On whiteness

“Are Lebanese white people?” we asked the 71-year-old gentleman who considered himself white. “Yes,” he said, “although they’re real dark.” How about Italian Catholics; are they white? Sure. And Jews? Yes. What about the Chinese? “Yes,” he said, “they go to the white schools.” And Mexicans? “They’re becoming more white,” he said. “More of them are getting an education.”

Then what is a white person? we asked. After some confusion, our interviewee gave us this answer: anybody “who isn’t black.”

From The dark side of white by Gregory Rodriguez in the Los Angeles Times (via Cecily).

Or as I like to joke, Italians, and Greeks, and especially Middle Easterners and west Asians (Turks, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Afghanis) are considered “off-white.” Because they have an identifiable ethnicity and a name that is not one found in most northern European countries, they don’t have the full privileges of whiteness.

It seems to me that “whiteness” requires at minimum two things in American culture:

• Not being black (“black” understood here as sub-Saharan African and not descended from colonizers or other migrant ethnic groups).
• Sufficient numbers (or loud enough protests) to justify creating a new Census category.

That said, by this erasing of culture and ethnicity for some groups (blacks and whites), but not others, I wonder if we are really privileging some groups as more American and reinforcing the black-white racial binary.