Damn you, Sherman Alexie.

[eurydicebound]

Today in class we read The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, a long name for a short story. It reminds me of things I don't want to think about. We then followed it up with watching him accept an award in 2007. He talked about a poem he read that made him realize he had to be a writer. It was by a Native American author, and it was about fried bologna (or, as said, baloney). His mom used to make it, you see. You have to cut it when you fry it or it poofs up in the middle. I know this too; my dad used to make it, and my grandmother before him.

I find that every time I listen to him or read his work, I know what he's talking about when the other people around me have no frame of reference for it. I didn't live on a reservation--we didn't have them in Oklahoma, and there's no tribe that would officially claim me anyway, not that that stopped my school from getting federal money for me for years. And yet, this man who grew up on a reservation outside Spokane can tell me my life.

We should have nothing in common, but I know the things he talks about. Yet technically I'm "white," right? I grew up as a white girl in a place with a lot of NA people. I wasn't blonde, but I was pretty damn Caucasian (although I wonder whether my classification might be shifted for some people if they saw my father and my brother). At least I always thought I was, until I moved to Seattle and lived in what feels like the whitest city on Earth.

In reading Alexie, I wonder how "white" my upbringing really was, and how poverty and racial culture intersect and influence one another. I would not have claimed poverty, but comparatively speaking, it probably was next to some people's upbringing in other places.

Can you be white and not white? Can you be part of the majority and yet not? Is blood or heritage what we are more than what we believe ourselves to be?

I don't know. But it's damned uncomfortable to consider, and it's almost the textbook definition of "unpleasant shock to the system." I'm not sure I needed one more heavy thing to struggle with right now.

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Comments

[amanofhats.livejournal.com]

I just the latest episode of My Boys wherein this very title is mentioned. First I'd ever heard of it and now you've just blogged about it.

Universe, are you talking to me?

[anaka.livejournal.com]

The universe always talks to us, it's just usually either asking what we want for lunch or complete gibberish. :)

[bruceb.livejournal.com]

I don't know the right word right now but there is definitely a threshold of lower class that is outside "white" norms insofar as those assume a particular spectrum from blue collar up through professional.

Credit to Jason Carl and our classmate Burt Clothier for first getting me to think about this stuff.

[bodybag-pilgrim.livejournal.com]

As I wrote on my own blog recently, my brother and sister are black, adoptees, who grew up in places where they were close to the only non-whites in miles.

I think that there are absolutely links of this kind - but then, I've been reminded in recent months (getting to know a lass from my hometown area who also has come to Lancaster) that a given area births mindsets, jokes, attitudes and memories common to all its children whether or not you knew each other.

She grew up half an hour away, went to school there, and when we were of an age that I was socialising in her town, she was going to different clubs than I. I doubt either of us ever ran into the other for more than a fleeting glimpse in the high street.

But it's not just that we both laugh at the same jokes - the old home bred into both of us things like an attitude to conversation that starts with an assumption that the other party will steamroll right back if they have something to say, an attitude that creative insults are to be treasured, bland curses to be mocked...

And that's not present in Lancaster, except as a result of our activity.

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

People label others in an attempt to decide how they should be. Don't let them make that decision for you, it's yours.

Can you be white and not white?

Ask the fellow on the dollar bill about that, he had Indian blood as well.

[tsob.livejournal.com]

Here's another question for you; is there such a thing as a white (or black or X) upbringing?

[carabosse.livejournal.com]

Yes, based in certain commonalities of experience just as with any culture or subculture. I look white, but I'm mixed and was raised by my dad's black family. As a result, there are things I have in common with other black people that I don't have with white people. (No, I don't have a list.)

[tsob.livejournal.com]

I suspect that the commonalities have less* to do with skin culture and more to do with class and regional culture. There are still wide gulfs, of course, but apparently there are narrow gaps as well and some bridges.



*I don't mean nothing, just less.

[carabosse.livejournal.com]

Can you be white and yet not white? If you want to. I guess it depends on how much your 'otherness' influences your life, and perhaps it also depends on why you do or don't want it to. I think it's a little disingenuous for someone to read a genealogy chart and reach back five generations for that one non-white person to base their identity on, but ultimately it's a personal decision. :-)

And for the record, I also grew up with fried baloney. I do have some Native ancestry, but I think it's mostly a poor people thing. For a really good book on how class influences perceptions of race, you might want to read (or Google) "How the Irish Became White" by Noel Ignatiev. It's one of the best observations of a group's rise in America's racial hierarchy based on a combination of race and class.


[ Here because Brannon said I should say something. :-) ]

[anaka.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not Cherokee. I'm not going to be, even if I did the paperwork and was able to get the tribal affiliation. It might be true on paper, but that's all it would ever be. It's more that I grew up in an area that had a lot of tribal affiliations (on the border of the Chickasaw, Comanche, Kiowa/Arapaho lands) and I think I may have underestimated the effects of this on the culture in which I grew up. (My dad used to trade for other people's BIA commodities, for example, because he really liked the cheese and the peanut butter.) I know the shared experience isn't entirely poverty, but maybe it's mostly that.

All I know is that I'm realizing when we get into stuff like this, particularly when people start talking about Native culture, that I look around and notice that I'm the only one in the room who knows what the guy is talking about. And I don't know all of it, by any means. Just more. It's disconcerting, especially since by all rights, given location and background and everything, I shouldn't know anything more about it.

In Oklahoma, I'm absolutely white. Here? Yes, but there's are things I don't share that might be closer to "normal" than I realized. I don't really know where that leaves me, other than feeling a lot more comfortable in neighborhoods with a high level of diversity, and that not knowing is disconcerting. Yet more proof that I am not the yardstick by which the universe is measured, I guess.

I dunno. Cognitive dissonance sucks, especially coming into it quite so far along. Whatever it is, it'll resolve.

And thank you for saying something. Brannon was right. :)

[carabosse.livejournal.com]

Maybe what you're feeling is more like being bicultural, much like someone can learn to be bilingual?

[anaka.livejournal.com]

It is, at least, a less loaded term. I'm not certain that covers it either, but it's a possibility.

[sefue.livejournal.com]

I think so much of it has to do with class and locale, as well as skin colour/race. Growing up in rural Washington state, I have much more in common with other agricultural folk (regardless of ethnic origin--hispanic, native, east Indian, etc.) than I do with people who grew up in urban environments--though there are only certain intersections of class there, it's based more on commonalities of location. Bcause it does seem to me that there are large differences between rural poverty and urban poverty.

But it's frustrating, because class is something we don't particularly like to talk about in America. Even in anthropology, which I find personally frustrating.

Personally, though, I love (sarcastically) how people are judged on appearances. I have a classmate who is dual Mexican & American citizenship, her dad's a Chihuahuan indian--but she looks like she could be one of my cousins (dark hair, blue eyes, medium skin). She constantly gets flack at the U because she's not 'hispanic' enough. Despite the fact that she's lived most of her life in Mexico. And is a Mexican citizen. But she doesn't conform to an idealized picture of what a hispanic woman should be--according to her American latino professor, at least! Doh.