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Small creatures — A series in progress

at work today I unfortunately fell into a conversation about discrimination and race with a white woman; she proceeded to ask me how I’d address her neighbors newly adopted son, in which I was confused because what does she mean, “well should I call him black or brown?”, to which I though what does she mean?, but instead asked where he was from because I sadly know what she means. “South American, his mom said I could say brown”, to which I agreed despite the fact that South Americans can be white, black, brown, mixed and so on. And it dawned on me that she will never find that question to be weird; If the child was a white adoptee, would she need to box them into a race? I doubt that. I realized a long time ago that white people do not belive they have a race because they believe we do. Just look at how the conversation always goes in circles; they need to apply their own logic (race) to themselves but they do not see themselves as racialized people. Growing up, it was never beige, or eggshell, or cream but 'skin color', but who's skin? Not mine, that's for sure. And applying their questiones and how they move around black and brown people to themselves make them pause because "why would we do that?", why indeed.

The same point goes for gender/sex. The default human is white and male. Anything other will be catagorized as such; Many men don't see themselves as men or male, just as people. But they see woman as female or other. And when you belive you are the default everybody else becomes other rather then a different variaty of what you are. Look at sports, why is it that it can be tennis untill woman participate and suddenly it is womans tennis. Not men's tennis (of course semantics have changed, especially in music spaces where best male artist vs best female artist... but we still have a long way to go.