The significance of heritage

[onefixedstar]

The topic of last night's class was race in cyberspace, which led to some interesting discussion both online and face-to-face about the way the internet affords people the opportunity to avoid the topic of race, and how they can serve to reinforce existing power structures by allowing those who already have power to continue to deny power to a group while pretending that the group they deny power doesn't exist, and that it's all a question of individual merit. One of the issues that came up was the way that white is often treated as a homogeneous category. White is white, and differences in region and class and gender are often ignored, and to complain and demand attention as an individual is to be labeled a whiner or uncomprehending because, after all, white means power.

This point got me thinking, because while I believe that I acknowledge the role of region and class and gender in the formation of identity (I've never lived in a place very different from where I grew up--a rather sad limitation on my experience--but I've met enough people from other places to have some sense of the range of differences possible), I do think that I tend to ignore race if the individual in question is white. For me, being white really is background noise. And thinking about it more, I suspect part of the reason for that attitude is my own mostly-white heritage.



I look very white: blue eyes, light brown/blonde/red hair, pale skin, freckles. I identify as white. But my surname isn't European, and neither was my paternal grandfather. All that name and heritage really meant to me as a child was that my family took New Year's Eve and New Year's Day a little more seriously than most, and that once a year we used chopsticks to eat strange foods like kamaboko and inari sushi and folded a few paper cranes. At New Year's, some years, I became sort of pseudo-Japanese. The rest of the time, day-to-day, I was white. Except when my elementary school decided to hold a miniature-
Caravan, and assigned my siblings and me to the Japanese pavilion on the basis of our surname. And that, I think, is the real reason I treat being white as background noise.

Throughout my life, the part of my heritage that has been treated as interesting and significant has been the Japanese part. When people find out that I’m part-Japanese (and nearly everyone who knows me eventually asks about the name), the second question* they ask is either "do you speak Japanese?" or "have you ever been to Japan?". They never ask where the rest of my grandparents came from, because that part's not interesting. And I embraced that. I don't identify as Japanese, but I delight in exploring my Japanese heritage. When we had to pick a country to study in school, I always picked Japan. In high school, I checked out books on the Japanese language and surfed the web for information about Japanese culture. In university, I took Japanese courses for my language requirement and East Asian studies courses for my electives. Being Japanese was interesting and exotic, and being white was ordinary. Boring. Background.



*The first question, because most people aren't quick on their feet, is "which grandparent is Japanese?".

Comments

[semiotic-trader.livejournal.com]

I agree with much of what you've written and want to respond to it in greater length, but am in the middle of cooking dinner. So I will toss off this one observation: I've begun to take the "first question" less as evidence that people aren't quick on their feet and more of an ontological challenge, along the lines of "you don't look Japanese at all. Are you making this up?"

[onefixedstar.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, yeah, you might have a point about the first question. I've noticed that the older I get, the more often they guess that it's my husband's name, so I think they tend to be really thrown when they find out it's not.