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This guy walks into a bar and says... - Mar 13, 2006 - Printable Version
- "I Am The White Sheep Of My Family."
(Gray Like Me: Part One)
by Ken Shade
When I say that I am the white sheep of the family, I must clarify which family I mean. In the family of my birth, I am not the white sheep. I don't know who is, but I know it isn't me. It would be difficult for anybody to be the white sheep because a more utterly caucasian bunch of people has never been spotted in North America. One family of cousins holds the world's record for pale blondness. Even their names, Karen, Gretchen, Mark, Paul, Laura and Todd, are pale and blond. If my family has a whitest-of-the-white, it's probably one of them.
I read recently that blond hair and blue eyes were a mutation among cave dwellers in Europe. Men being the way we are, the cave dudes found that mutation attractive. (Men tend to find whatever is different from the women around them daily to be exotic and monstrously exciting. That's why, whenever one culture colonizes or conquers another, the first thing the winners do is to jump on the women.) With a ratio of 1.5 cave women to every cave man, the guys were able to take their picks. The blond/blue mutation was passed along, and a race of my translucent cousins was born.
I do know who the darkest spot in the family is, it's my father. My father had, until recent years, thick jet-black hair and a ruddy complexion. He bore an uncanny resemblance to Elvis Presley. In fact, he was frequently mistaken for Elvis. The first time was in 1954, when a woman in St. Louis came running up to him excitedly asking if he was Elvis Presley. "Who's Elvis Presley?" was all he could say. My father wasn't from the small area of the country that knew who the heck Elvis was in 1954.
If the most ethnic-looking person in your family looks like Elvis, you know you're among white folks.
No, when I say I am the white sheep of my family, I mean the family I am in now.
In 1994, I married "outside my race."
Before I go on, let me explain that I use the term "outside my race" out of convenience. Personally, I don't believe in "race." Being human, and not all that bright, we have identified certain physical traits, all traits of appearance, and decided to categorize people according to those traits. The problems with this approach are many. They start with the fact that skin color, hair, height, epicanthic folds, lip thickness, nose shape, etc., account for only 6% of human genetic variation. By selecting it to classify people, we make that 6% far, far more important than it ought to be. If we chose to classify people according to some other, less visible, characteristic, such as how our immune systems function, then the Kalahari bushmen and Hasidic Jews would be part of the same race, and that would be too important to us.
I live in the real world, though, and I must deal with things as they are. Racial classes were arrived at long before I came along, and they're not going to go away.
So, I married "outside my race," for lack of a better term. The perfect woman for me happened to be African-American. How much of an issue that has been in my life, and in what ways, I will save for a later time. I mention it now only to tell you where I am coming from. I have spent the last twelve years primarily as a member of my late wife's African-American family. I have been completely adopted by them, and when I hear the word "family," theirs are the faces that first pop into my mind.
During that twelve years, I have had an experience that I wish everybody could have. I have been able to walk back and forth between two subcultures...two neighborhoods in the same town. I know what each group says when the other is not around. I am able to laugh at the differences, and the more common similarities, as looked at from both sides. I see the blind spots in both brown and blue eyes. I have the chance to identify with feelings of frustration, anger, guilt, fear, triumph, regret and hope which are right out in the open, though usually misunderstood. On any given day, I face the challenges common to all parents, and the challenges peculiar to raising African-American children in America.
There's a good place to begin sharing my perspective: my children.
I married my beautiful, African-American wife, Karla in 1994. Within months of our wedding, we had adopted "mixed-race" six-year-old child. Thirteen months later, we adopted another child, an African-American three-year-old boy. One year later, Karla gave birth to our third child who, obviously, is "mixed."
Instant, stir-fry family!
If our middle child looked at all "mixed," it would have made our family less confusing to onlookers. Karla and I took great amusement in how mightily and sincerely people tried to figure out how that kid fit into the picture. The oldest and youngest looked the right shade of light brown, but the inexplicably chocolate-looking boy threw people for a loop.
Now that Karla is gone, people see me with my children and assume that all three of them are adopted. (That may be partly because all three of my children are very beautiful, and I look like "Honorable Mention" in a jack-o'-lantern contest.)
I put the word "mixed" in quotation marks because it's like Richard Gere's gerbil: Everybody believes in it, but it has never really existed.
When she was about eleven, my oldest child once happily ventured: "I'm mixed, so I can go either way." My wife answered: "I'm sorry, Jasmine, but you don't get to decide."
Of course, Karla was right. The world doesn't look at anybody, no matter what the shade of their skin, and say, "There's a mixed race person. They're a different category, so we'll treat them uniquely." The world looks at a person and, if they're even a little bit brown, decides they're "black." They will be considered "black," and treated as such, for better or worse. I can prove this point in two words: Halle Berry.
