Mono-racial privilege

[asterroc]

Reading over a list of things that people with white privilege take for granted, I am reminded of how I feel every time I am told to "check only one box." This list is things that people of only one race take for granted.

1. You can check only one box.
2. You won't have complete strangers walk up to you and ask you what you are (as if maybe you're not human, after all).
3. You can answer "where are you from" with the place where your house is located, or where the hospital in which you were born is located.
4. You can answer "where are you from" in under ten minutes, without any follow-up questions.
5. You don't have to worry if someone is hitting on you because you look "exotic". 
6. You don't have to wonder if the person you're talking to would treat you differently if they knew what you "really" were. 
7. You don't have to correct people when they describe you. 
8. You can talk about white privilege or racism without having people give you funny looks.  ("How would she know?")
9. You don't feel constantly torn in two directions about common cultural norms and values.
10. You don't have to think about whether the clothing, jewelry, or make-up you're wearing makes you look too much like race X.
11. You can wear hand-me-downs without worrying if they're too "ethnic". 
12. You don't have people turn to you as a representative of either/all of your particular races/cultures.
13. You don't have to check only one box (multicultural) that lumps you in with people of entirely different backgrounds.  (Tiger Woods and Obama would check that multicultural box, but their experiences are nothing like mine.)
14. You can nod and agree when someone says to you "I'm multicultural: Italian and German!" 
15. People don't expect you to laugh at jokes that slander your own background. 
16. You don't have to feel simultaneously guilty about your advantages and angry about your disadvantages.

Time to run to work.  Got any more I can add?

Comments

[l0stmyrel1g10n.livejournal.com]

'5. You don't have to worry if someone is hitting on you because you look "exotic".'

I'm assuming you mean for white people, not just any mono-racial person? Because I'm pretty sure people do that to mono-racial Asian, Black, Indian, Hispanic, American Indian, Middle Eastern...actually just about anyone who isn't mono-racial white. I was watching *ahem* ANTM and "exotic" was a fairly common adjective used favorably to describe many of the mono-racial Black girls, as well as a mono-racial Hispanic girl. And biracial Middle Eastern and Asian girls, which supports your point, but doesn't refute mine.

People ask me "what I am" sometimes. Usually they mean to ask what my sexual orientation is, or sometimes my religion. I guess being non-straight non-Christian makes me less than human too?

I'm still not sure whether my Jewish heritage counts as "ethnic". Certainly we Jews have definitive cultural values and cultural traditions that may be distinct from non-Jews of the same race. But I guess I don't worry about hand-me-downs making me look too Jewish. Then again, I would be proud to look Jewish, so I'm not really sure what to think about numbers 10 and 11.

Regarding 16, there are advantages and disadvantages from things other than race that are also not mutually exclusive. I'm queer (disadvantage) and from a financially-stable family (advantage). I can be angry and guilty about those even though I'm mono-racial, right?

[spazzy444.livejournal.com]

I read the list in her article as well as the opening paragraphs and as a white person I found some of those to be unfounded and even offensive. Some I completely agree with. But I do not think white should be synonomis(sp) with Middle or Upper class as she seems to think. While yes on my street the only people we avoid is a multi-cultural family, but it has to do with the fact that the WHITE husband is violent and volitile and they like to let their un-nuetered male dog run loose - nothing to do with his Ethiopian wife and multi-racial children.

As far as your I don't think #3 You can answer "where are you from" with the place where your house is located, or where the hospital in which you were born is located. is any different from a white person, especially in the US today. I rarely find people of a pure origin - I myself an German, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, English, Dutch, Ukrainian and I am a dual citizen of both Canada and the US.

One other thing that bothers me, is I often find that people leave out "white" in their race and only use multi-racial when it benefits them. You obviously don't do this, but how many times have you heard people refer to Obama as the first black president, Hally Berry is the first black woman to recieve an Oscar, etc.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

So I know it's been months since this post and your comment, but at the time I had a very emotional response to some of the comments (see my recent post on "whitesplaining" if you want more of why it bothered me), and so said nothing, and I just came back to this post today and wanted to non-emotionally respond.

I rarely find people of a pure origin - I myself an German, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, English, Dutch, Ukrainian and I am a dual citizen of both Canada and the US.

