One of the more controversial pieces I’ve written critiqued Ancestry DNA-mania for legitimizing and intensifying tribal thinking at a time in history when people already see reason enough to feel kinship with some neighbors, but not others. In the essay, I detail my father’s inexhaustible efforts to imbue me with pride in my Italian heritage—and my resistance to same. I questioned Dad’s notion of pride as birthright, a gold star conferred simply by genetics. (He did not live to hear George Carlin’s mordant riff on ethnicity-worship: “Pride should be reserved for something you can actually do, not just something you are. You wouldn’t say I’m proud to be predisposed to get colon cancer!”) As I saw it, there was also a more troubling dimension to Dad’s genotyping. If he wanted to claim DiMag as ours, were we not logically obliged to claim Crazy Joe Gallo, too? And back in the day, certainly in popular culture, there were a whole lot more Crazy Joe’s than DiMaggio’s.
I told Dad I’d much rather sink or swim on my own merits. Having taken that position, I never looked back. I never identified as Italian, and I protested when people made that assumption, offhandedly associating me with this or that aspect of Italian culture.
“I’m Steve,” I would say. “Just Steve.” If necessary I’d add, “You don’t get to define me.”
“Were you not born Italian?” they might press.
“I was born to parents who considered themselves Italian,” I’d rebut. “That’s accident. Happenstance. That has nothing to do with me. I have two sisters who are very unlike each other, and neither of them is anything like me. We’re all individuals, regardless of any circumstances we were born into.’”
That is the mindset that I urged on my college students this past semester in evangelizing for the heretical notion (in today’s campus environment) that we ought to jettison our racial identities as well. “Just be who you uniquely are,” I exhorted.
As I conceded to my class, for most of my life—I am 71—if someone had inquired about my race, I would’ve answered, reflexively, white. That was the box I checked on forms, simply because it was how I’d always been formally categorized. There seemed no dire reason to resist that categorization.
More recently, however, I decided to take my ethnic independence to the next level by declaring my racial non-affiliation. I’ve already refused to check the usual boxes on forms handed me by the DMV and the university. I intend to leave the box unchecked on my next census form.
From now on, I told my class, “I am to be considered Steve. Not white Steve, just Steve.”
“You still look like a white dude to me,” quipped one of my favorite students.
Whereupon I remarked at how fundamentally silly it is to make these sorts of determinations based on outward appearance. Another student, a multiracial girl named Alexia, identifies as black in spiritual solidarity with her very dark-skinned grandfather—despite looking more Irish than my (proudly) Irish wife. Alexia even has blue eyes, whereas my wife’s are brown. So is my wife blacker than Alexia?
I also have Sicilian relatives who are darker than Obama. Are they, then, black?
In fact, the differences found in the shallow regional heritages identified by the likes of Ancestry DNA are insignificant when compared with the core-level genetic universality demonstrated by the Human Genome Project. The scientific literature is all but unanimous in that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and then, around 1.8 million years ago, commenced a diaspora to all points of the globe: that was when the superficial differences we now think of as racial characteristics began appearing as mutations or adaptations. But those visible adaptations changed nothing about the essence of who we are. A major Harvard white paper on race and the genome argues that
“If separate racial or ethnic groups actually existed, we would expect to find ‘trademark’ alleles and other genetic features that are characteristic of a single group but not present in any others. However, a [landmark] 2002 Stanford study found that only 7.4% of over 4,000 alleles were specific to one geographical region. Furthermore, even when region-specific alleles did appear, they only occurred in about 1% of the people from that region—hardly enough to be any kind of trademark.”
Here’s the bottom line, according to the Harvard study: “There is no evidence that the groups we commonly call ‘races’ have distinct, unifying genetic identities. In fact, there is ample variation within races.”
National Geographic was more emphatic in a 2018 special issue on the subject: “There’s no scientific basis for race—it’s a made-up label.”
Social Justice activists argue that such a mentality robs black Americans of their cultural identity and the special allegiance they feel with their black brothers and sisters. No one would deny the bleakness of too much of the black experience in America, especially prior to the 1970s. It is only natural that black folk would bond and organize in order to seek redress.
But a cultural or political identity is vastly different from a genetic identity. Culture is transient and superficial.
Although throughout history, people have othered and imposed arbitrary distinctions on people who looked unlike them, often to horrific ends, the imposition of those distinctions did not make them biologically real. Bigots of various stripes have assumed that superficial characteristics testify to profound internal differences, even declaring some of those differences to be indicative of a lesser form of humanity. In fact, as the Harvard and National Geographic materials tell us, you may share a more comprehensive DNA profile with a person of another so-called race in another city than with someone who lives down the street from you, in your racially homogeneous neighborhood. Major studies have documented individual intra-race genomic variations that exceed those between races.
Beyond that, consider the absurdity of deciding who you are, of internalizing a self-image, based on the way other people historically have treated you. If I call you a buffalo, does that make you a buffalo? Even if I put you in a corral and feed you hay, you are not a buffalo. So too, if racist whites in the Deep South historically treated people of a certain physical appearance as black people—in a manner distinct from the way those whites treated each other—that does not mean that those mistreated people were indeed a breed apart and should have bought into their otherness.
Treating you as a buffalo does not make you a buffalo. Treating you as a black person does not make you a black person. Especially in light of the possibility that a genetically black person may have more DNA in common with his tormentor than with others being tormented alongside him.