Halle Berry is what? She is the first African-American to win the Academy Award for Best Actress, isn't she? Nobody exulted because she was the first "mixed race" actress to win the award, even though her mother is white. Halle is a little bit brown, and that's all it takes. It doesn't matter a bit if she calls herself mixed, white or a human saddle oxford. In the reality of race in America, she's a black woman. The culture got to decide what she is, not Halle.
Jasmine never gets to decide, either, even though she is about as racially ambiguous as a person can be. In Hawaii, people thought she was Polynesian. If she were in the Middle-East, people would walk up to her and speak Arabic because she looks like she'd be able to respond in kind. On Southern Cheyenne territory in Oklahoma, she looked like she belonged. In the America we all share, she's just a black girl.
As I raise my children, I face the same questions all of you do:
Are they eating properly?
What is the proper way to control her behavior?
Are they safe?
Are they applying themselves in school?
Why would my teenage daughter pause to apply make-up before she fled a burning building?
Did the child do that because he's a child, and not neurologically mature, or because he's been eating paint chips?
In addition to all of that, I also have to ascertain if they are having problems in some situations because any child would, or because they have been singled-out.
My son had a teacher several years ago who went nuts over a love note he wrote to a little girl. The note was one of those one-question tests that kids pass in elementary school all the time:
I like you.
Do you like me?
_____YES _____NO
(check one)
Completely harmless.
Well, I got called to the school to answer for my son's "sexual harassment" of this poor, mistreated girl. The teacher was strongly suggesting that my son be moved to another class.
I had so many things to sort through. I wondered why the school's sexual harassment policy was insane. I read it, and discovered that it wasn't insane at all. The teacher was not applying it properly.
I asked if she was making such a big deal of it because the girl's parents were insisting. They weren't.
That event was about the fifth time she had complained about things my son did in a way that seemed like quite an overreaction. I had to ask around and find out if she had reacted the same way to things that other boys did, including love notes. She hadn't.
I asked the principal if it was common for this teacher to want a child removed from her class. It was.
I asked about the children she had already had removed. There were three of them, all male, all African-American.
I was starting to smell a rat, so I asked my son about the girl he had written the note to. She was white.
Suddenly, the whole year made sense.
I'd love to say that I made the right decision about what to do, but I don't think I did. Being new to this sort of thing, I didn't know when to fight, so I fought all the time. "We have to pick our battles," Karla had always said, but I never learned exactly how to pick them before she died. So, I insisted that the boy stay in that class, and I told the teacher that she would deal fairly with my son, or answer to me.
I should have allowed the school to move him to another class, where the teacher probably had a better attitude. By foolishly believing that my righteous parental outrage would set things aright, I trapped the child in a class with a teacher he adored, but who couldn't abide him. When she couldn't remove him, she pushed him aside and ignored him. He fell behind, and it took almost $12,000 at the Sylvan Learning Center to get him back up to grade level. During the remainder of that year in school, my son learned only two things:
1) A good way to demand attention is to cause trouble and shock people.
2) People freak out easily over sexual subjects.
To this day, his favorite way to get attention is to make sexual remarks where they are least appropriate, and shock people.
Of course, this plays into the bigotry of many people he has to deal with, who are all too ready to believe that all people of African descent are sex fiends. Most of his white friends do it too, now, but they're considered normally mischievous.
Most white parents don't have to deal with all this crap.
I bring all of this up now because I have wanted for a very long time to share all of the things I have learned and experienced as a man in the middle. I have wanted to tell people how funny, how enlightening, how frustrating, how rewarding, how hopeful, how confusing and how inspiring it is to experience life from a vantage point shared by so few. I have wanted to tell people how silly they look, sometimes...how they teach me by example...how close they sometimes are to a personal breakthrough, and how full of manure they can be. (White folks, the stupidity is yours, 95% of the time.)
What finally prompted me to take on this subject is the airing of the television series "Black. White." on the F/X channel. For those of you who don't know, "Black. White." is a reality show in which make-up artists transform an African-American family into caucasians, and a caucasian family into African-Americans. They're followed by cameras, both hidden and visible. Their experiences make up the action of the show.
At first, I didn't intend to watch the show. I didn't intend to watch it because the promos featured a cast member saying: "We're doing something that nobody's ever done before." That kind of things makes me crazy. The white, teenage cast member who said this can be excused for not knowing about John Howard Griffin and "Black Like Me," but the producers who chose to air that promo should be ashamed of themselves. I'm sure many of you wonder why I get annoyed with it, but that's just me. People with no knowledge of history, or no historical perspective, infuriate me.