People who look Asian are treated significantly differently from people who look Caucasian. I am treated differently from either. Someone who is Polish/Jewish-English will be treated very differently than someone who is Polish/Jewish-Chinese.

One other thing that bothers me, is I often find that people leave out "white" in their race and only use multi-racial when it benefits them.

When Obama was growing up, the one-drop rule was not only common practice, it was law in at least Virginia. Because of this history, many people whom I personally would call multi-racial instead identify themselves as their non-white race. I doubt that Obama has received many of the social privileges that a white person would receive, and I expect that people react to him as a black person thus resulting in his receiving the social drawbacks of being a black person.

[spazzy444.livejournal.com]

I am only going to make a basic response, because my initial knee-jerk reaction to the whitesplianing post was "so whites are the only racists now?". I know thats not what you intended by it, but that was the reaction. Thus it pissed me off, which is why I said nothing.

To clarify my response to #3 was just to show that is not cut and dry with any race. Race is the color of my skin and has nothing to do with my culture or ethnic background.

I don't know whar the one drop rule is, but I can only assume its "one drop of colored blood"?

I haven't personally seen/experienced a lot of one-sided racism, and I am not going to belittle any of your experiences because I don't know them. However, this may be just my perspective coming from a background that white was a minority in my schools at 11%, and an office environment where the population until recently was 50/50 White/Hispanic. (It is now 3/2 - we have 5 employees, 6 prior).

My grandmother is EXTREMELY racist. All Asians are "Chinese" and she hates - well anyone not white (she has other categories, for other races too, but its irrelevent to my point). My SIL is Viet. My grandmother insists she is Chinese and regardless how many times we tell her otherwise she refuses to beleive it. As such, I have experienced favoritism from her since I married a white man and had a very white baby. This has been my only real experience with racism.

I personally am more classist, as much as I hate to admit it but its true. I'm more likely to hang out with a bunch of hispanic women dressed in clothing like I'd wear than a bunch of white girls dressed in thug clothing or even "clubbin' clothes".

[q10.livejournal.com]

do Italy and Germany not have different cultures?

seriously, i recognize my privilege and your legitimate bitterness at the evils of the system and all that, but there are a number of these that as written need elaboration or cut along different lines than you think.

[q10.livejournal.com]

to go down the list...

... there are a lot of different reasons why 3 and 4 can be hard. lots of monoracial folks have complicatedly multinational background or complicatedly nomadic life histories have trouble with those.

... 6 is prettymuch any stealth or concealable identity category. it certainly also comes up a lot for, say, Jews and the queer community, and i imagine these days for many Muslims.

... 7 can again be for a lot of reasons in a lot of contexts.

... 9 is something that can be an issue for anybody who's seriously multicultural. in many cases, people with monocultural background living moderately assimilated lives in a place where some other culture is dominant have the same unease.

... 11, or something nearly equivalent to 11, is probably an issue for plenty of younger assimilating members of monoracial immigrant families, among others.

... 13 is just an unpleasant feature of the nature of boxes. lots of people with totally different personal histories and socio-cultural backgrounds all get lumped into the ‘white’ box, or the ‘female’ box, or...

... 15 is, like 6, also an issue for any other stealth identity group.

... 16 is a potential issue for monoracial folks who're privileged along one major identity axis of our social order (race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, et c.), but underprivileged along another.

i guess for, say, white heterosexual protestant men of pure English ancestry who were raised in Virginia where there family has lived for 10 generations, all of these apply, but once you get outside categories like that, there are a lot of forms of privilege listed here that are far from universal across the monoracial population. (which doesn't make the situation any less problematically privilege-y, of course.)

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

I'd maybe reword 3, or add a 3b or something:

"You *assume* random strangers will never ask 'Where are you from?' when you are in what you consider home territory."

(My ancestry is all northern European, as far as I know, and yet - )

[sildra.livejournal.com]

Being monoracial white, myself:

2) Ok, I've never had it phrased that way, but I have had it happen to me. (Meaning to ask, what kind of white am I? European? Middle Eastern? Northern Indian? And then they occasionally argue with me, insisting I must be whatever it is my interlocutor is/isn't. On a bus in America, it was kind of funny to have an elderly Indian man disbelieve when I said I'm German/Polish/Hungarian; in the middle of Istanbul it was kind of frightening to repeatedly have waiters and shopkeepers disbelieve when I said I'm not Israeli.)

