what are you?

“What are you?”
Nod if you’ve heard that one before,
if you’ve wondered,
what does that even mean?

I’m never really sure of the right answer
so there are a range of responses that I offer.
“I’m American” kind of means nothing,
like I have no heritage worth mentioning.
“Well, my birth certificate says I’m white…”
but with that answer no one is quite satisfied.
“So do you want a list?
Welsh, Spanish, English, Irish,
German, Native American
and maybe a great-great grandmother who was Mexican.”

So what do I know about any of them?
So, what?
And I don’t think my blonde-haired sisters
are ever asked this somewhat innocent
though slightly invasive question,
“What are you?”

But don’t get me wrong, I’m fine.
People don’t discriminate me
though distinctly off-white.
In fact, it’s nice to blend in when
traveling in Latin America or even India.
Why, I’ve had strangers start to speak
to me in all kinds of other tongues
assuming I spoke the same one.
When I was a child, people swore
“She must have been adopted.”
Depending on the degree of my tan
and my current hair style people tend to ask
if I’m Middle Eastern or even half-black.

But now, I’m off-track.
The truth is that race is a biological fiction
and yet it’s a very real social construction -
you can’t find race in our genes,
but you sure can find racism in our streets,
racism that’s justified acts of domination
and taught the so-called “privileged” ones
the melting-pot myth of assimilation.
The more I learn, the more I become
aware of how very little I do know
about what I am, or where I came from.
For heaven’s sake, history books state
there’s a war running through my veins,
some of my ancestors committing rape
and genocide and all kinds of hate
on the others. “Us and them,” not brothers.
Well “us and them” is “us and us” for me
and I want peace. I want to listen to the voice
of my mothers, the white, brown, and red ones.
I cannot in good conscience check any
one box, because to check one
is to deny the others, and to claim one,
I must recognize the ignorance left to be undone.
Imperial conquest institutionalized silence.
Civilized progress leaves me embarrassed
of some and uneducated about the rest.
And maybe I’m not fine because
that does give me pains in my chest.

Our modern glorification of technology,
our stubborn insistence of autonomy,
even our born-again spirituality
can serve to blur the lines that trace
us back to our ancestry.
There is more to me than my ethnicity
but it remains a part of my identity.
I need to find the roots of my family tree,
so I can grow to embody
and embrace the multi-colored leaves
of our common race, our humanity.