This is one of the images that come up when you search Google for “snow bunny” (there are many that are much more NSFW). “Snow bunny” is also what I was called when I was walking down the street earlier this week. Urban Dictionary has it as ” a white female; [an] expression commonly used to describe a white female who mingles among black males.”
It’s been a long, long while since I’ve been called white. Recently, it’s been Asian; sometimes in earnest, but usually in situations like the above, when men on the street have used it as a stereotyping cat-call. This being America, it is always Chinese, and it is usually used in reference to my eyes. “Your eyes are beautiful, you Chinese or something?” “You look gorgeous, China!”, “China eyes…” etc.
Oftentimes, mixed-race people complain loudly about being admired for their non-black features, and for the most part, I find this disingenuous. I take issue mostly with the regular, non-gorgeous everyday pretty people doing it. I think it’s another thing for celebrities to question how black is too black in magazine articles, because of the personal risk involved for their careers, and after all, they are giving visibility to a serious problem of representation in our media. I give mad props to people like Zoe Saldana who are doing it so articulately.
I’m talking more about reg’lar people, and bloggers, particularly, using a lot of political outrage to complain about getting cat-called. It happens to most people, not just you, and not because you aren’t blue-black. The only people it doesn’t happen to is ugly people (like, really ugly; I’ve seen some real doozies get hollered at), and you know for damn sure you’re happy you’re not one of them. The oppression levelled along the sliding scale of race is a serious issue; the way that punishment is doled out to those viewed as less-than because of their comparative blackness is a huge problem. Popular culture is where it is disseminated, and it is past due for a take down. Being hit on in the street is not this; being hit on is categorically Not A Big Deal.
So, I will not insult your intelligence with a thinly-veiled attempt at talking about my own attractiveness. No, this is a post about another, equally inconsequential topic, but I will do you one better and only refer to it as such: this is a post about the times I’ve been called white. It happened a lot when I was younger, and hadn’t happened for a long time until this week, which is why I’m talking about it again. I live in a white world, between work and friends and the media I choose to consume, I’ve accepted that I’m associated with it to some degree. I expect people to think it, but I don’t expect them to say it, thus my surprise. Thus this post.
It was late on Tuesday night when it happened, around 11pm, and I was walking home on Stuyvesant Avenue. There was a car parked next to the sidewalk where I was walking with its window down, and amidst some other solicitous whispers and kissing sounds coming from the car, I heard it, distincly: “Snow Bunny”. I could not see the drivers. As is my wont in these circumstances, I offered nothing in return, just made an extra effort not to seem to notice and walked a little faster.
In high school, I was probably only called “Oreo” a couple of times, which I considered lucky, because in every movie or book about mixed kids the name followed them like the smell on the Smelly Kid; it was just what mixed kids were called. Though it seemed somewhat benign–Oreos are, like, the best snack. Who doesn’t love em?–I didn’t want to be called out as one by being called one.
Of course, this statement hurt because it hit close to home. Literally. Both of my parents are visibly mixed–my mother is South African colored, a mixed-race group that occupies a cultural space similar to Hispanics in the US, and my father is part Chinese and phenotypically very Asian-looking. He is lighter than I am, and he has epicanthic folds, meaning the “Chinese eyes” that I have inherited are more pronounced on him. Neither of my parents look totally Black, but they grew up in a time, and in respective places that didn’t have much room for in-betweeners (my mother, as mentioned, Apartheid-era South Africa, and my father, Jamaica, Queens, and Inglewood, Los Angeles). Because they were also smart kids and they grew up during times of tremendous Civil Rights action, they aligned identified fiercely as black, as a measure of politics. In short, we were all Black, nothing more, nothing less. My father was Trinidadian, and that Chinese grandfather, he wasn’t mentioned too often.
In my house, being Black was a point of pride. It also represented an interesting dichotomy: my parents were proud of being Black, and proud of the fact that they were the only Blacks in our affluent, mostly white neighborhood. My parents came from the complete opposite: from Black, working-class neighborhoods, and Black was also all my parents knew. The other day, my father mentioned that he was invited to a childhood friend’s son’s bar mitzfah. I was perplexed–my father knew a Jewish kid when he was growing up?
At home, my parents teased me by calling me white, and I, in turn, sometimes leveled the insult at my younger brother. A few times, they expressed concern over my lack of Black friends. I was deeply ashamed of this, and the fact that I got called white at school felt like a pretty big failure. But it happened, over and over. As a smart kid, I mostly hung out with other smart kids–kids I knew from class, where I spent most of my time and energy. These kids considered me one of them, and the worst statements, the ones that made me most embarrassed and uncomfortable, were the ones that implicated me as one of them. You’re not, like, a real black person. Someone I actually knew, for years, who knew my family, and who had witnessed my pathological attempts to trumpet my race for years, said this to me, in front of other people.
Once, in my smart-kid math class, a student sitting to my left asked the student sitting to my right, one of the star theater kids, why it was that black people couldn’t sing classical music as well as well as white people. The theater kid went on to earnestly and scientifically explain why. I sat perplexed and angry, scared into silence, in the middle, and they showed not a hint of embarrassment.
Things changed markedly in college. As much rap as diversity training receives, I can say that we had it in college, and I never experienced any incidents like the above. Some of it has to do with who I chose to hang out with–at Brown I found, at long last, black kids who shared my nerdy interests and instincts, and I fell in with them happily. But a lot of it was that people were told over and over not to say certain things. There were times when I resented the PC-ness–at times the overly the atmosphere tended to inhibit thought and interaction, and there were people who ended up saying even more fucked-up stuff in reaction to all the PC-ness. But given the choice between an unregulated, uninformed environment like the one I grew up in and the at times uncomfortable, sterile environment of college, I would always choose the latter.
I’m well beyond feeling hurt or threatened by being called white or implicated as white. On that Tuesday night, as soon as I had turned the corner, I texted my friend what happened, hoping she’d share the laugh.
In each of these instances, and especially in the most recent one, it wasn’t the name that hurt; it was living in a place where no one understood, or cared to understand your particular background. People called me white because it was convenient for them; it was easier for them to pretend that I was just like them, instead of treating me as black and making caveats, giving up certain insults, or–God forbid–wrapping their heads around the actual complicated nature of my heritage. The worst part is, it was easier for me to let them. In all of these situations, I did next to nothing. They were my friends, and I was a teenager, and I was scared. I let it happen. It’s never really about the insult, it’s more having who you are not be recognized, or even worse, denied.