Today’s black cultural identity was forged as a defense against the evils of slavery, and, later, the KKK South. In a very real sense, racial identity was inflicted on American blacks from without, along with the shackles of slavery—and, like those shackles, the identity can be cast off, given time and understanding and a society-wide commitment to individuality.
The campaign I now champion is a Sisyphean undertaking in America’s race-obsessed society, let alone in today’s academia—especially at administrative levels, where science itself is seen as a trifling inconvenience compared to the larger social imperatives that are bound up in race. Without race, after all, there can be no calls for equity or diversity, which in practice become the exaltation and celebration of all things non-white (and/or non-male). Academia justifies this rooting interest in the name of empowering minorities. The problem with upholding racialized thinking on social grounds is that it tends to get expressed as a blanket indictment of all members of the one race you’re not celebrating. Witness the appalling race-baiting of the likes of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, as well as some of today’s heartbreaking scholastic initiatives: children are segregated by race, with white kids called to account for the sins of their forebears and black kids led to believe that they lack agency in a nation that—since 1619—has existed to exploit black people while also marginalizing them.
One can surely understand the lingering sting of such historical grievances as slavery, recently inflamed by episodes like Ferguson and Flint and Floyd. But—like Crazy Joey Gallo—none of that has a damn thing to do with my current white students or, for that matter, with me. Regardless of how anyone chooses to classify me, I reserve the right to assert my individuality and my innocence of crimes in which I played no active role.
Viewing me through the prism of lynchings in the Old South or the loathsome tap water in Flint is not only specious and unreasonable: it is textbook bigotry. I enjoy the same right to be free from sweeping opprobrium that a black shopper enjoys to browse the aisles in Macy’s without store security trailing watchfully along.
This is why I have decided to set an example for my students (and, if necessary, with them). I will no longer pay the debt service on racial liabilities that I did not incur.
During my first semester at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, I stood mutely in front of a class for a good five minutes as a student delivered an ad hoc harangue about the manifold ways in which my white privilege distorted my lens on social issues. I could not summon an answer that seemed appropriate or safe. Black Lives Matter was then reaching critical mass; these were very touchy issues and for the most part remain so.
Nonetheless, today I would respond to that student as follows: One, I am not white. And again, no, you don’t get to define me. Two, my personal background, the only background I deem relevant, does not betoken anything even resembling privilege. (Just for the record, my father job-shopped amid a climate where employers had signs in the window, “NO WOPS.” He had to give a false surname, without a vowel at the end, to secure menial employment in a butcher shop.) Likewise, I will not stand idly by as students regurgitate talking points assimilated during workshops with titles like Dismantling White Privilege, Power and Supremacy, or other campus activities that paint my presumptive whiteness as a per se affront to communities of color.
I reserve the right to opt out of those proliferating school-sponsored faculty events that masquerade as seminars on diversity and inclusion, but actually unfold as mass interventions that out me as a card-carrying member of the Pale Patriarchy and seek to extract my atonement for a litany of ill-defined sins (see here, here, here, here and here). Should I decide, in the spirit of collegiality, to attend such a session, I will not apologize for my lack of guilt and shame (a confession expected from me at at least one such event, as its brochure proclaims) or for my disinclination to acknowledge that meritocracy is sly code for “white supremacy.”
On the other hand, while I prefer not to be dismantled, I chafe at the prospect of being left off the list of invitees to the next meeting simply by virtue of melanin deficit.
As an individual who opposes bias in all its forms, I will let students and administrators alike know that I reject today’s systemic portrayal of whiteness-as-disease. I will neither applaud when administrators declare that there is still much work to do in reducing white enrollment, nor cheer when they remove photos of esteemed emeritus faculty from gallery walls because too many of the faces are white.
I will urge my own students not to fall prey to the ubiquitous trope that people who claim to be colorblind are deluding themselves and thus part of the problem. That’s ass-backwards thinking.
In fact, race is the big lie. It is kept alive in America by cynical political operatives on both sides, who find it expedient as a wedge issue, and by a relative handful of incorrigible bigots, who truly believe that their rarefied DNA ennobles only them and people who look like them. (Although, why they trace their roots back only as far as Europe—and not the rest of the way to Africa—remains a mystery.)
As of 2019, it was precisely four centuries since the first slaves arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, an event that placed the nation in the vice-grip of a mass delusion. That delusion still makes us see formal dichotomies that do not exist—more specifically, it makes us see race where there are only different facial features or skin tones. The problem is not erroneous colorblindness: it is the erroneous perception of race. We should work to eliminate that delusion, not sustain it in politics and culture until we all lose all sense of who we are as individual humans.
Also ask yourself, if race is mere social conditioning, then it disappears the minute you condition people differently; in that case, it is…nothing. Artifice. Veneer. (If race is a social construct, does this mean that a black child brought up by white parents in a white neighborhood magically becomes…white?)
I’ll close with a desire and a demand.
My desire is that we abandon race altogether. Scientifically the concept is bogus, and socially it has outlived whatever validity or usefulness it may once have had.
My demand is that no one, of any color, be scapegoated for the worst sins of his supposed group, past or present.
I certainly refuse to be a scapegoat. You should refuse to be a scapegoat…or a victim.
Portions of an earlier version of this piece appeared in Areo Magazine.