How We Became White
I would like you to imagine two family photographs.
The first is a picture of my mother’s grandfather in Greece from a sepia-toned copy of a 19th century original. He was a peasant and a patriarch; you can tell from his worn, leather face, his eyes crow-footed from a lifetime in the sun, and his impressive white moustache. He wears a Turkish-style cap, his mouth closed in a grim line because he probably did not have many teeth. The image is old, but we have held onto it for generations. (I would post it here, but all my photographs are in storage, so you will have to rely on my description.)
The second image is also from a stored photograph, one my siblings and I took in the mid-1980’s as a present for my parents. We are all teenagers, dressed in identical striped shirts, with the big hair of the era. Our grins reveal our good, braces-enhanced teeth. My brother is in his first year at Beverly Hills High School; I am in my last and my sister in between. We took the picture on the lawn of the school because we lived across the street. We look healthy and well-padded, optimistic and sure of our place in the world.
In the 100 years between the images, my family became white.
I don’t mean our skin colour changed. Apart from the bleaching effect of moving from an outdoor to an indoor life, our olive tint remains the same. What changed is what our pigment signifies.
I have been thinking a lot about this, being white and American in a country in which 66% of white women voted for someone I consider the most disturbing candidate in our history. I am white and so are they. What does that really mean?
In Greece, my peasant ancestors lived on a mountain. In Greek school as a four year old, I learned a rousing folk song: “To Fengari Mou Lambro” or the Moon Shines on Me. The moon lit the path of a child marching to her lessons at night because it was forbidden to learn Greek under Ottoman rule. This was our heroic story: slaves who fought to liberate ourselves. In Greece, my family were peasants, Christians and mountain folk. We were not Turks, or Gypsies. Those were the groups we identified ourselves against.
On my father’s Jewish side of the family, we also had a foundation myth about throwing off the yoke of slavery. In that much older story, we were under the thumb of the Egyptians until Moses freed us. Later, when we went into exile across the globe, this story sustained us. In Europe, we suffered for being outsiders. When my great-grandparents left their villages to escape pogroms, they took their otherness with them.
Then we came to America, and like many others we made the switch: from slavery to economic emancipation; from being on the bottom to the very top. How? By being white.
In order to be white we had to be not black. In my mother’s neighbourhood in Queens, her gang was Greek, Jewish, Italian, and Irish. What they had in common: skin colour and its ticket to the mainline of American mythology. When my father went to medical school, there were still quotas on Jews, but his family had maids, and those maids were black, and that was how his parents knew they had arrived.
Growing up in California, I never thought of myself as white. I was “ethnic”. I knew I was not black, however. Or brown, which was even more not white. Not Mexican, or Central American, because those were the ethnic groups whose labour enabled our prosperity: cleaners, gardeners, farm-workers. Whiteness was about economics as much as pigment.
In college, I fell in love with a man who was black. For years, he was the most important person in my life. I learned some things about race in America, but whiteness clung to me. It was an invisible mask I could not take off no matter how I tried. Only later, when I moved to England and married an English man did I feel it begin to lift. Ironically, you might say. I was in England and I was white, but that was no longer the most important thing about me.
In England, race and class are as real as anywhere else. But as my husband once said, England is a club: there are insiders and outsiders and this division exists across all groups at all levels. In England, I am an insider often, but I am an outsider also, always. Being foreign is the first thing anyone knows about me, as soon as I open my mouth.
This is not like racism; only two people have ever told me to go back to where I came from (one politely and one not so much). I still live in a bubble of privilege, but being foreign has given me an insight into what it feels like to have identity imposed on you, and how culture is a set of blinders we put on.
Living in Europe helps me see how racism is connected to history; in France, you can be lauded as an African American but denigrated as an African because of the unease of colonial memory. I have a friend who is Pakistani American who refuses to come to England because here she is considered black, but in San Francisco, exotically foreign. In the UK, my own exotic origin gives me a kind of class immunity I do not deserve.
Even now in America, whiteness and blackness feel like totalising identities that can threaten to supersede every other aspect of our selves: work, family, values, education, religion. Race allows one group of us the privilege of forgetting while it keeps another vulnerable to present and historical wounds.
Many who support Trump would claim they favour kindness over cruelty, respect over humiliation, truth over lies and rectitude over excess; yet they chose a candidate who violates every single one of those values because they could afford to take the risk.
Love did not trump hate. Race trumped gender.
Last night, I cried: not only for the future looming but for the one we have thrown away. As so often, music unlocked the tears I have been hiding from myself. My husband played a You Tube clip from a concert posted one month and a lifetime ago of a “tiny concert at the White House.” Hip hop poet Common sings an anthem: “If Women Ruled the World,” an imagined country where love and respect and commitment to our common future conquer the history that divides us. Performers and audience in every shade of skin were there in the seat of power, united in a beautiful vision of what we might become. That is my final image, the one I leave you linked here.
If you watch it, you too may catch a glimpse into a world that perhaps never has been truly ours, and will not be ours now either. Not yet. Like a light in the dark, maybe this final image can become for you what it is for me, a vision to carry you forward into the tunnel ahead.
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You might also be interested in: Breaking Our Vows: Some Thoughts on Our Dark Times, Life Through Two Lenses or On Cross Cultural Unions, Conflicts and Compromise
