Editor’s note: This commentary is by Paul D. Manganiello, MD MPH, of Norwich, a emeritus professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College. He is president of the GunSense Vermont Education Fund.
[W]hat does it mean to be white, or better, what is being “white”? I’m not talking about a color, but about race. I was born in 1948, the post World War II era and grew up in a white Western European neighborhood in Jersey City, New Jersey. My grandparents had emigrated from Southern Italy in the early 1900s. Those waves of Catholic Italian immigrants, as were the waves of all early 20th century European immigrants (Irish, Jews, Poles, etc.), were not initially accepted by the previously established Western European immigrants (English, Scot, German) as being “quite white enough.” It would take decades before Italians, as well as the other western Europeans who followed, to be assimilated into the majority white society and have all of the privileges, which whiteness conferred: quality primary and secondary education which then resulted in the opportunity for higher education and higher paying jobs; good housing; safe neighborhoods; and not being subjected to discriminating laws..
In this post-Obama era, we have to ask the question: Does the designation of race really matter any more, or is it helping to perpetuate racism and systemic poverty? What purpose does it serve to check off the White, Black, Latino, or Other box on those surveys we fill out? There are some medical conditions, which may affect one racial population more frequently than others, but those diseases are usually related to the social and behavioral determinants of health, which oftentimes are related to poverty, and which disproportionately affect one segment of the population more than the other, i.e. white as opposed to black. Racism however, not necessarily race, can however disproportionately affect the health of our brown dark-skinned residents. Ignoring an individual’s economic class status, the chronic stress that blacks experience daily, from being profiled in a white society, contributes to their poor health outcomes when compared to whites, i.e. blacks, even in Vermont, proportionately are stopped by police more frequently than their fair-skinned counterparts. Those blacks living in poor urban centers on any given morning may not see their children come safely home in the evening.
Again, we need to question what does it mean to designate oneself as white? We now have the capability through commercially available DNA genealogy kits (MyHeritageDNA, Ancestry, etc.) to trace our personal family lineage. Sometimes individuals have reported getting results that were quite unexpected; they apparently were not as white as they expected! Hopefully, in the future we will all come to realize through this new technology that we are all in fact related.
It seems that Donald Trump, with his mantra of “Making America Great Again,” and his attempts to erase the Obama legacy (our first black president, born to a white mother), wants to take us back to the 1950s, when blacks were just beginning to gain their long-awaited civil rights. It was only in 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court (Loving vs. Virginia) invalidated state laws, which prohibited interracial marriages. Throughout my lifetime I have the good fortune of witnessing many, too numerous to count, wonderful (and unfortunately at times not so wonderful) societal and cultural events. Recently the marriage of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry (a “blue blood” British aristocrat) was just one such wonderful event. As I watched them ride off in their Jaguar, I couldn’t help but think that someday they might be blessed with a “black and blue” blooded child
Today, I don’t view our country as some homogeneous melting pot; rather I like to think of it more like a stew where we can savor the individual ingredients, which enhance the entire dish. Some of us are the carrots, some of us the potatoes, and for the non-vegetarians, some of us the beef. We will not get beyond racism until we stop the false paradigm of race, it is anachronistic. We need to stop the perpetuation of white privilege. I for one, when asked to check off the race box, will no longer do “White” or “Caucasian,” but either Other or, if possible, write in the designation “Homo sapien.”
