#whiteness

Two months and two days.

| Jade SV

The massacre in Charleston has made it hard for me to write. As has the continuation of this campaign; the horror of the burning churches. I have been in the land of milk stains and breasts and this tiny baby boy and sleep and burps, but what do I say about the world that is happening…because though this began as a very private space I can’t help knowing that there are people out there reading. And that has begun to slow me down. It seems too small to write the everyday life I’ve kept on living, but that’s also the truth of it: that I have simply kept on living that life. And there, there’s that thing. That I could forget and remain tucked away from the news. That is a thing; a property of whiteness. To live essentially untouched and know that you are not the target. My sadness can be real but I am not kept up at night by fear for my new son’s survival in this country.

Race often silences me.

I realized the other day that though I know myself as multiracial, my son is not, won’t. That is a thing about the way race moves and pigments shift. Infant faces change of course and who knows what ethnic markings may emerge, but regardless, I do know he will know the unearned and very real privileges of whiteness. As, I suppose, I have.  I thought by the time I had a child I would have figured out my language of racial and ethnic belonging, but I haven’t. I wanted to, but I’m still unsure. I think mostly my whiteness embarrasses me; feels linked to old hurts, old mistakes, things I did, my estrangement from my family of color always feeling like my fault.

Even more embarrassing is that a small, but real part of myself hoped for my child to deliver me from whiteness…to exert the other family genes and give people pause when they saw us all together. This hasn’t happened.

But also, whiteness itself is kind of embarrassing. The way it’s both smugly and naively unaware of itself. The way it just takes and takes and never asks if it should. The way it does not see how it foolish it looks or how little it knows.

The news of the massacre shocked me and then my brain shied away from it. I retreated back into my cave but I’ve done this many times when I didn’t have an infant to care for.  I cried exactly once over it and could have cried longer but swallowed it up and then I went and bought a coffee and walked in the rainy park with the boy and B.

Everything is very comfortable these days. B. not working yet, and making me these glorious plates of food and we walk three blocks and are in a park, and our home is cool and comfortable and I forget to see how weird and gross the class and race dynamics of this neighborhood have become. B.’s whiteness is complicated by his parent’s immigrant views of the world and by having spent much of his childhood in non-white spaces. My whiteness is complicated by my brown father. But the boy? If we continue to live here? If we raise him here, where the only people of color are employees? Where the rich wear charity run t-shirts and listen to NPR and actually say things like, “My dear friend, who happens to be Black/Asian/Latina.”

I am raising a boy who will become a white man.

How to complicate it. I’m not sure. But at least I’m feeling it again; the ache of the murders. At least piercing the veneer of this place. That needs to happen. And now the boy howls, and I have to walk away. In two days the Fourth of July. How to complicate that? That too seems like a thing that needs to happen.

Week 25

| Jade SV

The dream I had last night will make a lot more sense if I add that in the last week I’ve watched Selma twice, and just last night sat down with Dear White People.

I sleep in shifts now; I can’t make it more than a few hours without the babe doing it’s bladder dance and sending me sliding out of bed. Some nights I sleep deeply in every interval and the night stretches on and on in this luxurious way; always hours left to go if I check my phone. Other nights though, it’s all restlessness and peeing and this sensation in my lower back that I can only describe as static electricity. I fidget and turn and piss off the cat, and even disrupt B., who’s been known to fall asleep in the corner of the club with a speaker as his pillow. Other nights, like last night, I dream.

I was sitting in a long, spacious hallway with dark, carved, wooden walls and gothic windows set in high ceilings.  On the walls hung portraits of white haired white people lit with little lamps. It looked like what I imagine Oxford or Cambridge to be. I was in one of a cluster of armchairs, student center style, when up walked Oprah Winfrey and Harry Belafonte. Oprah was looking regal with braided and looped hair; she did not sit, but presided over us, disinterested, a being of an elevated state. Harry though sat right down with us. I don’t know who “us” was, but I wasn’t alone, and it was understood that we were student organizers of some kind. Then my mother and her brother were there too, and my mother, who is as blonde and white and Scandinavian looking as her brother, suddenly appeared as if she was a shade or two darker…it was if she had become another, darker ethnicity and when he was introduced to them, Harry commented on it. “Siblings?!” He was surprised. Then he got to me, shook my hand, and said, “And you, you look like everybody. It’s almost a race-less thing.” And I nodded and laughed, and it was clear I’d heard it a million times before. Then Oprah began walking through an imposing set of double doors. We knew to follow. Her braids were at my eye level, and I admired them. I wasn’t pregnant, and I was wearing tight, high waisted black jeans and a boxy, cropped black sweater and I felt Harry Belafonte admiring the flashes of tattoo he caught as he walked behind me. We walked through the doors and I woke up.

I think about the babe’s potential skin color.

My mother is Norwegian and Swedish and looks it–as I said, tall and blonde and green eyed. My father, well, we don’t know exactly. He was born to Spanish parents exiled to Mexico, but his mother was adopted, and the circumstances of this were hazy and secretive. In the photos I study, she sometimes looks Palestinian to me; Arab. He doesn’t look Mexican and he doesn’t look Spanish. His skin is a rich brown, his eyes opaque and dark; his dark hair curly. Some North African men remind me of him, and again, some Arab men too. B. is Sicilian and Polish, with none of the darkness of his Sicilian family. He is blonde, or used to be, his hair has darkened, and green eyed.

I’ve never figured out how to handle my whiteness.

Because for me my white skin is not simply that (as if skin color were ever simple)–it is instead an entire narrative, proof of things that I wish were not true. My whiteness advertises my estrangement from my family of color, tells the world that I don’t write my cousins enough, lists every word in Spanish I don’t know. Every time, my father sends an angry email,  my skin pales a shade.

And now this baby is coming, and what can I offer it of those lost countries, culture, and family? What am I going to be able to explain? My urge is to bone up on my spanish vocab and family history as if cramming for a test.

This must have been at least five or six years ago, I was in a small library when a very white father came in with his very white daughter, who was maybe 6, and he was speaking to her in a loud voice, using American accented spanish, his words slow and deliberate. He did not sound at all like someone who had grown up with the language; it didn’t seem a part of him, and I was sure that this man, this family, had simply chosen spanish as the language to teach their kid–take advantage of those early sponge like years, to help her grow up speaking a second language. And I was so pissed and so jealous. I wanted to be free to just pick up a language, scan my city for the largest immigrant group, and buy it for my kid. He didn’t care at all how he sounded, didn’t mind his gringo accent, he was so damned self-assured, while in the meantime, I sit and linger over Pablo Neruda’s poetry books, alone, whispering words to myself like incantations that will bring to me all that I don’t have.

This babe will not be race-less. No one is. It will have a color, a shade, and the world will read into it what it does, and the babe will have to learn to negotiate whatever those meanings, privileges, signifiers are. We’ll have to talk about it, and whatever I’ve lived in my body will not be what it lives.

It would be a surprise if this babe didn’t come out white; not impossible, but a surprise. And if my father’s genes assert themselves in this new being? Well, as B. pointed out, the world will probably just assume we adopted.