America for the Non-American Whites

I've been a fan of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for years, snatching up her works the minute they hit the shelves, savoring her little wisdoms, and gradually seeing the world a bit more cynically as she so astutely characterizes the human race. After being on the wait list at the local library all summer for her latest book, Americanah, I finally got my hands on it a few days ago, and I'm half way in. The prose is as usual deliciously eloquent and filled with Adichie's wry humor, but I did not expect to feel so personally challenged by her assessment of race divisions in America. Here she was, my personal hero, that I agree with on almost every point, and suddenly as she was describing white people, I felt inherently mocked and ill at ease. But at the root of it, I realized we were the same. The reason I felt so uncomfortable is because I have always thought of race as such an obviously superficial construct, and this is exactly what Adichie is addressing in her novel. Like Adichie, I grew up overseas and came to America later in life to discover that I had a race tagged to my identity, but in my case this race is white.

One of the protagonists in her book, Ifemulu, writes a blog called "Raceteenth or Various Observations about American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black," in which she emphasizes that although Africans and Caribbeans may not have thought of themselves as black before (they each had ethnic as well as national identities), now that they are in America they are black and will be associated with all the other blacks as one general ethnicity.

Interestingly enough, this idea was not entirely new to me. My mother is in Trinidad doing research, talking to Trinidadian teachers who went to New York but came back home, and one thing that seems to disconcert them is how they lose their Caribbean identity once they come to America and become one of the many faceless blacks.

Earlier this summer I went down to the Clarksdale area in Mississippi on a Habitat for Humanity Trip and I was confronted with the blatant racial tensions of the deep South as we spent the week in an all-black town which bordered an all-white town, the segregation clear-cut and unabashedly unchanged. One evening, a slight white man from a neighboring town who studied the history of the region instigated a discussion, encouraging every one of us to tell the story of when we had first realized race existed. Race is a funny thing how you don't even know it's there until suddenly you're thrust into a world where color is everything. As people told their stories, I learned what it would have been like to grow up in America. My best friend-- a girl with Indian parents-- told the story of being shunned from her play group one random sunny afternoon because they had decided that "being dark was bad." One light skinned boy told the story of realizing his race when confronted with enraged black peers who blamed him for slavery and the feeling of guilt and self-hatred that came with the understanding of his skin color.

I hesitated to tell my story and spoke last, hesitant and unsure of myself. For me, race was a still a strange and foreign thing. All my life, having grown up in Egypt, Kuwait, and South Korea, I was used to seeing myself as something between French and American and yet really neither since I hadn't grown up in either country. Race didn't even cross my mind, although I was aware that I was the only fair skinned student at the various schools I was brought up in. Race just wasn't the issue; it had nothing to do with my identity.

Like Ifemelu, coming to America meant suddenly having a racial identity. In Americanah, her character stresses that when Africans and Caribbeans come to America, the last thing they want is to take on this black identity because it is at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. But, I don't know if that's it exactly. Being white, I should have been eager to slip into my new skin, instantly crowned as part of an elitist crowd. According to Ifemelu. But my introduction to race left me filled with just as much self disgust as the Africans and Carribbeans in Americanah felt.

Being of unusually tall stature for a girl, I tried to join basketball which I was soon to learn was a sport for black girls, not white girls, unless you were willing to put up with incessant racial epithets and an overall alienation from the rest of the crowd. I soon learned that being white meant I carried the entire burden of guilt for the atrocities of slavery in America, and that it was my role to be apologetic for the crimes of people I held probably no ancestral or personal tie to. Losing heart in the face of so much resentment, I quickly gave up playing basketball and was never able to play quite so well again when I came back to the sport in later years.

The way I see it, yes, Adichie was right about the unease of Africans and Caribbeans to take on the black identity but she didn't seem to realize that taking on the white identity is not necessarily all that glorifying.

Race is an ugly thing in America that at the heart of it, I'm not sure anyone wants to be classified within, and yet the culture as a whole clings to it, forcing us to fill in our demographics as we sign up for standardized tests, scholarships, surveys, etc. reminding each one of us a stereotype we are suppose to fulfill in order to play our role in society.