Am I White?

I. Terms

People who see me tell me that I’m "White," but I hesitate to feel the "White" guilt that many sponsor.  The hesitation comes from two sources: our muddled definition of “White,” and the life experiences of my family and me.

Our society has never used the term “White” with a proper definition.  “Caucasian,” the previous term of choice, has proven nonsensical, so much so that its usage has been largely dropped by agencies such as school districts that keep track of employee and student ethnicities. The concept of Caucasian people derived from the late 18th century German academic Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who believed the "White" races originated in the general area of the Caucasus Mountains. That idea was debunked, but the term gained new life from another German, the philosopher Christoph Meiners, who, in 1785, coined the phrase “Caucasian race.” In Meiners’ classification, there were only two racial divisions: Caucasians and Mongolians. The Caucasians were, per Meiners, more attractive, having the “whitest, most blooming and most delicate skin,” while the Mongolians, which included Jews, were not attractive. Clearly, as a Jew, I have little incentive to use the term “Caucasian.”

Unfortunately, the term that replaced “Caucasian,” “Anglo,” which for over 30 years I have designated myself to be on forms for the Los Angeles Unified School District, is as meaningless as “Caucasian”.  You really could not pick a less descriptive term for “White” than “Anglo," short for “Anglo-Saxon,” a reference to the Germanic tribes that settled in Britain after the Roman exodus. Firstly, in order for the term “Anglo” or “Anglo-Saxon” to make historical sense, it should be “Anglo-Saxon-Norman,” to take into account the Norman (i.e. French speaking Viking) invasion that created the modern English people and its language.

The specific problem for me is that, while everyone agrees that I’m “White,” I have no common ancestry with Angles, Saxons or Normans. Depending on which history you accept, as an Ashkenazi Jew I am either descended from an ancient Semitic tribe or from a Turkic group called the Khazars, a nomadic and warlike nation that dominated the Russian plains until about 800AD, when it was weakened (along with the Slavs) by the Mongols, then destroyed by the Vikings who created modern Russia- contrasted with Sephardic Jews, a more provably Semitic people, many of whom migrated through North Africa and Spain, and who are no more related to "Anglos" than the Ashkenazi.

With both common terms for “White” - “Caucasian” and “Anglo” - virtually meaningless, there is not much to go on but the color white, but that is of limited help since “White” people are not the color white, any more than “Red,” Black” or “Brown” people are those colors.  I used to superimpose my forearm on a piece of white paper to show my inner-city students that I am not white. With my skin tone contrasted with actual white, it was clear that if my skin were a crayon color, it would be tan.

II. White guilt, special privilege and oppression

So much for the blanket definition of “White.”  The question now becomes, whatever kind of White person I may be, have I or my ancestors oppressed and harmed other races in heinous ways, and have we, as "White" people, been the benefiary of special privileges because we are "White"?   I don’t have any information previous to my grandparents and some great-grandparents, but from what I know of my family history, I’m not seeing much oppression of anyone, or race based privilege.  Both sides of my family fled for their lives from Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania in the late 19^th Century.   America was a promised land indeed, but not in an easy way.  My paternal grandfather, who came to New York City poor and speaking no English, worked for a while in a sweat shop, then made his way to Bismarck, North Dakota where he opened a successful store.  To my knowledge, no special privileges or slaves were involved.  The local KKK burned a cross in front of the Lasken Building (my dad, watching the crowd from the second floor where the family slept, recognized the chief of police and the husband of his second grade teacher).  Neither my grandparents nor my parents could join Bismarck's country club.  

My father became a pharmacist and we moved to Los Angeles when I was two years old.  Most pharmacy chains would not hire Jews.  The notable exception was Thrifty Drug Stores, where my dad worked throughout my childhood for $1.98 an hour.  He later used his knowledge of Thrifty’s exorbitant prescription prices to open the first discount pharmacy in L.A.  He made money, but, again, no privilege or slaves were involved, other than wage slaves (who got respectable union pay), and they were of every color.

In 1972, when I received my BA in English literature from the University of Minnesota, I went to see the chair of the English department to enquire about graduate school.  A distinctly unfriendly man told me that there was “no room” in the English department for me.  I later learned that the ‘70’s were the tail end of the practice of Midwestern university English departments to exclude Jews.  (I’m not very bitter about it; the fallout from this exclusion has been that I got to teach elementary kids to read and high school kids to read more, rather than toss all my work to TA’s and wear elbow patches).

I thought about administration and got a master’s degree in educational administration, but received intense hostility from the district when I tried to move into administration.  I was told by a principal, in a moment of candor, that I was the wrong color for administration.  The message was futher clarified by a Hispanic coordinator at an East L.A. meeting who told me I should not take a walk alone in the neighborhood because, not only was I White, but I was a particular kind of White who looked “really White,” so walking alone might not be safe for me (I did walk alone and felt perfectly safe). If the L.A. district had been rational about race it would have included in its mandates a message that people who look really white are not necessarily descended from slave owners or people who are comfortable in a world that accepts slavery. As it happened, the district, years later, headed its Critical Race Theory curriculum "Challenging Whiteness."

III. Does it matter?

There are enough reasonable people around of all races that I don’t worry about being misunderstood in intelligent circles.  The broader problem is that our national politics is increasingly racial (for want of other substance), with the 2016 presidential race presented as a struggle between a "White" party, the Republicans, versus the Democratic Party, a coalition of races in agreement on "White" guilt.  Thomas B. Edsall, writing in the New York Times (“The Persistence of Racial Resentment,” http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=139836&preview=true) relates that the GOP has won the “White” vote in every election except one going back to 1952 (the exception was LBJ in 1964).  Edsall writes that Mitt Romney lost the GOP ticket in 2012, not because he lacked non-“White” votes, but because he only had 59% of the “White” vote, not the 62% he needed. Were this translated into campaign advice for Romney, it would be that he should have done more to get the "White" vote. But how would he have done that? And what does "White vote" even mean?

The 2016 presidential campaign promises to be a landmark font of confusion regarding ethnic politics.  The “White” vote as defined above, by virtue of its link with Republicans and the Tea Party, presents itself as retrograde, bigoted and ignorant, as well as Midwestern and Southern.  What are the options for a “White” person living in, say, Los Angeles, who does not want to be represented in this way?  The standard option would be to join the Democrats, but that does not work for me because I regard the Democratic Party as shamelessly corrupt, both in its pork-driven and harmful education policies and its reincarnation as the party of war.

Thus I believe it’s time for everyone to stop obsessing about our ethnicities.  We’re all in the same boat, anyway: every race is about to be threatened by the biological sciences, which are on the verge of creating new types of humans to, well, replace us.  2016 should be the year of realistic assessment of the prospects for all humanity, not a rehash of our imperfect history so far.