Like Most Americans, I Was Raised to Be A White Man
Like most Americans, I was raised to be a white man: I read William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. I read F. Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Bukowski. I came to identify with the emotionally disengaged characters, the staccato sentences, the irreverent dirty old man voice. The books I read asked me to imagine the power I might have. I got women pregnant and then worried that they wouldn’t get an abortion, tying me down forever when all I wanted to do was continue experiencing my freedom. I wrote poems about the absurdity of writing poems, enjoying the decadence of imagining my readers drinking in my disregard for them. Being likeable, explaining oneself to others, were not prerequisites of protagonism. I watched women move—their hips in dresses, their lips on glasses, their breasts heaving. All of it offered up to me, to enjoy, to consume. The fact that I was a brown woman was not something that seemed immediately relevant when I was younger.
I moved through the world with this sense that I would have access to the same kind of power as the protagonists of the books I read and movies I watched. Of course we all identify with white protagonists—they’re almost always the heroes, the ones with the power to change things, to affect things rather than simply be affected.
As James Baldwin put it,
You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realize all of these things are really metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish.
And whether it be because you are female, brown, queer, or in any other way visibly other from white, able-bodied, cisgender, heterosexual men, it feels like a kind of violence when you suddenly have to reckon with the differences of the body you’re in. Not because of some innate qualities embedded in those differences, but because of all the assumptions made about the body you’re in that you have to confront.
Coming of age in particular constitutes a jarring emergence of double-consciousness—of being forced to see yourself through the eyes of others even as you’re still trying to form a sense of self.
During a summer trip to Florida to visit relatives, my aunt, poolside, remarked upon my 14-year-old form in a bathing suit: When did you get breasts? How big are those things? I felt ashamed—and not just because my body was suddenly a spectacle. I already knew it was. How big are those things was precisely how I felt about the strange lumps of flesh that had sprouted from my body. They were separate from me.
While I was deeply embarrassed by my aunt’s commentary, there was an element of identification, of relating to her perspective. It seemed more of a farce to me that people could look at me and assume that this newly hatched female form was somehow me instead of something that had happened to me.
And yet, that is the presumption: that the general shape you come to take imbues you with certain “female” traits—to be accommodating, empathetic, emotional, sexual (but not too sexual!). Our bodies become shorthand for a grab-bag of assumptions, some of which we grow into, some of which we bristle against.
My femaleness has always been something that seemed to fit me poorly—at turns an oversized garment I could not fill, or some skimpy rag out of which I spilled.
I’ve already made a mistake by calling the femaleness “mine.” It’s never felt like a thing I owned so much as a general shape I grew into that seemed to offer me up for public consumption.
“I moved through the world with this sense that I would have access to the same kind of power as the protagonists of the books I read and movies I watched.“
The phrase “gender is a construct” might strike some as academic claptrap, but ask any woman how they were treated before and after puberty, and you’re well on your way to understanding not just the truth, but how fucked up that truth is—the extent to which the entire world, and the way you must navigate it, is irrevocably changed.
Also at 14, I remember walking down the street with K. and H., my closest friends, in the North Carolina college town where I grew up. We flinched when three men started catcalling us. Yeah, baby. Look at that ass. I remember feeling bewildered and disarmed. Having a reputation as being the outspoken one, I felt vaguely responsible for doing something about it. But I did nothing.
One of the most humiliating aspects of that moment was that in doing nothing, it felt like I had allowed them to do something to us. This is one of the most nefarious aspects of predatory behavior: it makes the target of the behavior feel complicit. You might be going about your business, and then someone who has more power than you demands engagement—the kind in which even your refusal does not always free you, forcing you to play a part in a scene you had no interest in even auditioning for.
A couple hours after the encounter with those men, my friends and I piled back into the car and started our drive home. That’s when I spotted the men, still roving the sidewalk not far from where we’d encountered them. Wait! I told H., who was driving. Slow down. I rolled down the window, started shouting at them the very same things they had lobbed at us: Yeah, baby. Look at that ass. It was a humbling and educational moment because, of course, they loved it. I was startled in my naïveté: I had turned the tables, but the tables had not turned.
I didn’t have the language for it then, but this was one of the first times I experienced how my words would always be shaped by my appearance—how they would be heard differently. How they would often weigh less. How the expectations of my femaleness would become a thing I would repeatedly have to explain, justify, respond to, contradict.
