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

[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.