Sometimes it's Boomers, sometimes it's Gen-Xers. Sometimes it's NPR listeners, sometimes it's Fox News viewers. But this email is always, always coming from a hotmail/yahoo/ISP provider account. 
an unrelated thing i've gleaned from 6+ years of reading our emails: even white people who aren't like this person will identify the race of *every other person they mention in the email,* but almost never themselves.
it's the most reliable tell that the LW is white.
it's the most reliable tell that the LW is white.
"i have an Asian friend who recently..."
"my black coworker and I..."
whiteness is pretty consistent in this way! ppl of multiple heritages who email often say, "i'm half-Chinese" or "my father is Mexican"...but won't say what the OTHER half is, as if it's a *given.*
"my black coworker and I..."
whiteness is pretty consistent in this way! ppl of multiple heritages who email often say, "i'm half-Chinese" or "my father is Mexican"...but won't say what the OTHER half is, as if it's a *given.*
(Tellingly, multiracial ppl with brown parents of diff heritages don’t do this. And lots of people with one parent who is a white immigrant to the US will point out their parents’ nationality/country of origin. But ppl with a parent who’s just regular-ass USian white? NOAP.)
soooo...you're white.
uh huh.
(imagine thinking the US govt is "color-blind")
(imagine thinking the US govt is "color-blind")
are white ppl okay?
Left Twitter clearly isn't much better at thinking through whiteness 😬
re: the census...
but also, "half white" is itself a weird construction; that's not exactly how these things work. (if you're a person of color with a white parent but are not read as white, are you "half-white"...or do you simply have a white parent?)
put more simply: race isn't genetic, and the fact of a white parent does not automatically translate to a child being white *in the world.*
i think @eveewing said this but: having a white parent doesn't make her "half-white" any more than having a father made her "half-male."
i think @eveewing said this but: having a white parent doesn't make her "half-white" any more than having a father made her "half-male."
maybe the confusion is around what the census is asking us to enumerate. is it meant to be a list of Person X's heritages, or a list of how they personally identify, racially?
and i think the physics of this stuff is different for, say, people who might have been in the canceled MENA census category (Middle Eastern/North African), or multiracial people, or white people (like the above) who just have feels about thinking through their whiteness.
