Where I am from, whiteness isn't always appreciated. You may have heard the word gesundheit, and it means health, but the root of it actually means 'sunned' as in 'tanned'. Not being white but tanned was and is the desired look.
Especially in springtime when boys are supposed to wear shorts when it is actually still not all that warm, white legs protruding are also known as 'milk bottles'. Nobody wants to be truly white. They all want to be 'sunned'.
My mother called me spook, lovingly, because I could appear in-and-in white. I didn't appreciate it much, but I could tell she meant well. I even tried tanning one time in front of a tanning machine. When the three prescribed minutes didn't show up at all in the mirror, I did 18 minutes. After five days my Mom forced me back to school, so my schoolmates could still laugh at me and my white eyes in the otherwise rather red face.
I now live in California. When I go back home in the winter, everyone looks at me, telling me I look fantastic. When I go back in the summer, they all ask me what's wrong with me. They don't notice that I look the same all year round, slightly tanned, and that they are moving from looking white-pale in the winter to over-tanned in the summer.
The one part that I do not understand about negro or its worse cousin is that the white version is never used for whites. Blank is the opposite of negro. If I were a black person, I would start calling the other folks that were white, blanks. After all, that would be the proper word.
Where I am from, the words black and white are not used for people. It is considered an insult, so the words negro and blank are used. Yes, they mean the same as black and white, but the foreign words remove the directness of the word and therefore the potential sting. The skin is only skin-deep and underneath we may be nothing what our skin appears to tell all of us about us.
When I describe a person, I try to avoid describing skin-color. It actually tells nothing about a person, while the listener is prompted to entertain certain ideas that may or may not be true.
Skin does not tell us much about an individual, but skin does separate us from each other. We better leave that separating function to biology, and leave it out of sociology. That said, when society's results are not to our liking and become obvious along color lines, we have to put it inside our political debates. A country that does not have equal opportunities or quasi-equal results for all is not a free country. Then politics needs to come to the rescue, and if it doesn't then politics needs to be reshapen throughout.
Alright, nough said. Thank you for your writing, Steve. I appreciate it.
