The Precarious Balance of Ethnicity and Identity

If you don't speak your native language, you can't really claim to be ethnic.

Italian? You understand De Niro in Godfather II? A little bit of Cree blood? Could you make it on the rez? Black? Can you communicate in the projects or in the African country of origin?

This is the personal benchmark I apply in order to figure out the answer to a question that's gotten more and more perplexing as time goes along: "Where are you from?" Frankly, unless you're lucky enough to win the cosmic lottery to be born an Englishman (as Sir Cecil Rhodes said), there's never an easy answer. Are you a Canadian? A Quebecker? An Indian? Italian? Greek? Arab? Spanish? Native? Muslim? Jew? Christian? Wiccan? Citizen of the World?

Don't even start with the mixed heritage background stuff ("yeah, well my dad's Irish-Scottish, my mom's Jamaican-Filipino, I was born in France, uh, ya.....").

Really, when you get down to what makes up a person and what it means to identify one's self with a culture, it's fairly irrelevant. Legally speaking, that is. In the black and white of the law, your racial background has no effect on your legal status. On the ground, the reality is much, much different.

In terms of only the negatives, having an ethnic-sounding name, especially an Arab or Muslim one, can mean a more difficult time finding a job. It can mean alienation from certain social circles. One can garner different reactions from people sympathetic or non-sympathetic to your racial plight. Profiling at the airport or on the roads from law enforcement is viewed at in a totally different light when your face is not the whitest of white, the palest of pale. You can find yourself caught up in political arguments about places you've never even been to. And then of course, there's just good ol' fashioned hate and bigotry.

Somewhere along the way, society decided that if you don't use the word 'nigger' in public, you're not a racist. I mean, only racists use that word, and as long as a person doesn't use it, how could they possibly be thrown into the same rotting category as the KKK, Nation of Islam and Hitler?

Nay, racism has gone underground. It has retained its character but changed its language of communication. What once were biased laws, slurs and outright physical violence have become terror laws, insinuation and sneaky segregation. Gentrification after all is a big word that means 'move out coloured folk.' Private school means 'being German makes you a minority.' Listening to or making indie rock requires a test proving that your skin is capable of having a pink hue.

It's a tragic phenomenon, and to someone of the majority race, it's incredibly difficult to describe and articulate. But to deny the existence of implicit racism is to just be blind to reality...and perhaps to one's own racism. The problem has not been solved, and will not be solved any time soon. This is simply because we have yet to agree as a society where to draw the line between being racially colourblind and acommodating foreign cultures.

Anyway, this wasn't meant to be a downer of a post. I've written more than my share of those this year. All those negative factors suck, but man, sure as hell havinbeats being just plain ol' white. Think of the food! The bad movies! The weird immigrant stuff that you never really notice until you start making white friends!

Really, it's only a matter of examining yourself and the sort of factors that you consider when you figure out your ethnic/racial identity.

Here's a brief list of things to consider that I thought up:

1- where you were born.

2- where your parents were born.

3- what citizenship/passports you hold

4- where you've lived, where you were "brought up" and where you've lived the most

5- your physical features (yes, this includes skin colour)

6- your mother tongue (i.e. the first language ypu ), the language you think in, and any others you happen to know.

7- what you call yourself.

Now yeah, there's a lot of people who only care about the last one in terms of identifying themselves and what they relate to. That's cool.

But really, as we've been told repeatedly, race is not something you get to choose. I don't want to get into pseudo-intellectual semantics about the differences between ethnicity, race, nationality, background etc. To strangers, you are whatever you look like. If those strangers actually get to talk to you, they'll probably take you for your word if you're as brown as a cow with a miswaak in your teeth and you say you're from Kentucky. I hope you get my meaning.

There's a line you can draw for the character you craft for yourself. Western society permits and encourages in a certain sense that you do this. Squeeze yourself into nice neat little buzzword categories like 'punk' or 'hipster' or 'gangsta rapper.' The problem is, with so many of us struggling between two, three or more supposed cultural identities, these labels tend to lose their meaning. En plus, no matter how much of, to take an example at random, a goth, you want to be, if you're black, you'll never be as 'real' part of that scene as say, someone who has the skin colour and physical features of Marilyn Manson.

Anyway, if I had any sort of higher-level math training, I'd be able to formulate an algorithm using the seven identifying features listed above to generate an ethnic identity for you. Since I don't, you're, as they say on this side of the pond, shit out of luck.

Cracker.

=//Turnquest