3) Even when they do mean the place I grew up, I've had a complete stranger rather ungently accuse me of lying, and a whole lot of people look at me askance and say I don't sound like I'm from there. (I do. I have the local accent of where I grew up, with just a little bit of the lexicon of where my parents grew up--Los Angeles and New York City, respectively. People just don't know what an LA accent sounds like, while feeling so certain that they do know that they're willing to be confrontational about it.)

4) If they don't mean the place I grew up--and often they don't--I can't answer in under 10 minutes without follow-up questions. If I say I'm half German-Polish, a quarter Polish, and a quarter Hungarian, if people know what I mean by that it leads to followup questions of exactly each of my ancestors left Europe. If they don't know what I mean, it leads to followup questions about how that could possibly be my ancestry, given my appearance--questions I don't necessarily want to answer in front of strangers.

6) Yes I do. I have to be fairly careful in certain regions of this country, and whenever I go abroad.

8) I presume this one was aimed at people of color. Obviously white people can and do talk about white privilege and racism, from an academic or observational or activist standpoint--one can know a problem exists without having directly experienced its bad effects--and obviously they do get that reaction sometimes.

9) I think you're underestimating how different various cultures-of-people-who-look-similar are from each other. There is no monolithic European culture, nor Asian culture, nor African culture, nor American culture, nor Oceanic culture. Sometimes there aren't even discernible common threads. So the child of two people from a few hundred miles apart could feel just as torn as the child of two people from a few thousand miles apart. (For a non-Eurocentric example, consider someone from the DRC versus someone from the part of Somalia under Sharia law. Those two regions are about as far apart as France and Poland.) And, this same issue can apply to any immigrant or immigrant's child, even without any sort of intercultural marriage.

12) I spent my whole childhood in that situation, up through high school. People were constantly asking me questions, trying to compare themselves to me, making me explain and defend who I am. "Wow, I've never met a ____ before. Do you really _____?" Acting patronizing toward me. I still occasionally find myself in that situation.

15) Umm... what? Ok, that's seriously a sore subject for me. And not just jokes, but unthinking, non-joking slanderous statements. But at least if it was a slanderous statement, I could walk up to the person and say, "Hey, I'm a ____" and they'd apologize (although it happened so much in high school that I gave up on doing that after about a semester). If it was a joke, though, even if it was a joke about murdering my family, they'd expect me to laugh, and get mad at me if I called them on it, insisting it was just a joke so how dare I be offended.

16) That doesn't apply to me nearly so much as it did to my parents, but yeah, still applies.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

The more I think about it, the more I'm bothered by the racist implications of 9, 13, and 14. To go back to an all-white example, since you used one in 14, just because you, being multiracial, don't care to see a distinction between various white ethnicities such as Arabs, Romani, and Scots, doesn't mean a) their cultures are nearly identical, b) they don't care about the distinction and aren't bothered by checking a box that means all of those other cultures as well, and c) if people from two of those groups were to marry the resulting family wouldn't be in any way multicultural. Just because Koreans and Indonesians are both supposed to check the Asian box does not mean they have any of religion, food, clothing, art, mythology, or family structure in common. People of the same race are capable of being different from each other.

[q10.livejournal.com]

this is all making me think back to the multicultural complexities surrounding the occasion of my Ashkenazi Jewish/Persian-American marrying a Scottish-Canadian.

hell, even treating ‘Indonesians’ as a single category is already doing an unjustified amount of lumping things together, since we're talking about a country with at least than 300 ethnic groups, speaking in excess of 700 languages, unified mainly by a shared history of Dutch colonialism.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I picked Indonesians because they're so diverse that I didn't need to read up on them while writing my comment to make sure there's at least one group that has absolutely nothing in common with Koreans.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

So I know it's been months since this post and your comment, but at the time I had a very emotional response to some of the comments, and so said nothing. I still don't have tangible rebuttals, but I wanted to revisit this topic because I just posted on what I'm now calling "whitesplaining", and I wanted to let you know that I was very hurt and angered by your comments to my initial post here. Your comments to me sounded very similar to "mansplaining", where a man tells a woman she does not experience discrimination, belittles her experiences, etc. I do not want to get into a new discussion here or continue the old one, but I would like to ask you to consider your comments in that light.

