Skim milk and new snow, American’s teeth, the inside of most apples, stratus clouds, locker room towels, fleet trucks, bathtubs, coconut flesh, porcelain, chalk, sugar, bleached flour, drawing paper, Jockey shorts, daisy petals—loves me or loves me not?—, picket fences, the whites of their eyes, the fog line beside the highway, and the sign that warns “Do Not Pass.”
I am granted the option, but I do not decline to acknowledge my race on the forms. I check the box Non-Hispanic Surname Caucasian, though All of the Above is closer to truth. My great grandmother on one side was from Mexico, and on the other was perhaps Blackfoot. I was never made to suffer for their color or languages. I am white. My relatives spoke English before I was born. My mother’s skin was pinkish, her eyes were blue, her hair was pale. All my dolls had pinkish skin and blue eyes and blond curly hair. They did not resemble me in any detail. I dismantled them, pulled apart their arms and legs and removed their heads, studied their soft plastic joints, reassembled them in different order, used nail polish remover to wipe away their red lips and their dimpled pink cheeks, filled their bodies with dirt, left them out in the backyard rain. My childhood fury is what I conjure to remind myself what it means to stand before the master narrative and find myself excluded. No President has been a woman. It is not true that the masculine implies the feminine, as I was taught in school.
The White House, white nights, doves, frosting, feathers, pinprick stars, white chocolate, white out.
In the Western world, white is the color of innocence and brides, and what we name white diamonds in her ring is a colorless stone, clear like the raw white of a fresh egg. In the East, white is the mourning hue, not unblemished but the unadorned and empty void. In most Asian nations, brides traditionally wear saffron or red.
In light, white is all colors, in pigment it is the absence of color. White is a matter of perspective. White opals are valued for the color sparking their interior. A white paper is the concise and authoritative guide to solving a problem. Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year—the day retail goes solidly into the black and makes a profit. White imperialism, black power. Black heart, white swan. How we are named and what we are called.
Sun-bleached shells are white. In death, barnacles leave behind a white anchor and sand dollars I find on the shore are never white until they have passed dying and been thoroughly scoured by sea and light. The perched bald eagle I stood below this morning on my walk has white feathers on her head and also on her tail, but her heart and wings are clothed in brown.
Colors show on white. The pale page reveals the dark text, like the stripes make the zebra. It is the words that register, not the paper.
The leader of a workshop on teaching about race assured her audience that race did not exist. Scientifically, we accepted she was correct, but she was speaking to public school teachers. She compared distinguishing between black and white to believing Asian people could be recognized by country of origin. She said that Japanese and Korean and Chinese people looked alike. You know she was white. I told her: You grew up in the Dakotas; I grew up in Seattle. It would be unwise to tell a Korean American she looks Japanese. Not being able to see the difference between Italian and Swedish or Indian and Chinese heritage shows you have not been paying attention. Physical anthropology aside, telling my students that race does not exist is unhelpful. Race exists in my country. It is a social and political reality. Yes, we invented it, but it will not go away because we pretend it does not exist. Race and gender are the first things we notice about a person. That is my country. This is where I live.
Dress shirts, bleached cotton, froth on the leading edge of every wave, white supremacists, white lies, fresh bandages.
I do not decline to answer because that seems a shameful way of pretending that, all things being equal (they never are), being white is something or anything other than an advantage in my country. I am fortunate, I am privileged, I cannot deny this. I am white.
Most pearls are not true white, but tinged cream or pink. The most valuable pearls are those with color, the South Sea pearls in aubergine, amber, and smokey gray. My mother’s skin was not white and neither is mine. We are white but not white. The white ermine turns to a brown stoat in response to longer hours of daylight. A white elephant is the gift you have no use for. Polar bears show yellow shadows, a white Russian is only white on top, a great white shark is only white underneath, white lies are what we tell to avoid getting into trouble, and white water is the dangerous but thrilling stretch of rough river where we want to almost drown. White names are the ones discarded by slaves when they took back their freedom to identify themselves. That is not my people, they are my people. On white nights the sun never goes down. In a white out, your life is at risk from cold and confusion.
Race stands between people, makes us suspicious of motive and genuine affection. It should not matter, but it does. Race matters. Sometimes the racial fog between people bars friendship because the advantaged (me) and the other (them) cannot see past. White means I might be asked where I am from, and I can respond with the names of countries people have learned about in school, not a continent or region they cannot identify on a map. White means I glow in the dark. If I were a white male, white people would assume I earned my job and forget that my father might have friends, HR was hiring someone who looked like him, or I work for bigots. If I were a black woman, I would not be allowed to speak at all.
Hospital sheets are not all white anymore. White chicken meat is not white and the dark is not so very dark. Pork is the other white meat and it is not white either. White is bleached, white is dead, white is blinding bright. Some Arabian horses are born dark chestnut or black and silver with age to gray and sometimes appear pure white, but these horses all have black skin underneath.
All skin is colored except pink albino skin that reveals the blood flowing inside us all.
Lives matter. I do not need to say that. Black lives matter. That needs to be said aloud.
My President was not white. He is a person of color, the child of a broken home but also fortunate to have grandparents who paid for private schools. His culture is mainstream not ghetto, not poor. He did not wait on the porch on paydays for groceries to enter his kitchen. He did not walk to school in flip-flops because he had no other shoes. Advantage is a relative thing. When they were in high school my sons walked into shopping mall stores and they were not automatically followed by Security, but I would bet money both Barack and Michelle Obama had that experience as a teenagers.
The steady hum of white noise puts us to sleep.
I do not decline to answer. I am answerable. I have no answers, I listen. Times change but not fast enough. We are a nation of many skin colors.
We are all shades of human.
NOTE: This essay was originally published in an anthology about race. The editors of that collection failed to provide the copies they were contractually obligated to provide to authors (or any other renumeration).
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 