But You Don’t Look . . .

by Racialicious special correspondent Wendi Muse

On Wednesday, June 20th, when Jessie Marie Davis was still missing, the presence of a newborn baby left on Hallie Redman’s doorstep in Wooster Township, Ohio caused a great deal of suspicion. Could this be the missing woman’s child? She was in the third term of her pregnancy, after all, and the county where Davis went missing was close by. Was this simply a coincidence or a new twist in a local mystery?

Though investigators decided to take DNA samples of the child to verify whether or not it could be that of Davis, the reporter working on the story provided his answer for us:

[Redman] described the girl as “beautiful” with tufts of dark hair. She said the baby appeared white; Davis’ family said the baby she is carrying is biracial.

Though possibly not the author’s intention, the juxtaposition of the two phrases that make up the last sentence “the baby appeared white” and “the baby she is carrying is biracial” was an interesting one. There was no “but” inserted, but the use of the semicolon creates a paradox of sorts in the reader’s mind. Whiteness is considered pure and evokes a certain set of physical features, whereas “biracial,” when used in this sentence, serves the opposite purpose. The reader is left to assume, by phrase placement alone, that “white” and “biracial” as physical descriptions are polar opposites—that a biracial baby could certainly not be white in appearance.

This, of course, is not true, as the appearances of bi-/multi-racial people run the gamut, but I was less fascinated with this implication and more intrigued by the author’s having utilized one of my favorite race-based assumptions: the “But You Don’t Look (fill in the blank)” racial category. You know, that panic-inducing, racially ambiguous classification where many people of color find themselves because their appearance doesn’t match what most people see on tv or in magazines of their Hollywood-appointed racial representatives. I suppose I can’t hold the author entirely at fault, especially considering that all human beings LOVE to categorize. The European Enlightenment taught us that the codification, classification, and obsessive compulsive organization of everything we experience with our senses is key to human progress. It was so important, in fact, that we incorporated it into our concepts of self. Armed with a little box and a hyphen, we set out to define ourselves (and others) as Asian-American, Arab-American, African-American and the like. We even took the time to match these categories with visual images, as to limit any potential confusion.

Somewhere along the way, however, we became too skilled at this craft, so much so that upon meeting those who did not fit comfortably into the categories we had learned to embrace, we went into a moment of shock, with word vomit as a side effect. Slight accusatory in nature, the awkward little sentence “But you don’t look. . .” came into being. Sometimes, it remains unfinished, as the racially ambiguous person is so “different” that we can’t even come up with a racial, ethnic, national, or regional category to complete phrase. Other times, however, relying on our uncanny ability to see a feature or two and place it into one of those tiny boxes, we end the sentence with a word (“But you don’t LOOK Latina . . .”).

I’ve had to comfort people who seemed distraught about my racial background many a time. In fact, I have even come to accept this half declarative/half interrogative sentence as a common feature of conversation. I am so comfortable with it now that I have my own little phrase to use as a reply. When asked “what are you?” or when my racial background is challenged with a “but you don’t look . . .” or “but you can’t be 100%. . .” I am known to reply:

“My family is black, white, and Native American—you know, the slavery era remix.”

It tends to either shut down the conversation altogether or makes the identity interrogator laugh, though I admit, I have not always been this prepared.

As a child growing up in Memphis, where, at the time, racial diversity meant you were black, white, or “mixed” (black and white), my racial identity was questioned a lot. I never considered myself “exotic-looking,” but some others did. “Is your daddy Chinese???” my kindergarten classmates would ask on account of my small, almond-shaped eyes and “good hair” (their words, not mine). I would reply “no,” but I wasn’t really quite sure. My dad died when I was one, and from pictures of him I had seen, he didn’t “look Chinese,” but as a 5 year old, my ideas on race weren’t quite as advanced as they are now. Needless to say, the questioning left me a bit confused, and ultimately led to my mother having “the talk” with me. Not about sex (that was done much earlier—Mom was all into progressive parenting), but about race. “Wendi, we’re black,” she said. “I am black, you are black, and Daddy was black too.”

Well good. Clears that up. But considering the fact that I was a little kid, I had problems with the terms “black” and “white” because they ran head-on against my apolitical ideas on color. I wasn’t “black,” I frequently asserted. I was “Tan,” referring to the crayon box color that matched my skin tone. My mother was “Beige” and my dad, or at least what I could tell from pictures, was a reddish brown color Crayola had named “Mahogany.” I didn’t know what being “black” meant at the time, so I continued to live in a world with varying shades of brown and peach as my way of understanding race.

It wasn’t until I was called “nigger” for the first time or when I was the only black person in my grade or the only black girl at a dance or when people asked to touch my hair or whether or not I tanned that I had a clearer idea as to what my blackness meant and how race worked in our country. Or so I thought . . .

College was another story altogether. During my first year of college in NYC, it surprised me to see people of African and Asian descent speaking Spanish. The stereotypical physical representations I held of people from various regions of the world were completely eroded after living away from home. It was a culture shock when people would come up to me speaking Spanish, assuming that I was Latina, only to be thrown off when my reply was a bit delayed (or distorted by a Brazilian Portuguese accent thanks to language classes that had recently derailed my perfect Spanish from high school instruction). I was constantly asked questions about my background, and realized that the assumptions that my appearance solicited directly correlated with what I was wearing, the race of the group of friends I happened to be with at the time, or even how long or short I wore my hair.

This unintentional ethnic chameleonism only became more confusing for me when I traveled abroad. In São Paulo, I was a Bahiana. In Paris, I was Moroccan or, generically put, “Arab.” In Madrid, I was Dominican/Cuban. It served a positive purpose in many ways, especially considering that fitting the blonde-haired, blue-eyed image people have of North Americans is not always the best in terms of personal safety in certain countries, as it sometimes screams “tourist” more than Bermuda shorts and disposable cameras. But at the same time, depending on those who perceived identity x, my appearance proved to be a hefty weight to bear (like in Madrid, where I was mistaken as a prostitute on her day off on several occasions, despite my being properly dressed at all times).

Overall, if anything, the experience of not always fitting into a box in terms of my appearance has taught me to abandon racial classifications of others that I used to form in my own head. I don’t make assumptions any more, and the novelty of multilingualism from “unlikely” sources has worn off.

What does surprise me, however, is that people, to this day, continue to assume that if you are one race or another, or even a combination of many, that you must look a certain way or identify as what they assume you to be. Statistics seem to show that people, for better or for worse, tend to eventually identify themselves based on the perceptions of others. Perfect examples of this is how few people in Latin America identify as “black” despite the prevalence of people of African descent, due mainly to the term’s social significance and respective nations’ racial categorization choices made during political movements, and the recent studies showing that people in the U.S. who are of multiracial backgrounds, unlike their Latin American counterparts, are choosing to identify themselves as one race (usually the race with which most closely resembles). Despite how people have come to classify themselves, it’s something that should be left to them as individuals, not necessarily dictated by the opinions or political motivation of others, especially if these externally-assigned categorizations rely on stereotypes and limited knowledge of the diversity within a racial group.

What do these shifts say about how different societies deal with race? Or even moreso, how limited our approach is to understanding race and how it translates in appearance? I wonder if we will ever be able to shake free of the (often times intra-racially imposed) restricting definitions of “looking like” x race or “acting like” y race? I really hope so, because entertaining the self-serving interests of curiosity vultures is getting rather old, don’t you think?