OCR Text |
Show OPINIONS VOLUMELII.ISSUEll WWW.UVUREVIEW.0 The whitest black kid you've ever met "How many Mexicans do you think it takes to clean my room?" I used to ask. It would take "Are you black?" two: one guy would take out the Entertaining as it's been to trash and then either his sister just watch, Joey's argument or his mother would vacuum. with his friend about rac- Which of the two is more poism has brought up Darwin, litically correct than the other: The Velvet Underground and ambivalence about racism, or a beer or two, and now he representing a non-white permeans to bring me up as well. son accurately? But Joey, a former UVU When I was required to student who was born in identify my racial heritage, Memphis, means to shake I would never identify my things up a bit for his friend, Puerto Rican mother in a way who so far has been referring that made me have anything to racism as if it only ever in common with Latinos. But makes white people guilty her white skin is what made of something. that easy to do. "Are you black, Matthew?" My Haitian father, howSee, it's a trick question. ever, was my claim to inner blackness. If I looked like a Mexican but wasn't, then surely I could pass for black, even though I sounded and acted as if I was white. Right? By the time I was old enough to drive, I'd earned the nickname "Oreo," black on the outside, white on the inside. That means, especially in Utah, I'm just barely black enough. "Matthew, why don't you ever listen to Tupac, man? Don't you like hip hop?" "Why are you reading books all the time, bro?" "What Gilbert Cisneros/UVU REVIEW do you mean, you Matthew "Oreo" Jonassaint By Matthew A. Jonassaint Opinions Writer hate basketball?" "Dude, pull a Will Smith for us ... wait, what do you mean you've never seen "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air"? It's a trick question. My mother could pass as white no matter where she went in the United States because she came from Spain, she came from a wealthy family who was high class in Puerto Rico, and was fluent in both written and spoken English. The translations of her social and racial prejudices are rough and complex, but even without setting foot on Spanish soil, spending time in elite parts of San Juan, and even years of training in a different language, I still inherited a distrust - and even a distaste - for anyone who isn't white, and especially those darker than me. "I don't mean to sound racist, Matthew, but you might be the whitest ... not white person I've ever met! My father was exiled from Haiti for fighting against its political leadership. He fled for his life to Canada, where he became a citizen. He keeps that citizenship because although he's spent most of my lifetime in the U.S., he's only an alien. During the election of the first black president in this country, I was standing in line in an elementary school to vote while my dad stayed at home, same as every year, eating a cold dinner and watching TV. "Well, then," Joey's friend says, "if you don't identify as black, then what do you identify as? White?" He thinks he's making a joke. Who gets to be ambivalent about racism? A hint on this one: it's often the same people who say they're so sick of hearing about it. "I wish I owner half of that dog.' "Why?" "Because I would kill my half." -"Pudd'nhead Wilson" by Mark Twain I inherited my mother's racism, a kind of white supremacy that doesn't necessarily share in what every non-white person experiences on this campus, a campus that brings together so many students from all over the globe yet sometimes uses cultural divides to keep the ethnic "Other" where it belongs. Only a white person who spent the most formative years of his or her life in a society where running into someone not white is something of an event would find the relationship between all this the least bit surprising. Is racism ever ultimately about who is white and who isn't? I laugh when I hear the word "white guilt." I'm annoyed by the word "colorblind." I get confused when I hear the word "anti-racist." And I'm positively stunned, sometimes angry, when I hear someone say "anti-white," or use the phrase "reverse discrimination" to imply the same. Are they code words? Black on the outside, white on the inside. See, it's a trick question. Since I always liked to read, I wanted to learn how to read well. In 2008, I took a class from Dr. John Goshert on multiethnic literature. I read "Puddn'head Wilson" and "Those Extraordinary Twins" by Mark Twain, "The White Boy Shuffle" by Paul Beatty, "The Confessions of Nat Turner" by William Styron and "Flight To Canada" by Ishmael Reed. I watched Robert Townsend's 1987 film "Hollywood Shuffle" and Spike Lee's 2000 film "B amboozled" . I learned to think critically about blackness in the U.S. I learned to re-examine my ethnic and national heritages as a displaced and confused encounter between the Spaniards in my family and Native American Indians, Haitians, Canadians, Puerto Ricans and finally me, fraught with contradictions and paradoxes, a U.S. citizen. More specifically, head to toes, from the Yukon to the Caribbean, an American. And I decided to never identify as black again. But is that a choice I get in America? How about this one: what's more racist, ignorance or ambivalence? Being a UVU student changed how I encountered the ethnic "Other" in Utah because I took the time to learn what racism is. This campus provides a great opportunity for everyone to do that, but most people miss it if they think, uncritically, that having classmates from South Korea makes them globally aware, or getting their fake Mexican burrito from a black girl is just lunchtime. And speaking of lunchtime: ever wonder why there are only white kids working at Jamba Juice? No one who talks about "white guilt" knows what it is unless they are not white. And only a white person who spent the most formative years of his