I used to be White (well, I thought I was White)
By Rachel Lutwick-Deaner
Exhibit A
It’s the golden hour. We’re at the Grand Ideas Garden, part of the Michigan State University extension, a vibrant oasis in the middle of a residential neighborhood, a garden “designed to inspire and educate gardeners of all ages and backgrounds.” We’re taking Senior photos, and the lush green, punctuated with blooms, is a perfect backdrop. My eyes fall on the white petals of a hydrangea, as I wrap my arms around my sweet girl.
“You are so much darker than your daughter!” exclaims the photographer.
Yep.
This is a piece about color.
About being (not) white. And what that means.
There’s not usually anything to say about my friend Christina’s skin. Her hair? Hell, yes! Her clothes? For sure. Her sassy attitude? Well, maybe you don’t say anything, but you can’t miss her long lashed eye roll, even over Zoom. However, no one comments on her skin. No one says, “Hey Christina, you’re looking especially brown today.” No one says, “You used to be light tan, and now you’re more of a medium tan.” No one says, “Professor, you must be feeling sick because today you are taupe.”
Well, maybe someone does say it to her, but no one white says it. Everyone who is white sees that Christina is a brown woman, and because they are “careful,” because they “don’t see color,” no one comments on her particular shade of brownness. At least, that’s not what “nice” people do. At least, that’s what I’ve observed about my community, this little pocket of liberalism in a conservative section of my state.
I know that in many communities of color, there is a hierarchy, where people, women in particular, who are more “white”—paler skin—smoother hair—are considered more beautiful, more valuable. No one will come out and say “We like you because you look white,” but that is the undercurrent. Black is Beautiful! People cry—but we like you better if you are white.
Yeah, so I’m getting that impression.
Because everyone wants to talk about my color.
Exhibit B
When, I was about 11 years old, and I came home from sleepaway camp, my grandfather asked me, “How come you look like such a shvartze?” Schvartze is the Yiddish word that equates closely with the n-word. I remember his clammy hand on my shoulder, I remember the humid air, the marine stink of the harbor just a few miles away. I don’t remember what my mother said, but I remember how she steered me past the white wrought iron of the entryway and into the house, where the storm door slammed behind us. I remember feeling like shavartze was not the thing to say, but I was super dark.
Exhibit C
A friend of my grandmother’s once remarked to me, “Your children are much more attractive than you are.” Shocked, I blurted, “I know.” But really, what did he mean? That their bright blue eyes out-sparkled my chocolate brown? That their creamy skin, rosy cheeks, drew the eye past my olive visage? Their button noses, more shapely than my ethnic schnozz? I think he meant that we don’t match up–that they are lovely, and I am…something else?
Exhibit D
It even comes from my closest intimates. At the Ford Museum with my family, we were exploring the Jim Crow Era exhibit: Ku Klux Klan uniform; restroom signs directing people to “whites” or “coloreds”; the original Rosa Parks bus (the tour guide will show you exactly where she sat); the white and “colored” water fountains as well as two separate (and definitely not equal) waiting rooms at a “train depot.”
My 5-year-old daughter, Davita, guided me to the “Colored” water fountain. “This is for you, Mom, because you have brown skin.” My laugh was staccato, surprised. My older daughter, Tali, tried to tell her little sister that was “not nice,” but my little one continued with her reverie. She hugged the “white” water fountain, grooving on it, “This is my water fountain because I’m pure white.” Like synchronized dancers, everyone else in my family took a step away from her. Oooooh shit. Here we are, thinking that the kids are learning something about Race in America, and it’s clear our little one has no idea, doesn’t get it. “Davita! Stop!,” Tali said. I was smiling but my eyes stung. Another family was approaching this part of the exhibit. My husband touched Davita’s shoulders gently. “Let’s give someone else a chance, sweetie.”
And other families moved through, getting their chance. A chance to see that water fountain from 1954, a chance to know that it’s easier, more comfortable, to be white.
Sometimes, it’s not exactly a comment on my skin tone, but an understanding that my skin is darker, and in that darkness, there must be a meaning.
