Disclaimer time! I’m not American! (It’s weird how I feel it is actually necessary to say this, but apparently the internet revolves around the navel that is the US these days, so there we have it. I mean, I blog in English, that should say all.)
Before you get to roast me, you get to read the following sites, sadly my almost favourite post was deleted due to an account purge, apparently the person is now on tumblr:
- “WHITENESS” IN EUROPE & TUMBLR’S US-CENTRIC SJ DISCOURSE
- “before talking about egypt” post (sadly the original is also deleted here)
So, again, I’m not American. I’m not WASP. By an American, however, I would be perceived to be white. People from where I’m from often give me a second look and I can see them thinking “Is she…?”. What can I say? I don’t actually know, because in the last days of World War II several pretty ugly things happened and neither of my grandmothers talked about it. So I might be.
But it’s something I don’t waste much time with. I know I got lucky, that despite being from a very blue collar household, I got to go to a good school, I got to go to university and received financial aid from the state. I got pretty lucky and the higher up you go in this society, the less people will care about the answer to the question, “Is she…?”, because you’ve shown your merits. You’ve shown you can, and if it’s been more a struggle than for others with more money and a more solid familial background, well then that is so. Does this shit matter in school? Sure. Is it reason for bullying/mobbing? Absolutely, but so is that fact that you wear glasses and are fat, so what gives in the end?
But the answer to the question, “Is she…?” might as well be, no she isn’t. And if I’m not, then I may be lilly white in the eyes of an American, but that might not actually make much different in a society where the lines are not drawn by your skin colour. I’ve seen it happen too often that Italians are mistaken for PoC, when any Italian I know would rip my head off for that assumption. At the same time, are Turkish people white or are they PoC? I know the answer in my eyes, but in the eyes of an American? (Please, dear gentle American reader, do not call Turkish people Arabs, you might get yourself killed.) At the same time there’s a pretty large cultural divide between Turkish people and the other peoples of Europe, so the line in the sand is very clearly drawn (sometimes by the Turkish, sometimes by the people they live among, sometimes by both and often there is no line).
In my last job, which I held during the UK referendum and the election of Donald Trump as 45th President of the United States of America, the question of race got pretty prominent. And it still is, especially as far as the US media is concerned, and the general atmosphere among people. But it also put me in a strange situation:
To explain, part of my family is from Germany and therefore whether I like it or not, there’s a historical responsibility I carry. A work colleague of mine at the time is Romani, and for those of you who don’t know, the Romani are an ethnic minority – the so called “gypsies” – and were just as much a target of the Nazis as were Jews.
To any American, my colleague would be white. Pretty, with dark eyes and dark hair, but white. She’s not. And it’s not just that she isn’t, but it’s also visible to anyone who looks at her. When you grow up in Europe, it is pretty easy to differentiate between different shades of whiteness. Walk along a street in Berlin, Vienna or Paris or London or Stockholm with someone from Europe and they will be able to tell you whether someone “belongs” or doesn’t. The line isn’t drawn between black and white, it’s between ethnicities much more so. Someone who is black will not be treated any worse in Berlin than someone who is Polish, odds are the black person will receive better treatment.
Anyway, my colleague has the corresponding past of ill treatment in school, of a patchy history, of all the things that make people treat people who they think don’t “belong” shitty. This is racism, people, plain and simple. So my colleague looks at me and says, “I don’t get this, is everyone at each other’s throat just because of black and white? What’s with people like me?” I was at a loss. How could I tell her, as someone who carries the history of what happened to her people during WWII, how could I tell her that her experiences were not valid because to someone thousand of kilometres away she will never meet she looks white?
And that’s why the racial discussion, at least as the internet tries to have it, is complete bullshit. (Aside from the fact that race isn’t a scientific term, but let’s not go there.)