or her life in a mostly white town would fail to understand racism so miserably as to use a word like "anti-white." Joey takes a sip from his beer as he says to his friend, "You will never understand racism in America until you understand blackness in America." I couldn't put it better. Writer's note — In solidarity with my colleague, Felicia Joy. The High Five with John-Ross Boyce: Your awful Halloween costume The Celtic people believed that the veil between this world and the realm of the spirits was gossamer-thin around this time of year. Like, poke it with your finger and open a whole psycho-ethereal conduit. During Samhain, the annual harvest festival that later evolved into Halloween, Celts would carry an ember from an honorific bonfire to their own personal hearth at home, usually in a hallowed out gourd or turnip. So, imagine you're lugging an Iron Age jack-olantern back to your house, and inside this jack-o-lantern is a tiny fire, which, if extinguished, can cause some problems between you and the Celtic God of the Dead. His name is Balor, and even just reading his name gives you the impression that this guy doesn't screw around at all. It's not like his name is Cody. It's friggin' Balor. And it's really windy out and that little ember is getting fainter by the second. So you want to take a shortcut through the dark and foreboding forest and get this ember safely in your hearth, but, since there's an open door policy right now between Planet Earth and the Spirit World, you're afraid you might run into a sluagh, a dearg due, or one of the other unpronounce- CONTACT able entities in the demonic pantheon of the ancient Irish. They're very nasty creatures, which, at the very least, will probably knock your hollow turnip out of your hands and say "Whoops" and laugh derisively at you, or, at the very most, will suck all of the blood out of your body. What do you do? You put on a costume. That's how Halloween costumes got started. Ancient Celts thought to themselves, "Maybe if I put on some really scary get-up, the evil spirits will run away. Or at least I'll blend in." Today we wear Halloween costumes for a much different reason: to impress our friends at Halloween parties. I guess if your friends are jerks, it's sort of the same idea. You wear an awesome costume to avoid the derisive wrath of the people with whom you regularly associate. Unless your costume is stupid. Then prepare for embarrassment and emotional turmoil as you feel the judgmental eyes and wicked tongues of all your so-called "pals". Below is a litmus test: if any of the following applies to your costume this year, then it sucks. This way, you have plenty of time to change it. Happy Halloween, fools! Five Reasons Your Halloween Costume Sucks: — You're going as The Joker. The Heath Ledger one. Because no one saw that one coming a mile away. Actually, you know what? Any incarnation of The Joker is off the list of acceptable costumes now. Cesar Romero's Joker, Jack Nicholson's Joker, or any variation. Don't slap clown make-up on your face and put on your work uniform and come as "Joker, if he ran the drive-thru at Burger King". Don't come as the Joker and tell everyone that you're doing it ironically. Irony is for jerks. Your Ledger impression is awful and so are most of your ideas. Your costume mostly consists of lingerie. This means you, ladies. You bought a teddy and a garter belt from Victoria's Secret two years ago, in anticipation of your wedding night. Now it's 2011, you're still single, pretending you love it and you haven't met a man who makes all that complex underwear worth donning. Halloween is not the occasion to justify a regrettable purchase. Putting animal ears on along with your lingerie doesn't make you a cat or a gazelle or a sexy chimpanzee. I've watched all of "Planet Earth" and I've never seen a creature, great or small, who dresses like a desperate hooker. You ladies who wear this costume are the reason why men think women aren't creative or cerebral. Stop holding back the feminist fight and put on a real costume. Your costume was bought at the store and includes the word "kit" in it. If you want to be a redneck, you can find a Crystal Gale shirt and cut the sleeves off it. You can grow out your own mullet. If you want to be a vampire, find a friend with a sewing machine and commission a cape. The components of a Halloween costume can be easily assembled with a little effort. Even if you don't make everything, there's no shame in finding and purchasing the right wig, or a gnarly set of fake teeth. But if your costume came from a plastic bag in Wal-Mart, next to a 10-pound sack of fun-sized candy bars, you're sending a certain message to the world. That message is "I'm a lazy turd, and I think I deserve candy for it." Dressing like the Joker this Halloween poses a question: "Why so stupid?" You decided to go as the dead or zombie version of someone famous. I know you think that it's creative and original. But it's not. Everyone has already thought of that . idea. It's Halloween, for crying out loud. Dead things are on most people's minds. Unless someone famous has keeled over in the two weeks before Halloween, going as a decaying or zombie celebrity implies that you went as that living celebrity last year and you splashed some fake blood on it. That being said, those of you who are planning on going as a very pale version of Steve Jobs, be forewarned that one hundred other people in your town are going to be wearing the exact same thing. It's kind of a lose-lose situation. 4 You've released your inner Jersey and your costume is Snookie or The Situation or any of those idiots. We don't any more reminders that such brainless degenerates exist. ■ OPINIONS EDITOR ASST. OPINIONS EDITOR OPINIONS DESIGNER ■ jrboyce@gmail.com felicialartey@gmail.com tjmendenhall@q.com JOHN-ROSS BOYCE FELICIA JOY Illustration by John-Ross Boyce TARALYN MENDENHALL |