race is an expression of white privilege.  Power and privilege may not be immediately invisible to those who have it, but its affect on those who DON’T have it, is.  Marginalized groups often have a less distorted view of power because it is being exercised on them.  I also believe the perception of the power of race experience is diluted when one is enmeshed with those of her own race.  Hence, without the experience of diversity and exposure to a variety of different viewpoints and experiences, one risks a seriously truncated and distorted view of world and their existence in it.  It is when one comes into contact with those of another race—either physically, or over media, even—that race becomes more vibrantly salient.  I learned that many who are non-White, who are not of the privileged dominant social group (whether white, rich, Christian, heterosexual, but for the purposes of this post, mainly white) think on their race all the time, judging whether it has any bearing on their present situation or interactions with others.  I began to see what had been hitherto hegemonic and to understand how, and what bearing the history of race relations had on current cultural and socioeconomic conditions and the complex nuances within.  From anthropology I understood the important debunking of biological race and the power of socially constructed race, but Women’s Studies illuminated its complex existence in this world.

All my life I have had the ability to hide, to blend into the group or the background.  Nothing I do or am makes me stand out.  I am what everyone expects me to be.  One reason I wanted Peace Corps to send me to Africa was because I wanted to change that.  I wanted to have the situation flipped, to experience what it is to be in the minority, the inability to hide, to know what it is to have race in my face—everyday.  It is wearing, exhausting, trying, and I know, completely different from any other non-White experience.  I can’t compare it to being a minority in the US, because, even here, I am a privileged minority.  Even in a place where I am an intruding foreigner, identifiable to the racial category of those that are historically responsible for Africa’s current situations, I am privileged based on my skin (and to some degree my nationality, but mostly my skin).  It is like a bright neon banner flashing in a dark field.  To have it this way when I am marked with privilege, I can’t imagine the horror to be gazed upon with racial hatred.

But still, being American, and having been ingrained with a 20^th century American history of racial injustice, tension, and the radical correction of it, to be called out to or sought because of my skin color makes me very uncomfortable.  To have this quasi-celebrity status is very unsettling and, I think, very undeserving of such behavior on both sides.

There is a lot to tell you, blog-s-sphere, about my experience of whiteness in Africa and how people react to me based on this very obvious marker.  This subject shall continue.