The Reflection of My Essence: What does it mean to be "White?"

If you are white, do you have a race?

As you've written your version of Rafael Falcon's "The Reflection of My Essence," a chapter from his book of stories, Mi Gente: In Search of the Hispanic Soul, you've no doubt come into conversation with your body and your physical features--the physical container of who you are--as well as key memories that have shaped you. Falcon explores the "deep suntan brown" that expresses and contains a mixture of his Spanish, Indian, and African heritages. But what if you're white? What do you see when you look in the mirror? Is whiteness actually a race, or is it a social category? Do you see your parent's and grandparent's features, or do you see a cultural blank slate?

The History of White People

In her recent book, The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter talks about the cultural habit of classifying people by skin color as it evolved through European colonialism. Who "counts" as white today? Is this the same collection of peoples who counted as "white" a century ago? Why or why not?

Who counts as Latino?

Is Latino a term that denotes language, race, national origin, or culture--or a combination thereof? What exactly do we mean when we say "intercultural" or "ethnic?" What do you see when you look in the mirror, and how much of what you see has been influenced by categories created and taught to you by the dominant culture of which you are a part?

Famous American modernist poet, William Carlos Williams, was actually a Latino writer, but was never classified as such until a study of his Latino roots was published in 1994. Latino is a relatively new classification, and America was not yet dividing up its peoples in this way when Williams was a famous writer. What does it mean that scholars of Latino literature are now claiming this figure, long honored in the canon of American literatureas a key figure, as a Latino writer?

White Privilege

Scholar and writer Peggy McIntosh has come up with a list of white privileges, in her famous article, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack of White Privilege, based on critical race and gender theory that views both as social constructions. "White" is a code for the group of people who are privileged as "normative" in a society. If you are White, you will recognized and perhaps be surprised by some of the categories on this list. There are also some disadvantages of "whiteness," one of them being the assumption that other people's histories and lives don't really matter to you--or are peripheral to the history and cultural treasures of your own "race."