White Boy

More than 99% of the time, I don't think about my race or my ethnic heritage. As a white man in Kenosha, Wisconsin, I am a natural. I am the default. I blend right in. This means, for the most part, that I am not considered special or suspect. So writing this entry is a very strange experience for me, because it requires me to call attention to what is usually treated as invisible.

I am the grandson of Greek, Irish, and Polish immigrants (on my mother's side), and Dutch and German ancestors (on my father's side). To oversimplify (and all racial and ethnic designations are oversimplifications), I would say that I inherited a Dutch/German exterior, and a Greek/Irish interior. I have very little idea of what it means to be Polish, but I do want to know more, because my dear Granny was 100% Polish, and I revere her to this day. She was kind, compassionate, fun-loving, hard-working, and a lover of fashion, art, music, literature, and theatre. She lived to be 100, and she continues to inspire me.

My grandfather on my mother's side, "The Chief," was not Native American (as some have supposed), but a Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II. His father, who came directly to the U.S. from Greece, directed a Greek language theatre in New York City. I'd like to know more about my great-grandfather, if that is possible.

Writing about my ethnic inheritance feels very much like an interior journey, one that may make little difference to anyone other than myself. But perhaps it is not wholly interior. My sense of myself as Greek, Irish, and so on is largely shaped by the cultural images of these people. "The Chief" (George Pappas) always told me to "be proud"of my Greek heritage, without explaining exactly what that meant. The admonition would come in the form of a note that was carefully inscribed in the margins of a newspaper clipping featuring a Greek American who had achieved something noteworthy.

There are some ironies here. While he exhorted me to "be proud" of my Greek heritage, The Chief had himself inherited a name which was an attempt at assimilation. "Pappas" is a condensation that his father made of the original family name, Papadopulous. Another irony: as an actor and director, I was excited to learn that my grandfather's father directed a Greek American theatre in New York. Yet it was my grandfather who on occasion sent me notes that warned me not to pursue this line of work as my career. Usually they were accompanied by an article about out-of-work actors.

I hope, over the course of this semester, to learn more about my ethnic heritage, not only in terms of genealogy and family history, but also in terms of the cultural gifts and political struggles of "my people."

Now to race--the"white elephant" in the room. This journey will be more challenging. If my ethnic identity has been mostly invisible, my racial identity has been even more so. Sure, it's clear I'm white, but historically that has meant that you're not supposed to notice. As the African American activist Victor Lewis has put it, "white equals American equals Human." I grew up learning that I was just a person. I was the human being. It was "blacks," "Asians," "Mexicans," "Puerto Ricans," "Cubans" and "Indians" who had something called "race."

Growing up on Long Island (New York, for my fist eight years), and then on the North Shore of Massachusetts, I lived among "whites only" (with the rare exception of an African American student or two who had been brought into our school as part of an "opportunity" program). My exposure to people of color was through the media. I absorbed both negative and positive stereotypes: "blacks are violent"/ "blacks are soulful"; "Chinese are inscrutable"/"Chinese women are sexy."

Born in 1957, I grew up during The Civil Rights Era (1955-1968). I recall being in music class at the moment that Dr. King's murder was announced over the school intercom. Our (white) teacher was in shock. She called for a period of silence, and then lead us in a somber chorus of "We Shall Overcome." I was 11 years old, and just beginning to understand the depth of the racial divide in or country.

In the years following, I learned more about our history of race and racism from my social studies teachers (white men), through the writings of African American author Richard Wright (in high school, we read Black Boy) and white cultural icon Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn), and through movies like Sounder (1972), about a family of African American sharecroppers in Louisiana during the Great Depression.

In college, the realities of race and racism confronted me head on in ways they never had before. While it is difficult for me to pinpoint specific "aha" moments, I recall a powerful growing awareness of racism and its impact. In my "Foundations of Education" class, Jonathan Kozol's book Death at an Early Age made a huge impression. He recalled his experiences teaching fourth grade in a Boston inner-city school, where (mostly) African American children were severely neglected and poorly treated.

