why am i white?

My earliest memory about race is from the year 1986. I was a kindergarten student in a rural Georgia town. One day I asked my Mama "Why is Ben black"? Ben was one of my classmates. My Mama told me "because he's African, he's from Africa, a continent, it's a place, a location in the world." The next day I went to school and said to Ben "you're from Africa" and he laughed and laughed and replied "girl, I'm from Adairsville just like you." Then I felt upset because I could tell Ben wasn't lying, otherwise how could he have made me feel so stupid? That meant that my Mama was lying. I'm sure my Mama tried to explain later but at that time her words didn't make no damn sense.

Today in Steve's class he was talking about the black diaspora and how no matter where you come from if you're black you have a common bond with other black people. So that made me think of the Bob Marley lyrics "No matter where you come from as long as you're a black man you're an African." I've had time to reflect on that and it's brought up my childhood memory.

Why did I want to know why Ben was black? I probably had some type of race conception from my family but I don't think that's why I wanted to know. I think it was an innocent question, like asking "why is the sky blue? why is the grass green"? I remember asking my mother those questions and she got frustrated and said "robin, i don't know everything" so I told her "you do know you're just not telling me" and I believed that at the time.

I wonder why my Mama thought she knew why Ben was black when she didn't know why the sky was blue? I'm lucky I knew Ben because who knows how long I would have taken my Mother's word for truth if I never had that intercourse with him. I hope now that my words never hurt him or made him feel alienated, not that alienation is a bad thing. In this place alienation seems kind of necessary.

My sky/skin analogy seems short sighted, the color or shade of the sky is not a social construction. It's something that just is, right? Why can't people think in phenomenological terms? Race is a scary thing because it seems like it's somewhere in between being a social construction and something that just is. Every person is born with certain attributes that automatically place them within constraints because of a structure that was made up even before they were. Does that make sense?

I guess a good question is why didn't I ask my Mama "why am I white"?


ps. I can hear my upstairs neighbor fucking right now, sounds like he's into it. [bgcolor]#3b2212[/bgcolor]