I changed my mind and watched the first episode of "Black. White" because I wanted to see how much of it was reality, and how much of it was television. I wanted to see how it compared with my own observations. I wanted to see if the intent was to promote understanding, or simply exploit passions. I also wanted to use it as a jumping-off point for starting my long-delayed, and possibly helpful "racial pieces."
Each week, I will watch "Black. White." Each episode will provide a chance for me to compare, evaluate and add the events in my life. This will provide an artificial construct, a schedule, on which I can finally get off my butt and get to work. I don't yet know what F/X is trying to accomplish, but my own motive is to make the whole subject of race less frightening to people by shining my own light on it. I will only be sharing my experiences. I have no intention of speaking for anybody else, or either color. I will not present my opinions as Gospel truth, or even science. They will merely be one person, telling what he has seen from an interesting vantage point.
The first episode introduced us to the families. Sparks: African-Americans. Wurgel-Marcotulli: European-Americans. It demonstrated the make-up techniques, and took us along with family members on their first, furtive steps beyond the boundaries of their comfort zones. I took two pages of notes during the first episode, and I intend to incorporate those into my future, weekly pieces. I'm not going to do it now because I've used a lot of time and space to explain what I'm up to.
I will, though, say that I am a little suspicious of this "reality" show because Bruno Marcotulli, the white man, is an actor whose screen credits include "Baywatch," "JAG," "Safety Patrol" and the role of "Sad mime," in "Spy Hard."
If his lines are scripted for him, they're scripted by somebody who knows what they're talking about. His attitudes ("I pulled myself up, why can't you black folks? Black people see racism where it doesn't exist.") are very common among white people who were born on second base, and think they hit a double. He refuses, so far, to acknowledge that Mr. Sparks' feelings about his own life are at all valid. He probably thinks, deep down in his heart, that to admit racism is to accept personal blame for it, which it silly. If he admits that racism is a problem, he doesn't have to accept blame. He only has to accept that he has benefited from it.
His wife seems to be a well-meaning, but clueless GWL (Guilty White Liberal). She starts off with the statement "I'm not prejudiced. My parents were involved in the civil rights movement. (Those may not be her exact words, but they're close enough.) From there, she goes on to an unintentionally revealing display of just how self-conscious she is on the entire subject of race. Three of the adults in the show, when they first see their spouses made up, break into laughter, which is a very natural response. Carmen, obviously fearing that laughter might indicate something unwholesome in her, responds to the site of her husband in make-up by declaring: "Oh, my husband is a beautiful, black man!" She declares it several times, just to make sure everybody knows that she thinks black men are not at all disgusting; that she really thinks they're beautiful; that she wouldn't object to being with one.
It's diaphanous and annoying.
The daughter of the family is more sympathetic, if naive. She's flinging herself into the project with passion, and the subconscious security that she can step right out of the black world at the end of the project. The old saying "I only have to do two things: Stay black and die," doesn't apply to her, and she feels safe knowing that, even if she isn't aware of it.
The Sparks' son is annoying because he's saying some of the same things my teenage daughter says. She and her friends seem to consider race some sort of fashion statement, as though it was a conscious choice, and nobody regards it as any more important than what kind of shirt they like.
Now that my daughter has joined the workforce, she's starting to get a glimpse of how everybody is not one of her high school friends, and how simple, small snap decisions they make can negatively affect her in very serious ways. The kid on the show is a little younger than my daughter, and not out in reality. He still likes to entertain the idea that his generation is above anything so unseemly as prejudice.
Mr. and Mrs. Sparks are not quite as interesting, yet, simply because they don't have much to learn. You see, they've been living in white society for a long time. They've had no choice but to learn how to understand it and accommodate it. The simple truth is that African-Americans get pretty hip about the dominant white culture, while caucasians remain pretty thick about black culture. There won't be as many revelations for The Sparks. The best moment for them in the first episode was when Mr. Sparks discovered that he got better service in a shoe store as a white man. It's fun to see his reaction. It brings to mind Eddie Murphy's famous "White Like Me" sketch on Saturday Night Live.
A revealing moment for Mrs. Sparks is when she begins to realize that some whites are aware of their bias, understand that it's wrong, but don't know what to do about it.
As I said before, there are many, many things from the first episode that I could expound upon, but I'll take a rest, think, watch another one and decide just how to approach them, if at all.
I have no idea if I will be finished with this subject when the final episode of "Black. White." airs. If I'm not, I'll continue until the job feels done. I'll probably take a break, from time to time, rant about some other subject, then return to "Gray Like Me," or whatever the name evolves into. I know I'm tilting at windmills, but as long as I love my families, every black or white one of them, I'll always feel like there is work to do.
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