black & white

A few nights ago my roommate and I were having a conversation. My roommate is “Asian” and I am “White, ” and this in itself is not a very interesting fact except that the conversation somehow came back to race.

A friend of C’s – a white male who attends the same prestigious university that we do – was trying to describe an event he had gone to recently. When the subject came to who was at this event, he mentioned that there were a lot of “ethnic” people there. Ethnic? Outraged, my roommate exclaimed: “Ethnic! Who does this guy think he is?” Startled by the strangely racist terminology she asked him if he meant by ethnic, to which he answered, “You know… “ghetto”… errr… hip-hop?”

Did he mean “Black” people?

My roommate, angry at his failed attempt to smooth over the existence of a race other than white informed him that he could have just said African-American or Black or if he was really so concerned about it, he could have said “Urban.”

But wouldn’t you say that I’m urban? I replied innocently. I live in an urban area – and after all, we live in Harlem.

She smiled – good point!

I could understand her feeling of indignation at the racial guffaw of this white friend of hers – after all, she has to suffer people calling her their “panda” – but regardless of her friend’s stupid comment, I did feel a little bit sorry for him. What was probably just an instance of ignorance got written off as racist because he is a white male. This is the problem with being white in a heterogeneous society: you constantly walk on egg shells around the issue of race.

Being female, I have a little bit more leeway than white guys when it comes to talking about minorities and marginalized people, but as a white girl who is interested in African-American studies and who has always had a diverse group of friends, insider-outside language is a problem. You can laugh (carefully) when your friends make “ethnic” jokes, but you cannot make them yourself because you will be considered racist just because your skin is white.

I tried to explain to C that she shouldn’t be too hard on the guy who is probably not a racist, but just a bit ignorant, and she agreed. After all, I added, just recently I was having a conversation with a classmate of mine, who happens to be Afro-Caribbean, and as we were talking about the city of Atlanta, she mentioned that she liked it because it has a big “ethnic” community. That’s right folks – a bona fide black person used the term “ethnic” to describe other black people. And that’s another funny thing – a white person and a black person trying to talk about Atlanta. It’s like talking about two different cities. How do I look her in the face and say: yeah, there are a lot of affluent black people who live in Atlanta and there is an amazing hip-hop scene – without coming across as just a little bit racist? It’s the same reason that my brother who lives there can’t go to a hip-hop club even though he likes the music: you just can’t.

Over the last week I’ve been reading a book called “Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa,” by Antije Krog. Krog is a white journalist who writes about the Truth Finding Commission in South Africa following the horrors of Apartheid rule, and her struggle with white guilt strikes me as characteristic of how many white people in U.S. (especially educated, metropolitan ones) often feel. Even for those like Krog who never participated in the racist hate crimes, they walk the road “with their own fears and shame and guilt. And some say it; most just live it. We are so utterly sorry. We are deeply ashamed and gripped with remorse. But hear us, we are from here. We will live it right – here – with you, for you.”

Perhaps one cannot quite compare the situation of white people in South Africa with those in the U.S., but I imagine that this sentiment of guilt will not die out with the closing of the truth commission. 100 years or even 1000 years may not be enough time to heal crimes against a race. And yet, like Krog, I wish we could get past the black and white and truly “make space for ambiguity.”