I wrote this piece as I considered the nature of my American identity in comparison with those of the more privileged people I have encountered throughout my life.
“So, like, where are you from?”
“New York.”
“No, what are you?”
“American.” I’m not sure why I say this. We both know what he’s trying to ask and there’s nothing wrong with it.
“You know what I mean.”
“My mom was born in the Dominican Republic, and my dad’s family is Puerto Rican.”
“Oh, nice. I’m Korean.”
“Cool.”
Neither of us is ashamed, that is for sure. In fact, my ethnicity feels validated by explaining it to another person of color. There is a grossly understated appreciation for each other’s backgrounds that “cool” doesn’t reflect. And in speaking to my classmate, I wonder why this doesn’t hold true when I have this conversation with white people. I do not expect everyone to be able to distinguish between Puerto Rican and Dominican, but nevertheless my ethnicity is rarely understood. Does white America know what it means to belong to two cultures?
Their heritage seems to exist exclusively in sepia photos from the last century and the knowledge of a few garbled and unrelated words of “their” language at best. Ancestors, I am often told, hailed from brisk Irish bluffs, hamlets in the snow-capped mountains of Germany, and picturesque Italian villages hugging the sea. Inevitably, some married the Eastern European Jews whom their parents had slandered and, somewhere down the bloodline, but not too far back, a single Frenchman perhaps joined the party. After all, who doesn’t want to be French?
But this predictable laundry list of nationalities refers to the past, not the present. Our original “melting pot” has yielded homogeneous populations in which percentages do not matter because surnames no longer connect to roots. White people blend in with each other. They do not have to worry about being the “other.” They are not defined by who “came off the boat” because those are not the same people now making dinner. White people have the privilege of deciding who will know their background. And, as whites, that is when they seem to most fit under the umbrella of “American.”
Perhaps I feel so reluctant to talk about my own culture with white people because explaining my skin makes me feel less “American.” This is my fallback, and that of many people of color. When America does not work for us, we refuse to be “American.” Suddenly, we are Latino, Asian, and black first, and we pretend that the country for which our ancestors toiled never meant anything in the first place. We are American with a hyphen, because, ultimately, the term was made for white people.
It is difficult to love a country that does not always love you back. It is unfair that our few recorded ancestors lived at the outskirts of society and that we have to learn of them as a bloc relative to the exploits of white men. Their faces and stories are merged into a single PowerPoint slide defined by what they did not have. It is daunting not to know who you have lost. And when some of your civil rights are younger than your grandmother, it is infuriating to have them threatened.
So why, then, would we deny ourselves the label “American,” for which our ancestors suffered, just because we are being denied the privileges attached? A group is most powerful when it embraces itself. Once not long ago, the ancestors of today’s white America were driven to the shores of the United States from Europe’s darkest corners, and they were not considered unquestionably American, either. Rather than acquiesce, they redefined the term “American.” People of color will only succeed today in our mission for social equality if we emulate our predecessors.