What Makes Me White

All of my ancestors, according to my DNA, are from northwestern Europe. Most of them were Irish, a little over a quarter of them were English or Welsh, a little under a fifth of them were French, and about 3% of them were Swedish or Dutch.

But that’s not what makes me white.

Many African peoples, when northwestern Europeans first returned to the mother continent, referred to them not as “white people” or “fair-skinned people,” but as mzungu, which translates as “wanderer.”

So it’s not my skin’s contrast to theirs that makes me white.

My skin’s pigmentation is a product of my evolutionary chain. Its genetic heritage can (currently) be traced back to roughly 7,700 years ago, when at least seven individuals in southern Sweden had two gene variants that “lead to depigmentation, and therefore, pale skin” and a third variant, “which causes blue eyes and may also contribute to light skin and blond hair.” These gene variants were perhaps naturally selected to maximize vitamin D synthesis in the northern latitudes, where it is harder for the human body to get vitamin D thanks to a decrease of ultra-violet radiation in northern sunlight.

But my ancestors’ evolutionary journey into the northern latitudes does not make me white. If it did, the first northern Europeans to reach central Africa wouldn’t have been called mzungu.

What makes me white is the Atlantic slave trade, the belief by a population that would come to define themselves as white that they were more significant, more deserving, more…human than those they defined as not-white.

Race requires racism to exist. It is the excuse the powerful use to justify their power to themselves. It allows them to normalize for themselves their dominance over an entire population.

The first central Africans to see northern Europeans saw a people who were lost, people who were aimlessly moving across the land.

The northern Europeans, on the other hand, saw the central Africans as slaves to be used, as resources to be plucked up and burnt out. The difference in skin pigmentation did not create that difference in power. 

My skin doesn’t make me white. My DNA doesn’t make me white.

The need to justify my population’s social and institutional domination over cohabiting populations makes me white.

“You have to dominate,” my white President told the nation’s governors. “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time.”

Fuck. That. Guy.

Black Lives Matter.