Race & Identity: I Never Belonged In the White Box
I’ve never felt comfortable checking the “White” box when required to answer about race on any given form, application, or study. Yet, I always have. I’ve never felt “White,” and I struggled to reconcile, let alone fill in a blank, of what another racial identity option, (as in “Other”) might be. Topics of race and identity are loaded, complicated, and devastatingly divisive. Even within one’s Self, and in spite of the fact we’re all an amalgamation of bloodlines born from distant lands, stars, whales, and humanness.
When I see the above image of me, and objectively observe my features, conflicting thoughts related to identity rush in. Sure, aesthetically, I’d love to be that ten-year-younger version again. I can appreciate smoother skin and a naive non-midlife time when life still held morsels of innocence. However, when I look at the photo, mostly what I see are the many many times throughout my entire life I was asked about my race or nationality. People always inquired: “So, exactly what are you?” Then the inevitable guessing game — Egyptian? Iranian? Israeli? Italian?
I was told I looked like Cher, Mariah Carey, and Barbara Streisand, none of whom I believed I resembled, but appreciated the comparative compliments. I grew up in sunny southern California. I never felt as if my darker features blended into the beach-blond landscape.
On my mom’s side, generations back, my bloodline hails from Eastern European Jews. I grew up with my mom, in a single parent home, and didn’t know much about my dad’s family. His side remained a mystery, although I knew, as a Lopez, I had Hispanic bloodline. I half-joked by calling myself a “Jew-ritto” though I wasn’t clear on what a racial notion of identity actually entailed. I coined the pithy phrase to provide a contextual form of self-soothing to relieve an ever-present discomfort of ethnic uncertainty.
I was raised Jewish. My grandparents on my mom’s side, whom I was incredibly close with, felt Judaism was an important familial tie. But it’s not a box to claim as race. I didn’t truly connect with my dad until I was in my late teens. I never knew anything about his parents, my other set of grandparents. They passed before I was born. I knew scarce details about how he grew up or was raised. My dad was an only child, and had one living relative he was close with, his cousin Lorraine, and remained generally quiet about his life’s relational schematics.
Fast forward a bit. My father died several years ago. Throughout my 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s, we’d mended broken fences and had a close relationship. Though he still didn’t talk much about his past, and regrettably, I didn’t have the wisdom or foresight while he was alive to dig deeper and ask about his mysterious familial context. A few years before he died he’d given me the incredible photo of these women: My great-great-great grandmother, great-great grandmother, great-grandmother, and my dad’s aunt, Martha, as a baby.
I looked at this photo from time to time and tried to muster some sort of spiritual or familial connection. I mean, this was/is my bloodline. Indeed the women, my grandmothers, look very Hispanic, or Native American, or both. It’s astonishing to note they were who I came from. Yet I still had no real identity connection to that part of who I am. Who they were felt very separate from who I am.
Six months ago I had my ancestry DNA tested. The stark clarity of what was revealed surprised me. Indeed I’m over a third of Latin-esque mix: Blood from Spain, and blood from the Indigenous Americas, including Sonora, Mexico, and Eastern Jalisco. I’d always felt innately drawn to this soul-full part of who I am, even though I’d not been raised with Hispanic or Latin ways, culture, or familiarity. I now live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and prior to moving here and without knowing ancestral origins, the moment I set foot on this soil, my blood felt home.
Having genetic proof was affirming. It also presented an entire new conflict: the damn boxes that always demand checks. Can I check Hispanic or Latina? What percentage of blood deems worthiness of checking a whole box, and not a half a box? Is over 30% enough? Even if I deeply feel the Hispanic, Latina, cultural ancestral confluence coursing through my blood, if I claim myself Hispanic or Latina, would others react as if I’m appropriating what they feel is rightfully theirs? Would it be fair to have an advent of social rights and privileges that come with life as a White woman, without the daily struggles and discrimination people of color experience?
The times of knowing who we are, and an ever-present “us-ness versus them-ness” are so complicated. Identity is complicated. Most have strong opinions about race, culture, and identity, especially when it comes to labels, categories, definitions, and ancestral claim. To declare a “right race,” I researched Hispanic and Latina racial definitions. Even those explanations were wrought with ambiguity and conflict.
Depending upon the source, vastly oppositional parameters dictate just how much blood, spoken language, culture, birthplace origin, and ancestry are allowed or accepted as part of the box. Do I claim a Hispanic or Latina identity on my own behalf, to feel whole and connected to who I believe I am, or will I be relegated to box-checking-struggles my entire life? If others feel so brazen to ask me what race I am, when will I feel confident enough to give a definitive answer? Should I have to?
I compare the picture of me to my ancestors; my abuelas. I trace their features. Search my own. My heart both rejoices then breaks from an ineffable fragmentation that permeates our empirical lineage. Yet my heart’s clear. Belonging desires an honest path towards reconciling vast social, racial, and culturally-dividing labels. I am who they are. Being required to cram myself, and an entirety of my being-ness, into a lie of a constrained, diminutive, exclusionary, inauthentic White box, won’t divert me away from a truth my ancestral Hispanic blood already knows.
Janna Lopez is an intuitive book coach and leads life-changing writing retreats in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Visit www.jannalopez.com or www.landofenchatnmentwriting.com
