Imagine just for a moment that you are from another planet from a galaxy far away, and you are studying species "homo sapiens sapiens". You have never encountered such odd beings before, during the time you have roamed the galaxies charged with categorizing the sentient life you encounter.
You round up a group of samples, from various regions of the blue planet, called "Earth" by its inhabitants, and begin to put them in categories. You group them into types - ones that make sense in your own logic system. You have a bias, because of your own planetary hierarchy; you project onto your specimens characteristics of your own social structure, and grow quite fond of these new pets, particularly the ones who more closely resemble your ruling class.
Imagine your shock, when you find that quite a few of the lower order of pets are unhappy with being relegated to second class status. After several years of studying the sounds made by these pets - you find some are very enraged that they have not been selected to be Class A specimens.
Some seem to keep insisting that they are "white". Curious. But irrelevant, since everyone of any intelligence in the galaxy knows that only those sentients over 7 feet in height are born to lead.
If you live in the modern world of Earth, post the 1700's, and especially if you are an inhabitant of a sector called the United States, you are trained quite early to respond to certain visual cues which translate into attitudes and behaviors towards other beings. These cues are not the same cues learned early by other planetary inhabitants, in other cultures, but they have been codified as "science" and rarely questioned. This "science" of classification has been termed "race".
These cues are founded on surface phenotypical variation. Not height, or weight, or hairiness. They are modified by extremities - fatty tissue in the chest area certainly becomes a minus factor on the totem pole of power, but gradations of flesh tone, combined with variations in hair textures are the be all and end all of social positioning.
Rarely, if ever, do you question the validity of this "science". You seem to have known which place marker is yours, by right, since before you could talk.
You spend the rest of your life wrapped in your flag/tag/label. You fill out forms, check mark boxes, and fit into a box, not of your making.
You are never aware that the box is a prison. Especially if your box is one marked "white". No one has ever asked you to renounce the box.
Why would they? Who voluntarily would give up a perk? That doesn't mean you dislike those who are packaged/stamped/branded/marked with a variant label. In fact, you have good friends, lovers, co-workers, perhaps even relatives who had the misfortune to have been tinted differently. But you love them just the same. Only bigots and - gasp "racists" would think differently.
You can remain steadfastly "Caucasian" (even though your ancestors don't hail from the Caucasus Mountains) and never question the moniker.
It is not important. You will probably never read about the coiner of the term, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, nor the history behind his use of it. (If you are curious at this point, go read Nell Irvin Painter's excellent paper entitled "Why White People Are Called 'Caucasian'?")
If you happen to be in one of the groups lower on the totem pole of hegemony, you can defiantly embrace your relegation to a sub-species, suffer under second-class status or revolt, or you can deny it vehemently and avoid discussing colors at all and don a National or ethnic tag like "Latino" or "Hispanic" but that really doesn't fool the real "white" people. "Real white people" have only recently embraced and added into their number other tagee's who used to be Irish or Jewish or Turkish. "Italians" are a protected minority in the CUNY College system in NY. I had a young woman come to me with a distressed look on her face when she found out she qualified for a "minority" subsidy to grad school. She didn't know what she was going to tell her parents. They would be enraged that she was going to get money set-aside for Ni****'s", she said. "Italians are white aren't we?" she asked.
As an anthropologist, I have spent quite a bit of time studying the social constructions of race - and how "race" is intricately meshed with "racism" into the fabric of America's psyche. Rather than take up too much of your time on the anthropological theory I subscribe to, please read the American Anthropological Association Statement on "Race"
I have had the advantage of having my own color-struck perceptions challenged when immersed in other cultures where my box/tag/label has shifted. Imagine my surprise when I was dubbed "white" visiting another country. My insistence on "being black" earned me quite a few incredulous looks, and caused a bit of head scratching, and a few mutters about "crazy Americans". It did cause me to reflect on why our eyes see differently here in the US and to pursue graduate studies in the construction of race, social stratification, and their intersections with gender.
I cannot and will not ever escape (nor would I want to), my "blackness". To do so would be to ignore the deaths, pain and suffering of some of my ancestors who had no choice in migrating to this brave, tawdry New World.
That very "blackness" has enabled me to "see" "smell" "feel" "sense" racism in all its loud panoply and in its hidden closeted corners; like the lingering odor left behind by my dog after he's been skunked.
So what do I propose? A simple solution. If Whiteness is still the normative by which everything else is defined in opposition; let all those who have benefited from it renounce it soundly. Let us resolve together to denounce "whiteness", by attempting to change the racial categories we have all so unwittingly accepted.
The same way Kossaks rallied against the ravings of the right wing against the middle name Hussein, worn by our POTUS, by naming themselves "Hussein" Smith or Jones - let us see who will be brave enough to fill out job application and census forms and check "black" (no matter if you are ecru, taupe or peachy).
Homo-sapiens sapiens are one race. All are ancestored from the African continent.
My solution is not a new one. Social thinkers like Noel Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White, and founder of the Journal "Race Traitor", among others have issued this call before, with little success. But I see no harm in trying once more.
I have never forgotten reading the tale told by journalist John Howard Griffin, "Black Like Me", about his experiences masquerading as an artificially skin-darkened Black man in the South of the 1960's. Griffin of course could go back to being "white", but his life was forever changed.
I have also admired those relatives of mine who could have quite easily slipped off quietly into the world of snow whiteness, abandoning darker kin to their unenviable fate. They chose instead to remain and suffer along with the rest of the family. They rejected "privilege". They accepted their own humanity and culture. They paid a high price for it.
Who among you all will be so brave?
But then, I forget - there are those of you who think that some of us who talk of racism here protest too loudly. We are overly sensitive, paranoid, and blind to a "post racial world" that has dawned with the election of Barack Obama.
I say that the day of racism's end has not drawn nigh, but then who am I anyway? Just a "black woman". As long as you are clothed in a mantle of whiteness, I will always be other-than.
There are others who make excuses, who cover their ears, and eyes, then move immediately into a defensive stance when we dare to point to that enormous elephant in the middle of the room, crowding us into the corners. We have a corner here called Black Kos.
We are black - cos you are "white".
And if those visitors come from that other mythical galaxy, and carry some of us away, I won't be seven feet tall,(I'm only 5 ft. 8") so there is no hope for me in that world, either.
Guess I better just stay here and try to change this one.