For as long as I can remember, a shelf in my living room at home has proudly displayed a book called “Are Italians White?” I’ll admit, I’ve never read the book, but I always predicted the answer to be something like, “Well, you may assume they are, but it’s actually much more complicated than that!”
The complexity of Italian identity isn’t just the terrain of erudite, problematizing intellectuals. My grandmother—rest her soul—once told me how she hated to fill out forms about her race.
“I’m not white!” she said. “They want to make me say that I’m white, but I’m Italian, not white!”
I’ve often encountered a similar problem. With all the paperwork necessary for higher education, I’ve needed to fit my race into a checkbox. It doesn’t help that my father is Latino, so I’ve had to choose between categories such as “white,” “Hispanic,” “Hispanic (non-white),” “white (non-Hispanic),” “Puerto Rican,” “Hispanic (non-Puerto Rican)” etc.
The options change depending on the form, and (as you can see) often border on the ridiculous. Recently, institutions have tried to accommodate for mixed ethnicities, but sometimes I have to choose just one option. And I usually avoid being “white.”
What’s wrong with being white? White is the default race. The white race is not an identity in itself as much as it is an absence of identity. How many times have you seen someone, shoulders shrugging, say “I’m just white,” and nothing more?
To admit that you’re white is to sacrifice ethnicity and culture. Can whiteness exist in its own right, as more than an instrument of oppression?
Whiteness is also association with power, and the derogatory language we use often classifies social and economic power as “uncool.”
A few months ago, my friend John and I were walking to a concert in downtown Manhattan. We passed by a building with a large vertical sign: “Sohotel.” I turned to John. “Wow,” I said, “that is so…hotel.”
Reveling in my wittiness, we decided that “hotel” would be a cool new slang word. But what did it mean?
We arrived early to the concert with nothing to do but walk around the theater and observe the crowd. That dude’s pinstripe suit? Hotel. That woman’s Google tote bag? Hotel. Showing up an hour early to a rock concert? Hotel.
Feeling out a meaning to this word, we decided that “hotel” meant “tackily bourgeois.” To act “hotel” is to ignorantly exude self-importance. Of course, there was already a word that meant more or less the same thing: “bougie.”
To be bougie is not just to be a part of the bourgeoisie, to own the means of production. Bougieness is aesthetic, and bougieness is not cool.
What about “basic?” In one popular sense of the word, “basic” activities include drinking Starbucks, wearing North Face and using Instagram. Truly basic people are unaware—they don’t realize that their interests are unsophisticated and vapidly materialistic.
The basic and the bougie aren’t far apart. In a way, bougieness is basic. To value wealth and power is to conform to a dominant capitalist ideology. Being bougie is the default: we see it across television and in advertisements. The media tells us to value the aesthetic of elitism, and that conforming is not hip.
When I was a child, there was another book I often noticed. It wasn’t in my living room, but on my mother’s personal shelf. This book was Maureen Dowd’s “Are Men Necessary?” (I didn’t read this either.) Even as a 10-year-old boy, the title felt like a personal attack. If men weren’t necessary, what did that mean about me? In my childhood understanding of gender, it seemed insane to suggest that we eliminate half the population. And yet, when it came to race, I had no qualms about sacrificing my whiteness for a cooler Italian ethnicity.
When deconstructing identity, we sometimes conflate race and gender as analogous structures of power. And yet despite resisting “bougieness” and whiteness, I’ve held on to the masculine, dominant, gender. Being a man isn’t lame like being white or shallowly wealthy.
Gender feels more substantial than wealth or whiteness. We can measure and change our wealth; whiteness is simply the absence of color. Gender, on the other hand, is something that most of us hold on to.