Week 22: “What Is Your Racial and Ethnic Identity?” Essay Rough Draft
I'm going to start out by stating the obvious. I'm a white guy. My parents are white and so are both my pairs of grandparents and presumably a long line of parents and grandparents going back for a long time. Ethnically, though, I have a little more trouble identifying with anything. As far as I can tell I'm some sort of mix of a lot of Western European ethnicities. As someone with the last name "Weiss," I've always assumed that I come from completely German heritage, but I don't know German and never heard many stories or information about many people beyond some of my great grandparents. I also more recently found out that my family somehow has ties to the mayflower and some of the founding fathers, so I must have some sort of English lineage, but I think my mom once mentioned that my grandmas side of the family is French.
I remember two things about going to school in a primarily white school, and I can't remember which one was the thing I thought more often. I remember being jealous of kids who strongly identified with racial and ethnic backgrounds, but also being confused as to why it was so important. I thought, "maybe I'm just still a kid; maybe it's a thing that grown ups care about and I'll care about later." That never happened to me though. In college, I had a roommate who strongly identified with his Irish background. We flew an Irish flag on our porch and drank Jameson and every time he made a big deal about his heritage, I pretended to have the same level of pride in my german heritage. It always seemed meaningless at some level to me. From what I could tell, we were all just people, and I thought that people should just focus on being people. I really appreciate that my school spent a good amount of time making sure that we understood that racism was bad and that slavery and the early Americans treatment of the native Americans was bad, but I don't think that they did much in the way of explaining that racism was still a huge issue or explaining white privilege. "Manifest destiny," when I learned about it, was more of "oh that makes sense" and less "that's inherently racist."
I never bragged about my ethnic background and I never have given it much of a thought. The thing that bugged me the most growing up was when kids would call me "Zach white" once they found out that Weiss means white in german, or that they'd call me Zach rice because rice rhymes with Weiss (and because rice is white). I think that kids calling me "Zach attack" bugged me even more. I came to realize in college though, how much my Western European background, while not a thing I closely identified with, was still a big part of who I was and why I was where I was. Mostly through listening to podcasts, reading essays, and definitely through my women's studies class in college, I realized that privilege is invisible and that the feeling of normalcy and thinking that people should just focus on being people had a lot to do with the fact that I have never had to confront or defend my racial or ethnic identity. I've always live in middle class neighborhoods in the suburbs where violence was low to non existent and where I had access to high quality education. I was able to go to college because of my parents and grandparents having access to high quality education and good jobs. Watching tv as a white male is easy because most characters on tv are white males. The biggest difference between my family and any family on tv was that I only have one brother I instead of a sister and a baby sibling. How I think about the effect my racial and ethnic background says a lot about the reality of how it affected me.
While my ethnicity never stuck out to me in my brain, it’s impossible to talk about my racial and ethnic background without talking about holidays. My family went to an Episcopalian church growing up, so it always struck me as absolutely normal that we celebrated Christmas, Easter, and all the other major Christian holidays. As I mentioned in the last paragraph, however, I now realize that speaks a lot to the idea that I represent a majority in America, so the reason that my holiday and religious traditions struck me as very normal has a lot to do with the reinforcement that movies and TV provide. Every group of friends on TV have Christmas together, and if they don’t celebrate Christmas it’s treated as a plot point. It’s also reinforced in school and work. I had to do a google search to find out if Jewish people get Rosh Hashana off of school or work and found a lot of articles about how it was a deeply troubling decision that Jewish people had to make, whether or not to go into work on Rosh Hashana. School breaks in school were always built around the Christian calendar, also. I found another article from Sun-Sentinal.com by Larry Barszewski about how excited Jewish students were that Hannukah coincided with the Christmas break in 1997, and that Jewish students can expect Christmas and Hannukah to line up “about once every seven years,” when I always knew that I’d be off of school on Christmas so that my family could travel to see family. I gladly participated in traditions like opening presents from underneath a Christmas tree and searching for Easter eggs on Easter morning. These are definitely traditions that speak to my racial and ethnic heritage, but when sitting down to write a paper about my heritage, they’re some of the last things that I thought about.
Ultimately, I logically know my racial and ethnic background. In my everyday life I don't notice a lot of it because of built in cultural defaults. "Whiteness," in a large part, seems to be a lack of culture. Even people who have a strong identity with specific countries of origin that still fall under the banner of "white" will tend to have a similarly cultures experience.