“What are you?”
A patient asked me that early in my career. They weren’t the last. I was only four years into my life as a first responder when I watched a 757 crash into the World Trade Center. After 911, that question became commonplace, as patients and the public alike noted my brown skin and dark hair.
“What are you?” “Where are you from?”
“Where are your parents from?”
I took a mischievous pleasure in answering truthfully. “I’m a paramedic.”
“Outside Dayton.”
“My dad was born in DC.”
I, of course, knew what they were asking. They wanted to know my ethnicity and, by extension, my place in the hierarchy of things different. It is a tragic truth about the state of our world that we feel compelled to categorize and place limits on one another.
I believe this particular behavior, this anxiety-driven need to know “what” a person is, is the result of living in a culture that has set its default definition of a person to white, straight, cisgender, Christian, nondisabled, non-neurodivergent male. A culture born out of a post-enlightenment, Eurocentric paradigm that has been obsolete since its inception.
A human being is a beautiful and dynamic creation, and it is well past time that we shaped our culture to reflect that. We do not need to place limitations on ourselves or each other. Now is the time to make room for all of us in all our wonderful complexity. We all deserve the freedom to be our whole selves and, in my opinion, the best place from which to launch this revolution is the humble demographic form.
The facts of my heritage are far less exotic than most imagined. I am not Egyptian, Armenian, Brazilian, or even Italian — folks do love guessing. My mom is white. My dad was Black. Both the plain old American variety, which makes me … well, it’s complicated.
My driver’s license says that I’m Black. As far as the government is concerned, that’s me. But that official stamp of identity has had little effect on the opinions of my peers. I could never count up all of the times I have heard, “You don’t sound Black,” “You don’t look black,” “You don’t act Black.”
On the other hand, I have never once been labeled white, despite having every claim to that identity. My genetics break down to exactly 50/50. I checked. My spouse is white. My neighbors are white and my co-workers and nearly all of my friends are white. Physically and culturally, I am as white as I am Black. The whole question is pointless, though, because neither category fits who I truly am. I don’t identify as either Black or white. I am bi-racial, not that anyone has ever asked that.
