An odd honor, my own fault

So I got this weird phone call today.  A sweet young person from the University asked me if I would participate in a special day where alumnae of color come to advise students of color on how to achieve the kind of career success the alumnae have achieved.

I  listened to the description of the event, waiting for the punchline that would make the invitation make sense, but finally I realized there wasn't going to be one, and I said, "Wait a minute.  Are you under the impression that I am an alumna of color?"  I should have said "successful alumna of color" as well, but I didn't think of that till later.  She said yes, and I had to disabuse her of that idea and thank her kindly for the invitation but also suggest that she could find someone who fit her criteria -- any of her criteria -- better than I.

I think I know how this happened.  For many years whenever I fill out the ethnicity questionaires, I check "other," and write in "semite."  This is because I don't really fit into the category of "white" very well, given the kinds of experiences I have had and the kind of wordview I have, and I am on a mission to desimplify ethnicity, and I haven't yet come up with a better way to correctly express my skewed relationship to mainstream privilege and all that.  I do not mean to claim that I have the experiences that a person in a caste of color receives in this country.  When I need to make the distinction in that direction, I own up to being white enough for the purpose.  I never expected that anybody but statisticians would be looking at these questionaires, though.

But it tells you something about what "ethnic" means in our society: "ethnic" means "of color."  There are even contexts in which this is a useful meaning.  There are other contexts in which it is not, and I spend more of my time in those contexts than in the other ones, so I simply didn't realize that I was setting a trap for myself and the people I wish to ally myself with.

But I don't think I'll stop, because I don't think it's a really important or dangerous trap.

Weather note

I feel like an overprivileged brat for the second time today writing about this, but it's tropical out there.  Warm and muggy and very windy, with that weird light that comes from a certain kind of cloud cover -- like we're going to have sunshowers or even a full-bore rainstorm with the sun glaring through.  It's not very cloudy, but the clouds that are there are heavy looking.  Did I mention the wind?  It's not dropping palm fronds on my car, but it feels like it will.