So, tell us… what race are we?

Last night, the dolce far niente of my retirement was interrupted by a telephone pollster from the NYS Deparment of Health and the Siena College Research Institute. The guy said I'd been selected "randomly" for a survey, but was a little too vague about how the gathered information would be used.At first, I was sorely tempted to beg off, then decided that for 10 minutes of my time, I could be a good sport. And the interview unfolded pleasantly enough, covering my opinions on everything from the legal drinking age to breastfeeding in public. However, things came to a screeching halt when he asked me my race. I told him I really didn't know and I was not joking: you see, I'm whiter than some folks, not as white as others. My son (photo above) claims that, like critters in the bush, I have "protective coloring" because of my light hair, skin and eyes.He says I can almost "pass" for white; although of course, I'm not. My son subscribes to American absolutist notions of race because he grew up in the States, and because he cannot be mistaken for anything but brown. It's true that race is not totally a social construct--there are visual considerations as well. Some people are unmistakably white, black or Oriental. In between, there's a whole range of skin shades: race is a spectrum, a continuum from pale to tan and black. And to date, there aren't enough little boxes on paper to check off and identify everyone's place on that spectrum. But really,it should depend on the mirror: you are what you look like, end of story. At least, that's how most Latinos think. For us, a black woman can have white children and viceversa. Or you can be white and have black siblings. None of that one-drop rule that blacks in this country so fervently espouse. American blacks think that if you look white but your great-great grandmother came from Mozambique, you're black. Latinos believe that with time and intermarriage, families can "evolve" into whiteness--regardless of where their ancestors came from. "It's racism with an escape hatch!", exulted a black friend when I explained it to him. Another black friend views such notions of racial fluidity as insulting,heretical. She claims that on employment and government forms, the denomination "other" really means "other niggers". The issue is that in the US, determining race is not that simple. It is a process fraught with sociopolitical meaning, because assigned race is a form of currency that places top value on whiteness. So naturally, everyone wants to be white, and "established" whites become the arbiters of racial assignation. Whites decide who's white. It's a way of neutering competition from nonwhites trying to share in race-based social privilege. Race thus becomes a matter of perception: it depends on who you're talking to and what they think you are. Race in the US is also a matter of geography, where the racial goalposts keep moving according to where you're standing. For example, in Miami, (where my fellow Cubans adamantly insist on their whiteness) I' m definitely white, but in NYC, maybe not so much. So who's White in America? It's a matter of shifting opinions rooted in historical convenience. Greeks and Italians, for example, weren't considered white until late last century. Even so, their whiteness was assigned begrudgingly and given a separate status to appease WASPy sensitivities. Greeks and Italians became "ethnic" whites (a euphemism for "Inconclusively White", if you ask me). They stumbled upon that dubious distinction because at some point, whites decided to officially expand the notion of whiteness so they wouldn't be outnumbered by the surge of other races within the US. Of course, it's impossible to convey even half of all this during a 10-minute interview with a pollster. After all, these ideas are not my own, I adopted them because they make almost lyrical sense to me. They can be found in Critical Race Theory and in the book "Whiteness of a Different Color" by Matthew Frye Jacobson (Harvard Press). And though I swallowed that book whole, ideologically speaking, and though I do recommend it, I note it has been relegated to curiosity status by a literary establishment that likely prefers more familiar American notions of race and caste. But back to the survey: While I kept trying to dodge the issue of my own race, the pollster kept trying to wear me down, asking different versions of the same question: : "Well, so what are you?" I finally gave up and told him that I'm white--only because the survey didn't include any other options that might better accommodate reality. There was no "other" category, for example, and no "brown"--and "Hispanic", as we all should know, is not a race, but an ethnic denomination spanning people of many different colors who speak the same language and are culturally similar(NOT identical). And though I know that enlightening Americans (no pun intended) will take more than modifying sections on race within official paperwork, doing just that might be a good start towards expanding public consciousness about race over time.