They begin with reflections in social and personal mirrors.
They end somewhere between chips on shoulders and narcissism.
By William Wetherall
Some of my stigmas caused me considerable anxiety. In time my social shoulders became strong enough to bear the burden of humoring people who seemed concerned about who they thought I was merely by seeing my eyes or nose, or hearing the way I spoke.
It took a few years, but eventually I realized that it was unfair of me to blame others for having the same fault I had -- a normal mix of natural human curiosity, with passively acquired attitudes and behaviors toward people according to how I reflexively attached ready-made labels to their being.
Beautiful, ugly, tall, short, black, white, coordinated, awkward, able, crippled, bright, dumb -- and countless other boxes I had built in my mind as I learned -- at home, in school, from media, and by ample example -- to differentiate foods I liked and didn't, good snakes from bad, friends from foes.
Childhood stigmas
Most people want to be noticed -- but not necessarily for the reasons that other people may notice them.
My shortness and cuteness, before adolescence turned me into a male chauvinist pig of average height, got my toothless grin front-and-center in more than one elementary school class picture -- usually between the cutest girls. Had I stayed that short -- would I now be wearing elevated shoes, and daring the guy on the next bar stool to call me Shorty?
I went through a spell of wondering why some of my mother's friends made such a fuss over me. Did they really see her beautiful eyes in mine? Hopefully the genes I got from her drew everyone's attention away from those I inherited from my father's nose, nostrils, and upper lip. In time, though, pimples commanded my share of the mirror time I had to divide with my brother and sister.
I also had to wonder why some kids giggled or snickered. Because they understood why, after gym classes began from the 7th grade, the boys who had seen my developing inguinal hernia in the locker room had started calling me Balls? In the halls? In front of the girls? I left that nickname, along with part of my heart, in San Francisco when moving to Grass Valley near the end of the 8th grade.
Or because I stammered? When I was in college half a century ago, someone etched "The Talking Seal" under my name on the leather case of my sliderule. Then, because I could not hide the sliderule, I hid my feelings by joining the laughter of those who noticed the remark.
Much later, in Japan, I found myself somewhat self-conspicuous because of my putative race. People looked at me in ways I had never been looked at in the United States. Only then did I begin to wonder how some people must feel about my probing eyes.
Until then I had grown accustomed to all manner of official forms, in the United States, which called for me to write or check "Caucasian" or "White" in a race box. The racial classifications in my own mind were habits acquired purely through social osmosis. I had never before then given much thought to racialism.
Military race boxes
My DA FORM 214 "Report of Transfer or Discharge" -- which honorably released me, in 1966, from my 3-year enlistment in the United States Army in 1963 -- has a race box called "7a. RACE". On the form, "RACE" has been replaced by a black bar and "NA" is typed in the box. "b. SEX" says "MALE" and c, d, e, and f are COLOR HAIR, COLOR EYES, HEIGHT, and WEIGHT. Race, in other words, had been the highest order of physical trait on this form.
The standalone box called "7. RACE" on my DA FORM 20 "Enlisted Qualification Record" says "CAU" -- as contemporary Army regulations required that one "Enter the first three letters of one of the following: Caucasian, Negroid, Mongolian, Indian (American), or Malayan. Example: Caucasian will be entered as Cau."
An American friend has a 1965 "U.S. Forces Permit For Civilian Vehicle" with "C" in the race box. I asked him what it meant. He said "Chutzpah". I thought it meant "Clown". For me, at birth, it could have meant "Clubfoot" -- because I had one.
By the time I was old enough to look at old baby pictures and ask about the cast on my foot, the deformity had been corrected. One of my earliest memories is of my mother taking me to the store on Irving Street where she always bought my shoes. I clearly remember the time the man said I no longer needed a wedge on one of my heels.
Hawaiian dreams
In 2008, an American woman who had served in the Women's Army Corps between 1958 and 1960 applied to the Army Board for Correction of Military Record to change the racial classification on her military records from "Malayan" to Hawaiian". She argued that she was "Hawaiian-born" and her family was "all Hawaiian" -- and alleged that the recruiter had probably changed her classification.
The board reviewed the woman's request despite the decades which had passed since the lapse of the 3-year statute of limitation that usually applies to corrections of military records. It found that "Malayan" had consistently appeared on a long list of forms, from enlistment to discharge, which the woman had partly completed and/or signed. Moreover, she was unable to document her claim that she was "Hawaiian".
The board determined that "The evidence presented does not demonstrate the existence of a probable error or injustice." It therefore declined to accept her request.
NOYB
Governments that have legalized race boxes are bound by their own bureaucratic obsessions with racial classifications -- as well as by legal procedures related to changing information in old records. The board was not free to say -- "You want to be Hawaiian? No problem. You're Hawaiian." Nor, apparently, was it free to say -- "The only thing we can do is strike out 'Race' and change the entry to 'NA'."
"NA" means "not applicable". I would prefer "NOYB" -- "none of your business". Army regs would have reduced this to "NOY" or "NON" -- and not "N", which had long been reserved for something else.
Had I been the board, I would have amended the woman's record as she had requested. And I would have told her -- "If you want to be something else next week or next year, just make another request."
Despite my cynicism about racial classification, I believe that people should be free to be what they want. If someone wants to be "Hawaiian" rather than "Malayan" -- or just "human" or "animal" -- or "Martian" or "Nothing" -- that's fine with me.
My crayon box will accept any pigment of the imaginary racial rainbow, visible or invisible. But anyone who shoves a race box in my face -- today -- will get a smile and a polite "No thanks."
I cannot control what other people think I am. My only choices are to get upset or not care. I have found all manner of ways to parry sticks and dodge stones -- but names now hurt only if I choose to feel offended. And I choose not to be defensive.
Ends of the spectrum
The pathologies of racialism -- to return to the underlying cause of a truly global and worrisome stigma -- are everywhere. I see the extremes of racial stigma, both in the United States, where race boxes are proliferating like superweeds -- and in Japan, where some people want to import American-style race boxes.
At one end of the stigma spectrum are people who are doomed to suffer delusions of reference in public until they die. They feel glances that are not there. They become upset by glances they take to be stares. Glances that linger long enough to be stares, linger in their thoughts all day and the next.
Not everyone at this extreme becomes clinically sociophobic. Many, though, suffer anxiety just thinking about stepping out the door, and have difficulty truly relaxing in public. And those who have trouble containing anger risk venting their hostility on others.
At the other end of the stigma spectrum in Japan -- which has no race boxes -- are some people who dream of having a race box all their own. "Zainichi" t-shirts. "Hapa Power!" buttons. "Naturalized Citizen" bumper stickers.
Some publicists for such "communities" claim their intention is to destroy racial boundaries. In my view, though, they merely define new political territories that end up being defended with the same sort of prideful narcissism that created race boxes in the first place.
10 September 2009
Postscript 1 I no longer worry about my nostrils. Their main disadvantage is their capacity for collecting pollen. Much bigger, for me, is the pleasure they bring the babies I now and then cuddle, whose fingers find them utterly irresistible.
Postscript 2 My clubfoot never had a chance to nurture a stigma. Now and then I recall it -- either in nostalgic thoughts about my mother, and how anxious she must have felt about my foot and stammer -- or when wondering what my life would have been like had I been born where people had no idea how to straighten a foot that got twisted in a womb.
Postscript 3 I still have the sliderule, and now and then I take it from a drawer to make sure it, and my brain, still work. Today, though, the remark on the case draws a smile -- at the thought that someone went to the trouble to notice that, despite my stammer, which has all but entirely vanished, I liked to talk. And still do.
