My Ethnicity Pales in Comparison

I'm currently enrolled in a graduate class that grapples with issues of race and ethnicity. It's interesting for me to engage in the dialogue because, like gender, that's another socialized aspect of society that I would like to eliminate. That said, I'm also pragmatic, and I understand that race is still too influential of an entity to merely pretend it doesn't exist at this point. Because the perception of race still has a monumental effect on people politically, economically, and socially, it's just as ignorant to ignore the power of race as to perpetuate the beliefs associated with it.

An assignment due for this class today was to find five objects that I have in my home that represent my ethnicity. Not my culture, but my ethnicity - in other words, my whiteness. For nearly an hour, I searched for things to represent my racial identity. Aside from the Klan outfit, I don't really have anything that celebrates my Caucasian status. I have plenty of things that are significant to being American or part of my generation, but that's far more cultural.

My five items were as follows:

1. An anthology of English literature. I explained that as an English major/teacher, this was something very dear to me, and if you were to read it, you'd find that a very small percentage of the text was authored by anyone other than Caucasians.

2. A box of potatoes. Due to my Irish heritage, I have acquired a taste for tatters, but not the skills to cook them without aid from Betty Crocker. Thank goodness the famine is over.

3. A depiction of Jesus Christ as a white man. I was raised Protestant, but now more so like its kitsch aesthetic. It demonstrates my whiteness since, given the region in which he was born, Jesus would not be fair-skinned as he tends to be portrayed in the western hemisphere. Unless, of course, seeing as it was a miraculous birth anyway, God's divine will saw to it that the baby be white in an area where everyone else was tan.

4. A college essay I wrote about the presence of the white trash archetype in John Wayne Bobbitt's pornographic film.

5. A bowling trophy for being on my college's champion team, Boner Patrol. I feel it's the only athletic pursuit that the white man still dominates at.

As part of a class where white students are the minority, I found that most of my peers had a much easier time selecting their items. With Chinese decor, Filipino toys, and Spanish-inscribed religious idols, even the individuals who I would subconsciously guess have acquiesced to the mainstream American culture had items related to their ethnicity.

As I watched these people share them items without having to struggle to justify the reasoning behind it, I was a bit miffed. In my head, I whined that the ethnic minority students had this assignment so easy before quickly catching myself and realizing that after all the white privilege I've had throughout my life, boo-fucking-hoo to me for a slight impairment on a small homework assignment. Sometimes you've got to put these things in perspective.