The same was true of my brownness. Growing up in the South, I quickly learned how to translate the questions “What are you?” and “Where are you from?” Obviously, “human” and “North Carolina by way of Connecticut and California” didn’t cut it. What they wanted was for me to explain the parts of me that weren’t white. I came to accept the question, and as I got older, played around with responses. Sometimes I’d say I was “half white” (and in response to “What’s the other half?” I’d add “half non-white”). Sometimes I’d say I was “mostly human.” I played dumb, and answered as literally as possible in an attempt to force people to examine what they were saying, what they actually wanted to know, and whether it was a reasonable thing to ask of a virtual stranger.
This was hardly unique to my experience of growing up in the South. When I was in my twenties, I spoke to a literary agent in New York about a collection of short stories I had written. She was excited by my writing, but concerned that there wasn’t enough of an “overarching emotional arc or theme” to connect the stories. “For instance,” she wrote,
Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories have something larger to say about first generation Indian-Americans—about marriage, family dynamics, adjusting to a new country, etc., and I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to say here . . . I’d like to see more of your background woven into the stories.
Better yet, one of the stories in the collection I had shared with her included a protagonist who was an Indian writer in conversation with her agent:
“Nobody biting yet,” the agent writes, suggesting that I start something new—something that “takes advantage of your heritage. . . . How about a novel with an Indian-in-America theme? Sort of Jhumpa Lahiri-ish?”
It was darkly comical that the real-life agent was echoing the fictional situation I had written. At the time, I took her feedback to heart. Yet I found myself wondering about what she meant by my “background.” My primary identity is not as a first-generation Indian-American. I identify more as an ambiguously brown American—one who decided to learn Spanish in part because so many people assume I’m Latina, that I figured I should be able to at least say, “No soy Latina. Mi padre es de India y mi madre es blanca—de Estados Unidos.” The unifying theme in the stories I gave the agent was precisely this: my characters were shape-shifters whose appearances were often in tension with their self-identification.
I abandoned those stories, and it wasn’t until almost a decade after my conversation with that agent that I thought: Would she ever have said “I’d like to see more of your background woven into the stories” to a white male writer?
“I didn’t have the language for it then, but this was one of the first times I experienced how my words would always be shaped by my appearance—how they would be heard differently.”When you ask what terrain a white male fiction writer might explore, the sky is generally the limit. (In fact, it’s rare to even see that question posed.) But if you’re queer, brown, female, differently abled, etc., it’s expected that you’ll discuss that. More than discuss it, you’re often tasked with explaining it—what happened, why you look the way you do, why you identify the way you do in contrast to the expectations projected on you based on your appearance. The conversation you’re supposed to have is the conversation white folks would like to have based on what they see. They’re the kinds of questions we almost never think to ask white folks themselves—particularly white men.
As an “other,” the complex human you are ends up being reduced to a handful of visible traits. It’s a kind of censorship: the world’s questions shape how you define yourself, how you explain yourself. Even individuals and organizations with good intentions end up reinforcing this heavily policed line: there are a number of scholarship and funding initiatives for marginalized individuals, but to be eligible or to have a real chance of being selected, you usually have to prove that this identity is core to who you are and the work you do.
To move beyond the perceived notions of your identity can be destabilizing for other people. As a teenager, I recall a drunken frat boy who, after seeing me teaching a friend basic dance steps, ambled over to ask what kind of dancing we were doing. I told him it was salsa. His brow furrowed. Then he asked, “What are you?” I translated his question, replied that I was half Indian. I watched his face travel a journey of utter bewilderment. There were about eight long seconds of silence before he came out with: “Then . . . shouldn’t you be Indian dancing?” Despite the offensiveness of the question, I laugh when I think about it. In the moment, I recall telling him that I knew he had had a lot to drink, but that I wanted him to try to remember the conversation when he woke up the next morning, and to think about what he’d assumed and why it was problematic. He nodded, a little confused, the effort of earnestly trying to follow my instructions written on his face.
I sometimes get nostalgic about the transparent way that boy responded to me. I knew exactly where he stood. He felt like less of a threat than so many of the folks who count themselves as allies while their bigotry goes unexamined, closeted behind a veneer of progressive cred or good intentions. This outright confusion or even straightforward bigotry and sexism can be easier to navigate than the more veiled way so many Americans—particularly those on the Left—deal with their confusion about, and fear of, otherness.
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