Back in 1980, while living in Concord, Massachusetts, I worked for a time on a newspaper at MCI (Massachusetts Correctional Institution) Concord called Concord Community Inside-Outside. Those were the days when prison policy still included an element of rehabilitation, and inmates could participate in all kinds of programs, educational, skills-training, cultural, even community service and fund-raising. For my part it was an eye-opener, as I became aware for the first time of conditions in U.S prisons and began to get an inkling of what it might feel like to be on the inside. The non-inmates were allowed to go right into the prison to work on the paper with the insiders, and I had some memorable discussions and interactions, one of which became a friendship that lasted 30 years. Many of the participants in the program were lifers and, because of the racially skewed nature of the U.S. criminal justice system, many of them were African Americans.
I remember one conversation in particular, at the end of which one of the inmates asked me whether I considered myself white or black. Put on the spot, and without pausing to consider the question and its implications, I replied, “Black.” No one in the room ventured further into that racially fraught territory, so the subject was dropped, until later, the next time I visited my friend. He asked me curiously why I had answered in that way, and gave me the opportunity to consider the question a little further. My reply was that given only two options, white or black, my choice had been clear. Since I most certainly didn’t consider myself white, I had to be black. My answer had been based on my mixed background, personal identification, and political perspective.
Given my skin color and class background, I was in a position to choose my answer. Whatever people had thought of it, they kept their thoughts to themselves. Thirty-five years later, I would have challenged that black/white binary formulation and said that I was brown. As a racially and ethnically mixed 1.5-generation immigrant, I considered myself both Asian American and European American. Politically, I identified with people of color, both in the U.S. and globally, and I was still most definitely not white. Everything about that category disturbed me. However, I was in a position to pass for white, something that most other Asian Americans could not do, and I recognized the privilege that it afforded me.
However, being in a position to choose my answer by no means guaranteed that I would be accepted as such. At university in the early Seventies, there was simply no question of my sitting with the black and the Latino students at lunch. And though there were a few Japanese- and Chinese American students, at that time there were virtually no other students of South Asian origin at university. Nearly half a century of Asian exclusion and restrictive national-origin quotas had seen to that, and the children of the post-1965 immigrants had not yet come of age. It was a very different racial and cultural landscape for me then, as a new immigrant to the U.S. not understanding its very strange and particular system of racial categorization, coming out of the universalist ethos of the 1960s when we were all one, and not yet having entered the multicultural 1980s when everyone was expected to celebrate their difference rather than their unity.

It was not until graduate school in the late 1980s that I came to study the history of race and ethnicity as both reality and construct. I learned that despite the painful reality of race to the people who were at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, and who had to live with racism on a daily basis, “race” was a socially constructed category, something that had no scientific validity and that varied from society to society. Whiteness was a strange identity whose definition has changed over time and which, in the U.S. context, had been deployed by different immigrant groups from Irish to Italians to gain themselves leverage and social status as they struggled to assimilate. They might be poor and discriminated against, but they could claim whiteness and thereby position themselves as superior to blacks. (See Toni Morrison’s 1993 essay, On the Backs of Blacks.) Similarly, the dubious distinction of the model minority had been conferred selectively on certain Asian immigrant groups, with the effect of rendering them perpetually non-white, but simultaneously raising them above native African Americans (or all blacks, since African, Latin American, and Afro-Caribbean immigrants were lumped into the catch-all category of Black). The effect: a whole lot of “Others” rendered permanent outsiders to full Americanness, and pitted against each other as they struggled for a slice of an ever-shrinking economic pie.
Every society constitutes its racial categories in different ways. Those with histories of slavery and colonialism are still struggling to dismantle the racialist ideologies that were used to justify their oppression and disenfranchisement. In Britain in the 1970s, when post-colonial immigrant populations of color were under attack, and a movement had arisen to “repatriate” even those who had been born there, they adopted the term Black British to unite across categories of race, religion, and national origin, giving themselves greater moral support and political leverage. By that definition, when I was asked to identify myself racially in 1980, I could have called myself black, but not in the United States. There, an acceptable equivalent might have been person of color, but not black; not for me, anyway.

These reflections have been prompted by a news story that has been making the headlines this week: the case of Rachel Dolezal, a Howard University graduate, NAACP leader, and Africana Studies instructor who has long identified herself as black but whose parents have suddenly outed as white. There has been a furor in the media at this unusual instance of racial passing, in which the person in question has chosen to adopt the identity of a particular race, but not, as is most common, of the more privileged one. It seems that Dolezal decided that her own racial identification was all that mattered, and that she could disregard biology altogether. I understand the anger of African Americans who, by virtue of their skin tone and history of race-based discrimination, do not have the privilege of choosing a racial identity, and who see her as not only having lied, but having taken advantage of the scant programs and hard-won privileges for which African Americans have frequently laid their lives on the line.
Although I understand that anger, I do not find myself sharing it. I wonder, like Al Sharpton when interviewed here, why Dolezal’s parents felt the need to expose their daughter publicly in this way, why she was drawn to identify racially with her black adopted siblings and to represent herself as black. But I do think that in the wider scheme of things, this is a storm in a teacup, and a distraction from the ongoing racial injustices in U.S. society, where being black, or perceived as black, still puts one’s very life in danger.
If I were asked that question again today, whether I considered myself black or white, I would challenge the false binary and the whole premise of the question. But if I had to choose one of them, I would most probably give the same answer as I did then. Did that answer make me a liar, a wannabe, or wrong in the head? I don’t think so. I had my reasons; Rachel Dolezal probably had hers.
Then again, I could have chosen to walk out of that prison anytime.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)
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