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

[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.