More than anything, I was exposed to African American students. I lived with them, and spent time with them, which doesn't sound like much until you remember that this was my first-ever regular contact with African Americans. It wasn't all smooth sailing. In my freshman semester I was assigned to a mostly African American dorm. I felt very out of place. I thought that by transferring to another dorm I would escape this uncomfortable feeling. I was wrong. In my next dorm, "Butterfield," the Head of Residence, Anika Nkrumah, was an African American woman who with her husband had changed her name from Anglo to African. I learned from her example about Black Pride and African American cultural identity, and I loved her young son, Ambe, with whom I spent many happy afternoons playing.

In my first teaching job (high school English in Amherst, Massachusetts), I learned a little more about race and gender by teaching Maya Angelou's classic, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. (They say you best teach what you most need to learn, and I believe it.) Then in 1982, I took a job teaching English, speech and drama at a secondary school in Mandeville, Jamaica (West Indies). In the two years that I lived there, my eyes were opened in a number of ways. One of the most shocking realizations was that, under a special contractual arrangement for expatriate teachers, I was receiving much higher pay and greater benefits than the Jamaican teachers at the same school. It wasn't until many years later that I had the self-awareness and insight to recognize that my reaction to the Jamaican teachers' protests was to think "they're right-it's unfair," "there's nothing I can do about it," and "I hope we can all just get along." I was unaware at the time of steps I could take in order to be an ongoing ally of the Jamaican teachers, to help them change the situation by taking political action.

As is true for many 20-somethings, I was seeing things through a lens that was more personal than political (though these two dimensions of experience are, in reality, always connected). I was feeling irritation about the fact that Jamaican youth on the streets would call out to me, on an almost daily basis, using names like "White boy!" "White man!" "Yellow man!" and "Red man!" I was also deeply distressed by the fact that my mother was vehemently opposed to my relationship with a Jamaican woman (Sandra), to whom I became engaged (I later broke it off). My mother told me that she got sick every morning thinking about it, that she wished I had told her I was gay instead of this, that our children would turn out "spotted," that I was ruining my career (how would she look "on my arm"?), that from what she could see in her photo, Sandra looked "belligerent," and that if we did get married, she hoped we planned to live in Jamaica. Whenever I tell this story, someone (understandably) asks: "So did you break up with Sandra because of your mother?" The answer is, I don't know. Her reaction certainly didn't help. If she had been warm and welcoming, it's possible that things might have gone differently. But it's also true that I was not yet mature enough to enter into a marriage with anyone.

When I returned to the United States, I studied communication and culture in graduate school, and earned a Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts. My main focus was on dispute mediation and other form of conflict resolution. My graduate advisor had written an article about the futility and destructiveness of labeling anyone a racist, sexist, or any other kind of -ist, and largely due to his influence, my focus on race, ethnicity, and culture became a focus on "how to communicate better." While this is a very worthy undertaking, and in fact essential in order for us to make progress toward a fully inclusive multiracial society "with justice for all," the "therapeutic" approach to race/ethnic relations can also become a way of diverting ourselves from the hard work of re-educating ourselves and taking the necessary actions to create real change.

In the early 1990's, I raised a few eyebrows at Ithaca College in New York when I proposed (and then taught) a course on "Communication and Racism." It was in the teaching of that course that I became aware of the work of Teun van Djik, who had written an influential text by the same title. One of van Djik's basic arguments is that racism is cultivated and disseminated in the stories that members of the privileged group tell each other (often in private, or in code) about the "Others," who in these stories are characterized as social, cultural, and/or economic threats.

An important new chapter in my journey toward fuller awareness occurred when I accepted my current position at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside (in 1994). For the past 16 years, I have been living in region and teaching at a university that is much more diverse (in racial and ethnic terms) than anywhere I have lived or taught before. Through my work with diverse students and colleagues in the Communication Department, and as a long-standing member of the Ethnic Studies Steering Committee, I continue to learn, and I hope, to grow. I am excited by this, my first opportunity to teach Introduction to Ethnic Studies. I expect to learn a lot.

(Questions and comments are welcome.)