As for why I do not want discussion, I am quite emotional/angry about this. When I received the comments on this post I was so upset that every time I received a new comment I could not work for the next two hours, and I knew that commenting myself would only extend things. Anger is a trigger for me (regardless of whether it is directed at myself or if it is myself who is angry), a result of growing up with a father who was a control freak and had anger management problems. Therefore I would like to politely request that you not reply to this new comment of mine with anything arguing against what I am saying, because that will be triggery for me. If you do not reply at all I will assume you continue to disagree, and that is fine with me, as long as I don't have to discuss the fact that you continue disagree (if such is the case). Honestly, I am taking a big emotional risk to reopen this topic now since I know there is a high chance I will receive replies that are not in agreement with me, and I am only doing so because of the combination of wanting to help others understand my situation, and because Spring Break starts tomorrow and I don't need to do any work for the next week and a half. I know this request of mine to not express your disagreement isn't fair, but it's what I need to have happen and this is my space.

[sildra.livejournal.com]

Well, you say what you don't want, but not what you do, so I'm not sure how to respond, but I'm going to try to anyway. Umm... I guess it's best to start with this: none of this comment here is meant as an argument, it is just meant to explain where I, personally, was coming from that I wrote those comments several months ago.

First, I never intended to belittle your experiences or say you did not experience discrimination, and I'm very sorry if I came across that way. I completely agree that all the things you listed in your post are discrimination of various forms, some fairly serious, and I fully believe--and have never disbelieved--that you suffered these various experiences.

Second, the way the post is set up/introduced reads to me as an "us versus them" of multi-racial people versus mono-racial people, and my personal reaction to that was to get into a very argumentative mode. It mostly wasn't really even the content of the list that I was reacting to even if that was how I phrased my argument--I was mostly reacting to the vibe I got from the intro/title. (I am in no way asking you to respond/explain/argue for why you phrased it that way. I am just stating my own, personal, subjective reaction to the wording.) I know that I can sometimes get very abrasive when I'm in argument-mode (and I certainly did in this case) and some people react worse to that than others; I will do my best to keep in mind in the future that our styles of interaction are very different and I should temper both how I react to what you say and what I say to you.

And third, and this is again just simply a statement of where I'm coming from here, but items #6 and #15 on your list were what made me mad enough to actually respond/argue in the first place rather than move on without commenting. Those things have happened to me over and over. In the case of #6, sometimes in ways and places that made me actually feel physically unsafe in my surroundings. And, well, actually in one extreme example #15 made me feel unsafe, too ("joke" might not be the appropriate word--I've certainly never thought so--but it's the word the guys "telling" it insisted on using). And, in the end, it was the idea that these situations--ones where I felt physically unsafe--couldn't have possibly happened to me because I was mono-racial... that was the idea that I read in your post, and that was why I got angry enough to write that whole argument.

[blahblahboy.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I agree with your stereotypical view of mono-racial people. I think in some general sense there must be a stereotype something somewhere, but maybe those are the people that sit in the middle of the bell curve of everything or something. For example I certainly do not feel mono-anything. I feel stuck between the tugs of american and chinese culture. And having a stereotypically non-american name doesn't help anyway. I feel awkward when HKers get together (language issues -- and people making fun of my lack of language skills), and sometimes I can feel awkward when americans get together because they treat things differently, and also I feel like I was raised with a very chinese cultural mindset.

I do however feel alternate between proud and awkward of my dual cultural background.

[gemini6ice.livejournal.com]

My dad is FOB Turkish, and my mom is random caucasian. I do feel a little confused/torn on race questions when filling out forms. However, it doesn't really upset me. Part of this may be that I don't in any way identify with Turkish culture. I have a blatant disregard for heritage.

Internet culture is probably the only culture I pay much attention to. My having any American culture is just a default culture based on being raised here and by TV shows, I guess.