Race: “The Old Categories are Inadequate”

Growing up in South Carolina, my community of Southern-born, white-skinned, Cuban-Americans consisted of my brothers and two cousins. Of course, none of us understood at the time that we presented a challenge to traditional Southern notions about race. But we did understand what and who these notions and labels permitted us to be.

So my five-year-old brother Manolito told people his name was Christopher, and I occasionally tried to convince others that we were not Cuban but Canadian. Twenty-five years ago, there was no space for complications. I was ashamed not only to be Cuban, but I was ashamed not to be white.

I identify myself very clearly now. In some ways people also respond differently to me. Attitudes about race in the South have drastically changed along with Southern populations, but the willingness of anglos to continue to define others in a racist context has not changed. Some anglos congratulate me on the luck of a fair complexion and what they view as guaranteed success via minority status. Leftists congratulate me on my automatic and symbolic revolutionary Cuban status. And other progressives say — or at least think — “Yeah, but you don’t really count.”

Changing attitudes in the South do not begin to dismantle or even address the social and political system that allows anglos, within and outside the movement, to objectify “difference” and consequently hold the power to redefine “difference.”

The old categories are inadequate — not just because the growing number of Latinos in the South add more categories, but because the anglo system of categorizing people will always be racist. The power to identify and control difference presently resides within anglo-dominated culture.

The obstacles Southerners face in defining themselves has an impact on how we organize. Without a change in consciousness, social justice and social change are impossible. One of the greatest obstacles to organizing in the South is not only our inability to overcome racism, but our historic inability to overcome race itself. The same categories that excluded me 25 years ago continue to exclude Southerners from progressive organizing.

I know who I am. That is what counts, not whether or not anglos have enough visible people of color working with them or that everyone comfortably assumes their anglo-designated category. Change in the South must be accompanied by the creation of a space to legitimately define “difference” from a non-anglo perspective.