I’m a white person.

I am a White person. Lest you’re not sure if that’s true, I’ve provided a photo below. See? White.

 

 

My grandmother’s family, the Louds, came over to the Colonies on the Mayflower. Her house contains a thick, old, leather-bound family tree, dating back to our beginnings. “Whiteness” didn’t exist then, of course, because in order to be “white” there need to be people around who aren’t. In the 1600’s, there was no discourse of “white” and “black”; my family and those who were with them were those who created the reality of “whiteness”. My heritage, the legacy handed down to me by my ancestors, is that of creating division based on skin tone and religious belief. My family’s legacy is one of genocide of native peoples and the theft and enslavement of Africans.

 

In 2005, the summer after my first sophomore year of college, I discovered my Whiteness. It was traumatic: I was working at a co-operative summer camp, and in the context of a discussion about cultural misappropriation, a fellow counselor referred to me as “you people”- me, White people- and our appropriation of various Afro-American cultural markers, such as dreadlocks. I angrily stood up and left, because, I reasoned, it wasn’t my fault that I was white, right?

A (white, Jewish) friend of mine approached me a bit later and told me that my behavior was not only rude, it was racist. I was confused, angry, even traumatized, as this patient friend introduced me to the concept of white privilege and the plain fact that part of being White is the ability to ignore the fact that I’m white. I cried. Like coming out as gay and coming out as male, I had a coming-out as White.

 

Unpacking my Whiteness, like unpacking my gayness and my transness, is an ongoing and difficult process. Unlike being gay or(and) trans, unpacking my Whiteness is rather more complicated, because being White is considered the gold-standard for “normal” and “civilized”; it lacks the same kind of guide posts and validations. Further complicating this is the way my Whiteness (a position of great relative privilege) intersects with my being gay and trans: I don’t “enjoy” the full privileges of being White by virtue of simultaneously being a person of two non-privileged or under-privileged identities. Although my skin tone provides me with a host of resources, my genital configuration negates many of them. As a White person, I’m much more likely to be middle- to upper-class, but as a transperson, I’m even more likely to live below the poverty line. Lucky me, I’m a transman, so I’m slowly acquiring the two most privilege-y kinds of privilege our country has to offer: White and Male privilege.

This particular essay comes out of some frustrating conversations I’ve had with my family over the past week. I’m in Florida with my parents, two aunts, uncle, and grandmother, to celebrate Christmas. I don’t see these folks too often- my parents come up to visit me in Rochester maybe once a month for dinner, and the rest I see maybe once or twice a year. I pose something of a challenge to them: one of my aunts is a Christian missionary who spent 18 years in Papua New Guinea, the other and her husband (and family) are conservative Christians who attend their local mega-church in Ohio, where their pastor has not-infrequently chastised even the parents of us gay folks for supporting their children- heathens by association. They’re all smart people, and have been unexpectedly respectful of myself and my identity. My married aunt has spoken to me about her own struggle to reconcile her faith with her love for me as her nephew, and although the unmarried missionary and I don’t usually talk about these things (it doesn’t typically go well), she has been regularly referring to me as Tristan, using he/him/his, and even introducing me as “my nephew, Tristan”. My parents regularly call me their son, even when I’m not around, demonstrative of a genuine effort to validate and accept me for who I am, in spite of the very difficult their transition is. I am deeply grateful for the efforts that all of them are able to make- other families aren’t nearly as accepting.

I made the mistake the other day of answering my dads “what are you reading?” question with an honest answer, “I’m reading about the digital divide”. He doesn’t buy the concept, and the ensuing conversation grew heated, myself becoming angry at his belief that inequity is largely eliminated and that everyone in the US has more-or-less the same ability to become upwardly mobile. Sure, he argues, its tougher if you’re born poor, but everyone can make it if they want to. My uncle asked me outright if I thought that everyone born in this country has the same opportunities, and I answered “no”. I wish I hadn’t given the more complicated answer I wound up giving, because a simple and unqualified “no” would have been not only more reflective of my belief and more poignant, it would also have been more accurate.

I did my father and uncle a genuine disservice during the course of the conversation, which is what got me thinking: my dad and uncle married into our family, and come from very different socioeconomic backgrounds. My dad’s childhood was far from the middle-class up-bringing my mother and her sisters enjoyed, and in all honesty I know very little about my uncle’s story. Only yesterday did I learn that he was in the Navy in the 80’s and has a long record of military service- I really had no idea. He has also been on food stamps (I made the poor choice of saying “have you ever been on food stamps?” which assumed that he hadn’t been- he has, and quite possibly for a longer period than I have). My dad and uncle are both White, straight, men, but they didn’t grow up with the same degrees of economic privilege that my mother’s family did, and I did them a disservice by making large assumptions about them as a result.

In case you’re wondering, the conversation ended with me shaking and angry, my uncle largely trying to ignore my tirade, and my mom and dad saying that they love me and value my ability to challenge them in these ways. Not the most effective anti-oppression activism I’ve ever done, and certainly not a good start to Christmas day.

 

So I begin- or better said, continue- the process of understanding my own Whiteness, what it means to be White, what my culture and heritage are, and how it relates to me today. What does it mean to have inherited the legacy I have? I joke that I’m “all oppressor”, but what does that mean and why is it something I say with a heavy dose of hipster-esque irony? Its true, not an ironic statement. While I delve into books on race (I’ve been reading Cornell West over the break), I further explore my own socially constructed racial identity, that of being White. I lack answers or even more fully formed thoughts- but if nothing else, this is me reaffirming my White coming out:

 

Hello, world, I’m White.