“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.

Now, let’s start by saying that Jennifer Hudson is a capable actress. She blew Beyoncé out the water in Dreamgirls and by all accounts she did her thing in The Secret Life of Bees. But like all outfits aren’t for all weather conditions, all parts aren’t for all people. It was an outright shock to learn she had been picked to play Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Good luck to her, hope she does the part justice, but it just seems a little, well, opportunistic. It’s like getting Salma Hayek to play Benazir Bhutto because they are both olive-skinned.

AfriPOP magazine offers up this criticism and gives Hollywood some advice in case it wants to cast black Americans in African roles.

… Words become very important in the power relations between individuals and groups, in the exercise of law and democratic ideals. They help define the other: a member of a group with other religious, racial, gender, or biological affiliations.

A good example is the use of the five-letter English word tribe. The Western media’s analysis of events in Africa reveals the word as the main obstacle in the way of a meaningful illumination of dynamics in modern Africa. Tribe — with its clearly pejorative connotation of the primitive and the premodern — is contrasted with nation, which connotes a more positive sense of arrival at the modern. Every African community is a tribe, and every African a tribesman. We can see the absurdity of the current usages, where thirty million Yorubas are referred to as a tribe, but four million Danes as a nation. A group of 250,000 Icelanders constitutes a nation, while 10 million Ibos make up a tribe. And yet, what’s commonly described as a tribe, when looked at through objective lenses, fulfills all the criteria of shared history, geography, economic life, language, and culture that are used to define a nation. These critical attributes are clearly social and historical, not biological.

So says Kenyan writer, academic, and activist Ngugi wa Thiong’o in his Transition Magazine essay, The Myth of Tribe in African Politics. My own minor quibble: he uses Western rather than the less-popular, but in, my opinion, more accurate Northern (is South America not, geographically-speaking, ‘the west’?). But his essay drops all kinds of knowledge on language, the concomitant rise of racism and colonialism, and our post-colonial perceptions of Africa that are only slightly more evolved.

But that answer wasn’t always the most satisfying one for the asker. You see, I am black, but my skin tone is kind of beige. I’m the same shade of golden tan as most North Africans. S. is what Brits would call Desi. She’s 100% of Indian descent, but several generations removed from Indian culture and customs. To the Moroccans we encountered, our appearance and our answers were more confusing than enlightening. And for us, it raised old questions about our own ethnic identity.

In my case, "the United States," or "American" is the shortest, truest response to the questions "Where are you from?" and "What’s your ethnicity?" I have a sense of place here. The roots of my family tree reach down at least five generations into U.S. soil. My family’s history is murky, obscured by time and slavery, but it’s American — distinctly so.

In the rest of the world, however, people have an ethnicity or a nationality, even if their nation doesn’t have its own state. When I answered "American," the follow-up question was, as often as not, "but what are you?" particularly because I looked like a long-lost cousin. I’m not even brown-skinned like the images of black people we send abroad. But "black" is as good an answer as I can give.

S.‘s family history, however, is entirely clear. She knows that her great-great-great grandparents left India for Guyana as indentured servants. Her peoples are straight-up "GuyanIndian." Yet she was born in the United Kingdom, becoming a U.S. citizen when she was six. What’s murky is her ethnic and national identity. From which of India’s 14 major ethno-linguistic groups does she hail? Are her family’s traditions Indian, Guyanese, or some fusion of the two? And how accurate an answer is "American" when she’s the immigrant child of parents who emigrated to the country of her birth?

Define “black”

I remember a conversation from years ago that I had with a Malian woman named Fanta about blackness. She said "In Mali, there is no such thing as ‘black.’" In places where everyone has the same skin color, notions of ‘black’ or ‘white’ are unnecessary and non-existent (though, as with the Roma in Europe, ethnic markers still hold sway). Fanta said that when she came to the U.S., she found herself wrestling with a new set of expectations, assumptions, unspoken rules, and judgements — ‘blackness’ —that were applied to her as a dark skinned African woman in the United States.

Our conversation taught me that concepts of race, color, and ethnic identity are often fluid, culturally-dependent, and self-determined.

There are black people in Morocco, mind you: the Gnawa. The Gnawa are an oft-marginalized group descended from sub-Saharan African peoples, some of whom were slaves, some of whom were merchants along cross-dessert routes. They even have their own distinctive form of music. Y’all know that’s about as black as black gets.

But race is a culturally-specific concept, isn’t it? And I got the sense that in Morocco, race and color is almost wholly replaced by ethnic identity. The Gnawa aren’t "black" per se. They’re "Gnawa." Arabs and Berbers aren’t "white," they’re Arabs and Berbers.

So when you say "black" in Morocco, what does the listener hear and understand?

Does she/he have a concept of what "black" means in the States? Does she/he know that any African ancestor in your known family tree makes you legally black no matter what your phenotype says? Does she/he understand that blackness in the U.S.. often comes sans ethnicity? Does she/he realize that you, your parents, your grandparents, and probably your great- and great-great-grandparents grandparents come from United States and/or parts unknown?

Or does she/he view it through African eyes — eyes that think of "black" as "from the south side of the desert and a few shades darker than you?"

So you’re not Indian?

And what to make of S.? She is racially (for lack of a better way to put it) Indian, but not ethnically so. While I am wholly convinced that her peoples are descended from some long lost tribe of Indian nomads with all the continent hopping they do, S., has never been sure of how to define her ethnic identity.

I remember having mad conversations about it when we were checking boxes on our college applications. "Asian" wasn’t culturally accurate. For her, it didn’t even feel racially accurate. To this day, even calling herself Indian, she says, makes her feel like an imposter (Guyanese isn’t much better).

But because of her Indian looks (which, like mine, also look a little bit Latina depending on who’s doing the looking) she was pressed quite a few times about where she was from — you know, really from.

For both of us, "American" was not enough.

Thanks to George for inspiring the title.