What are you? People like to ask.
Exhibit E
What are you? When the guy behind the counter at the Mediterranean restaurant asks me where I’m from? The student who shyly approaches me after class, usually a student whose roots are toastier than the typical midwesterner: Can I ask you something, professor? Even the little boy in the Central Galilee region of Israel, who could barely speak Hebrew or English, did manage to ask me, “Ruski?” There’s something about me that makes people wonder—to want to categorize, figure out.
My children have progressively come out whiter and whiter. They are beautiful children—objectively. I know so because other people tell me that they are beautiful. Peaches and cream skin. Dreamy blue eyes. Pink mouths. I know also that other people find our pairing a mismatch. I used to joke that everyone thought I was the Latina nanny. But it was true. Once a child boldly approached me and asked, of my golden haired baby, “She’s adopted, right?” I wasn’t mad or annoyed that she said this. It was only a confirmation of what I thought people were already thinking. Because they keep saying it. Yes, I am a dark-skinned woman. But I am not African American. Not a Spanish speaker. Not Latina. These are all wonderful identities. If I were, I would embrace it. But I’m not.
So what am I?
Exhibit F
List of countries people have thought/said I was from:
Japan (a girl in a Dublin tea shop)
Lebanon (the guy behind the counter at the pita shop)
Greece (customers at Taverna Nikos, where I waited tables)
Poland (some Polish girls at a train station)
Russia (a little boy in the Central Galilee)
Italy (a former student)
Israel (my best friend, the first time I met her)
Mexico (a colleague at the community college)
Exhibit G
When I studied abroad in 1996, we didn’t take digital pictures just yet. I returned home after six months with a pile of cheap 3x5 glossies for my mother to peruse. Suddenly, she howled with wicked surprise. “You look exactly like Osama bin Laden in this one, Rachie!!”
On paper, I’m white. I was brought up on Long Island among Jews, Irish and Italian Catholics, and Koreans. I have had just about every New York Jewish White Girl privilege you can think of—family trips to Europe, education at elite liberal arts college, fancy New York wedding, mother with a platinum card at Saks. I thought I was a white girl.
It was a surprise to me that other people didn’t think I was white too. In fact, when it became clear to me that other people didn’t see me as white, I turned to science. When I say turned to science, I mean I mentioned it to my husband, an evolutionary psychologist. He offered that research suggests this “misinterpretation” comes to humans naturally. Robert directed me to the work of Mark Changizi, who writes in his book, The Vision Revolution, “In skin color, we tend to lump together the skin colors of other races as similar to one another, even though in some cases their colors may differ as much from each other as your own color does from either of them. For example, while people of African descent distinguish between many varieties of African skin, Caucasians tend to lump them all together as ‘black’ skin.”(p. 18.) There’s actually an explanation for the ridiculous idea that All [insert ethnic or racial group here] Look The Same. It still feels gross.
No, I’m not quite white. I’m sort of brownish. Like my half-Pakistani brother-in-law sometimes says, “I’m from brown town.” Brown hair. Brown eyes. Brownish/tan skin. But hey—one of my grandfathers was full-blooded Italian from Calabria! The first time his future mother-in-law saw him she forbade my grandmother from being associated with “a colored man.” The other grandfather had Russian-Jewish ancestry. We’re swarthy folk.
I knew that when I moved to East Grand Rapids I was moving to “Pleasantville.” We arrived in late June. One of the first images I saw when I arrived here was the montage of all the beautiful people at the concert in Collins Park. You know what I mean, the mothers and daughters in their matching Lilly Pulitzer dresses, the girls with those huge hair bows holding back their flaxen hair in side-parts. I saw them, and my own hair poofed out into an even bigger Jew-fro as the sweet breeze blew off of Reeds Lake.
It took me a while to realize that I was going to be perceived as other. And it wasn’t just because I’m the only one who will loudly complain about the absence of sufficient cashiers at a retail store. It took 5 years, precisely.
