My wife is a dermatologist and as such, skin is her livelihood and I hear about it a lot. Your skin is your largest organ, it's also your fastest growing. Skin protects our innards, it insulates us from all sorts of external buggery.
Skin also tends to be the first thing many people see or recognize in someone else. That person is brown, black, pale, white, yellow, purple --quick, does anyone know CPR?
I have never had a hard time with the color of my skin, (edit: that's a lie, I can elaborate in comments) but I think it can make other people feel uncomfortable at times. My last name is Clausnitzer and I'm pretty brown. Naturally, this raises some eyebrows, which is fine but what's annoying is the inevitable, "so, where are you from" question. When I say, "Michigan," it's not the answer they're looking for. They want to hear "Saudi Arabia" or some other brown, scary place. Saying that my father and mother are both second generation American citizens whose parents are German and Mexican isn't what they want to hear either, it's too complex. They want the Mexican part. How did a brown guy like you get a German name? Adopted?
Anyways, I want to hear about you. Are you comfortable in your skin? Even if you are as white as Christmas, there are times when we don't feel like we belong. Perhaps it's a gender identification thing, a ginger thing, a curly hair when I want straight hair thing, a black in a white town thing or a white in a black town thing...
When have you felt the most comfortable? When the least?
I thank you in advance for your answers:
lil and eightbitsamurai coffeesp00ns -I'd love to hear your take on this.
Full disclosure, I am considering a podcast on this topic. steve
I was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white boy that can also claim a Jewish grandmother and right-of-return in Israel. One set of grandparents were kicked out of Harvard and Radcliffe respectively; the other set were kicked out of dirt farming Bastrop County TX by the Dust Bowl. One grandmother was a head librarian at a university, the other a telephone operator. One grandfather was a union plumber, the other a regional president of the AFL. In the company town I grew up in, all the sons of white privilege had their toilets cleaned by the brown people down the hill; one set of grandparents chummed around with the president of the "company" while the other set lived amongst the proles. My parents spent a combined 14 years in South America for the Peace Corps while I hung around all the hispanic and native american kids.
I'm as white as white can be and have lived all my life on the boundary between WASP and minority. I can play every privilege card and have seen every minority card played. Through one bloodline I traced my lineage far enough to know that my ancestors were routinely hung for stealing the horses of one of my friend's ancestors in Ireland; through another I have great-great-grandfather Mordechai Horowitz who gave up his jewelry store in Moscow for a greengrocer's stand in New York ahead of the Russo-Japanese war.
I'm white. I have it easy. But I've spent my life amongst those who don't so I know just how easy I have it. If I can't be comfortable in my skin nobody can. It's fashionable these days for privileged white kids to piss and moan about how rough they have it but the fact remains: white kids get the benefit of the doubt in all things at all times. I feel like we owe it to the world to be aware of it and to do everything we can to extend the same courtesy to everyone we meet.