“There was no way I could ever say anything like “I Heart Being Light-Skinned” without people accusing me of being a member of the KKK.”
by Madeline Lau
I am not white. I might look it, and people may make the assumption that I have the same “Caucasian” blood as my pale counterparts, but the idea of “whiteness” is one I reject and disdain for many, many reasons. So, I refuse to label myself as such.
This philosophy all started one early morning in my American Cultures class. We were discussing race in American society and the horrendous acts committed by English Americans on minorities throughout history. I began to feel guilty.
I felt like the acts committed decades ago somehow reflected my own personal character as someone with European descent. This was when the idea of “whiteness” and “race” started formulating in my brain, and I quickly became uncomfortable with it.
What is “whiteness?” Technically, it isn’t really anything at all. The term originated during a time period when wave upon wave of European immigrants were arriving in the United States and had to band together as people with light skin in one large, nonsensical “ethnic” group to retain power.
The groups each had different languages and cultures, but were clumped together for the sake of controlling society. The term “white” became widely used, as did “Caucasian,” which really doesn’t make any sense since it stems from one Russian king’s belief that the most beautiful people in the world were from a remote area past the Caucasus Mountains near Armenia. I’m not Armenian, nor am I the color of Hanes t-shirts. I resent the term “white.”
When you take into account other random factions of ethnicities, light skinned people could go on for hours about their heritage. For instance, I am French, German, Irish, Scottish, British and Pacific Islander. I usually pick French when discussing my heritage, or, when explaining my Asian last name, choose the small part of me that is Pacific Islander. But in the end, people only really see that my skin is not dark, which, in a way, I suppose is fair. When we look at people, it’s impossible not to notice the color of their skin, just as we notice hair or eye color.