Exhibit H
I was with a group of friends at the Lakeside Elementary fundraiser. I can’t even get into the dynamics of said fundraiser—let’s just say that we’re a privileged lot and our kids are damn lucky. Making small talk at our table, an unfamiliar woman recognized me as the mother of a kindergartener. I was. She asked, “Are you Tobenna’s mother?”
Tobenna? I thought, Tobenna? Tobenna is the one African child in the kindergarten. Now, as I said, I’m a bit brownish, but Tobenna and his absolutely gorgeous and sweet family are easily distinguishable from me. Or at least I thought. This was before I knew about Mark Changizi and his idea that people generally group all the “browns” together.
The next thing I thought was, “Tobenna is an unusual name. My son, Zev, has an unusual name too. Perhaps I was just being lumped in with a group of women who have sons with names that are not a-la-mode.”
(Because I am a kind and good person, I will omit from this essay my critique of aforementioned a-la-mode names, but you know who I’m talking about, Tinsley).
So I corrected her—not Tobenna’s mom. Zev’s mom. Yes, Zev’s mom. I think I even explained that we were Jewish. I don’t think I said anything as explicit as “Not Nigerian.” But I did say not Tobenna’s mom.
As strange as the interaction was, I just put it in the box of funny-ha-ha stories (See Exhibit F). But then the story continued.
On no fewer than two additional occasions, I was approached by the same woman from the fundraiser who continued to assert that I was Tobenna’s mother. Once she started telling me about how Tobenna didn’t have a coat on the field trip, and how she had lent him one of her own child’s coats. Another time, she approached me right before the holiday party and told me that Tobenna was waiting for me to arrive. At that point I was too embarrassed, and too befuddled, to continue to correct her. I just smiled and nodded. I even thanked her, before I immediately reported this absurd, to me, mix-up to Tobenna’s mother who was delighted with the idiocy of it all.
I was gobsmacked by the misunderstanding. Was it funny? Was it stupidity? Was it something more insidious? Was it just a ditzy lady in a ditzy town who couldn’t distinguish one minority from another?
I didn’t think I was really so different from everyone else. I’m not blonde. I’m not Dutch. My name is not Van Vandervan. But I’m not that different. But I am a little bit different. And I guess this woman, who I’m sure is nice, and means well, and isn’t, well, that stupid, could tell that I was somewhat different, something else, and was just putting me in a group with all the other others.
How do I feel about all this? This notion that I am a standout. That people in this town can tell that I am not one of them. That I may as well be from Nigeria, compared to all the sleek-haired, pale skinned, PTA minions.
At first, I thought it was funny.
And now? As a person who thought I was white for the first thirty years of my life, it’s confusing and disconcerting to be outed, to be such an obvious outsider. I thought it was because I drank coffee and read The New Yorker when everyone else had their babies on their laps during story time. Now I know they saw me coming a mile away.
I used to think I was the diversity hire in the English department because I am the only one who has ever expressed an emotion publically. It turns out that I bring geographic diversity, and well, I didn’t want to say it, but I’m not that white.
But I used to be white. I thought I was white. But it seems I’m not anymore. And the feeling is revelatory in a way that is exhilarating and also makes me feel open, naked, not-quite-right. If I moved back to New York, would I get to be white again? Could I? Would I want to? To me, being white means a certain comfort, confidence, security, safety, belonging, and it may be that those things never belonged to me, and I just didn’t know it before.
I thought I could just blend in, that I ought to blend in. But it seems that’s not the case, and part of knowing who I am is knowing that I’m just not that white. Even if the rest of my family is. And I used to be.
Rachel Lutwick-Deaner enjoys a bookish life. She earned a BA in English from Colgate University, an MA in English Literature from North Carolina State University, and a MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. She currently resides in Grand Rapids, MI, where she teaches college composition and literature at Grand Rapids Community College. Rachel delights in writing essays that challenge and affirm her readers, and her ultimate goal is to make people laugh, even uncomfortably. When she’s not writing or teaching, Rachel loves reading, and her book reviews can be found at Southern Review of Books and on Instagram @professor.ld.