“Excuse me, sir. Can I ask what your ethnicity is?”
I’m not gonna lie to y’all…I never saw that one coming.
I probably should just go ahead and say this upfront: I’m white, and I’m here to be awkward. Incredibly awkward, even, if all goes well.
The excellent news is that this happens to pair nicely with yet another Back-To-School vignette from my vast repertoire of life experiences. Everybody rejoice!
As long-time readers probably know by now, I’m a perennial front-runner in just about everybody’s Whitest Kid You Know contest. Or as, the beloved country music singer and philanthropist Dolly Parton would put it, I have a “lilly-white1Errata: so I just checked my source, and it turns out she said “little- white ass”. Color me disappointed:…https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/country/9434624/artists-applaud-dolly-parton-dixie-comment-black-lives-matter ass.”
I’m talking Village-of-the-Damned, kicked-on-a-plane white. For better or worse, it is what it is.2Dammit, Donald, why do you have to ruin every turn-of-phrase.
Not exactly a prime candidate for an identity crisis, is what I’m trying to say. Yet, Life has a way of surprising us.
My moment of cognitive dissonance came the day before I started classes my Freshman year at Kansas State University. It was Back-To-School season, and as on most college campuses, every ----- campus organization and credit card company had booths set up outside of the Student Union, in search of easy prey.
Now, I was there on official business, picking up a textbook or some other classroom supply, and wasn’t in the market for anything they were selling. So I was in my own little world as I rolled up on my bike and was locking it to the bike rack.
Out of nowhere, I hear this voice…
“Excuse me. Excuse me, sir.”
Slightly bewildered, I scanned my surroundings.
“Excuse me, sir, can I ask what your ethnicity is?”
I realized that the voice belonged to the middle-aged Black woman sitting at the Black Student Union3https://ksusankofa.wordpress.com/ table.
And she was talking to…my lilly-white ass?
My brain slightly short-circuited…like, I understood the words she was saying, I just didn’t understand them when strung together like that. I didn’t think that particular topic could ever ever come up for debate.
Nevertheless, she was clearly talking to me, so I answered as best as I could.
“Uh…Caucasian? I guess…”
Not gonna lie, though, she had me doubting myself at that point.
“Oh, I see. I just wanted to say that I really love your skin tone. I’ve never seen anything like that before. It’s beautiful.”
I don’t know if it was because it was unexpected, or if it was because of from whom it was coming, but HOLY SHIT, I can’t even put into words how ----- fantastic that compliment made me ego4You can thank my Inner Pirate for that Freudian slip of a typo, Mateys! feel. I swear to you, it made me tingle in parts of my brain that I never knew existed.
I thanked her for her kind words and went on my way, puzzling over what had just happened and trying to figure out what my optimal response could have been.
Then I looked down at my arms and that’s when it hit me.
Oh. Right.
Context matters. And the context here was that I had just spent the whole summer working on the farm with my dad. Much of which was with an “I’m young and I’m never gonna die so bring on the melanoma” attitude towards sun exposure.
In other words, I had a so-called “Farmer’s Tan”…on steroids. Yet, somehow, answering “Tropical Viking” instead of “Caucasian” still didn’t feel quite right.
Oh, yeah. The hair…
You know what happens when already blonde hair gets too much sunshine? At that point, “white” isn’t even an accurate description anymore. “Clear,” “transparent,” or “fiber optics” would be better terms, but still don’t quite nail it.
Basically, I was a walking, talking, breathing film negative of a normal white person.
I know it’s a bit late of a repsonse, but, Ma’am, the correct answer to your question should have been:
“I’m a proud ethnic Bizarro Oompa-Loompa.”5This is not a joke. If I ever find my Driver’s License from that summer, I’ll post here as proof.
Indeed, ’tis a point of pride for me that I can say something that most of y’all crackers out there can’t:
” ‘Genuinely confuse a woman of color about my ethnicity?’ Oh, I checked that off my bucket list a looooong time ago.”
*Sigh.*
Despite my rather uncommon neo-ethnic bona fides, I’m admittedly still not very good at discussing racial topics. But I say the only way to getting better at it is practice, practice, practice! And that starts with whole-heartedly owning it…
Or, as I essentially told my woman-of-color admirer, “I’m white, and I’m here to be incredibly awkward.”
Content created on: 27 August 2020 (Thursday)
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