Reflection on Whiteness and changing Color Lines

The readings I choose for this reflection left me frustrated and hopeful.  After reading Frankenberg’s “Whiteness as an “Unmarked” Cultural Category” I was frustration.  It implies because I am white, I am privileged, have power, and dominance over other groups.  I do not agree with this.  However, I understand that many people in power are white, I think just as many people are white that do not hold positions of power, privilege or dominance.  Not all white people are the same.  We are labeled and viewed the same though by society.

Then the article frustrates me more by taking about white sameness.   So first if you are white you are discriminated against because you are white.  You are in the privilege group in society.  In being perceived as all other whites, I am labeled neutral, or lacking culture.  Many people think of people of white color as the same and boring.  I have no idea what it even means to be white.  I do only know what society believes it to mean.  I do not believe we will ever get rid of labeling people but we can change the way the labels are perceived.

When I think of myself and my culture this is what I think of.  I was told that I was from a very mixed background.  My parents told me I was part Irish, part Polish, part French, and part English.  Sometimes I think they even made some of it up.  My mother told me I was part black because I got so tanned in the summer.  Both of my parents have passed on, so I cannot ask them to verify any of this.  My mom always like to favor her Irish ancestry, or at least that what she commented on the most.  I remember things such as “Oh that is your Irish side coming out”.  My dad favored his polish ancestry. 

So after reading this article I started looking around on ancestry.com and myfamily.org.  I wanted to see if I could find any records that indicated where my ancestry came from.  After I spent (or I might say wasted) an hour looking through records, I decided I did not really care.  My ancestry could be made up by my parents, but what does it matter.  It is how I see myself.  Whether I have any linkage to any of those groups is unimportant to me.  However, during my research what I found interesting is that in 1962, when I was born both my parents had to put their race on the birth certificate and my race.  White.  I was born white.  I looked at my daughter’s birth certificate and it does not list my race or my daughters.  She was therefore born raceless, which I find interesting.  Could it be a sign that we are moving away from defining someone’s race right at birth?

When reading the article by Lee and Bean I finished feeling hopeful.  There are a lot of statistics in the article about the percent of interracial marriages based on what the native ancestry was.  The statistics point to Latinos and Asians being able to blur the color lines, mostly because they are new immigrants.  They do not have the history of discrimination that has created the black/white divide.   What I found that was hopeful it that we are changing the color lines.  The number of interracial marriages has increased greatly in the United States.   This means that there is an increasing number of people who are multiracial. These racial boundaries are flexible and they can change.

What it means to any race has and still is changing and the more I read about it the more it does not make sense to me.  Asians used to be identified as black and now they are identified as white.   What does that mean, it did not change who they were.

It appears we no longer ask for race on birth certificate.  So if everyone is born raceless can they choose what race they want to belong to?

Reading 6: Frankenberg, Ruth, Whiteness as an “Unmarked” Cultural Category’

Reading 7: Lee, Jennifer & Bean, Frank D., America’s Changing Color Lines: Immigration, Race/Ethnicity, and Multiracial Identification.