Okay, but if you turned around and said, "Oh, J.Lo, only in America would you get treated as not-white! Because in Britain, you are white!" she might say, "Okay, so I'm the whitest-looking girl in my family. Look at my aunties. Look at my cousins. I AM NOT WHITE." I don't think Jennifer Lopez would call herself white, even if she's probably from a white/native mix that was higher on the white. And I further don't think she'd exactly be down with "Oh, I don't think of you as not-white!" There's sort of this quiet, "well, doesn't everyone want to be white?" assumption in there, or why not assume "mixed" (which is still 'not white') instead of tanned Mediterranean?
I know that it's a different context and I know you're not going to assume "Puerto Rican" or "Mexican" of the person walking along the street in the UK (I've seen the numbers. Utah is less white than the UK. UTAH), but there is that hint of white privilege in assuming that the tanned person is white, or even wants to be assumed white, unless there's a seriously visible marker, like 'undeniably' non-white features or skin tone, or say, something that marks the person as Middle Eastern.
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Date: 2007-04-09 07:27 am (UTC)I know that it's a different context and I know you're not going to assume "Puerto Rican" or "Mexican" of the person walking along the street in the UK (I've seen the numbers. Utah is less white than the UK. UTAH), but there is that hint of white privilege in assuming that the tanned person is white, or even wants to be assumed white, unless there's a seriously visible marker, like 'undeniably' non-white features or skin tone, or say, something that marks the person as Middle Eastern.