Insurgents' Ink: European vs. White

Saturday, April 9, 2016

European vs. White

The importance of names has been on my mind lately--see my last post, "Call me by My True Names." It began with something I had never seen before at my latest trip to the doctor, a new doctor. On the forms for new patients was a term I'd never seen or considered for myself: European. There was no "White," just as there was no "Black" or "Yellow" or "Brown" or "Red."

I think this is an important change and have been using it since on all forms I complete. Not checking "White" but writing in European in the "Other" box. My reasons?

1) The current PC terms for racial categories are based on geographical location, not color.

2) Why should white people be the only exception to this? I'm not offended at being called white and am not, therefore, seeking a kinder, gentler term for myself. I simply think we should have consistency because...

3)Race is social, not scientific. There is no biological basis for race. Race is an entirely social construct. That being the case, it makes much more sense to use the geographical categories to classify ourselves as people.

4) White being the only non-geographical identifier, sets us--as ever--apart from. This distinction reinforces the idea that White is the standard. That Whites have no country, no race, no culture. Whites are then positioned as "normal," the standard against which all others are compared. Non-Whites, then, become the only ones of place, culture, and color. The truth is, of course, that Whites do have countries of origin, have a socially constructed race, and have just as much culture as any other group of people. White people simply have the privilege, and incredibly powerful advantage, of not having to notice it because it is everywhere. It is The Norm. We never push against it or disrupt it because of our race...though we may based on other things such as wealth--or lack thereof--gender, gender classification, sexuality, immigrant status, language, education, region...

What say all of you? Am I right? Should European be the term we use and is that change as important as I think it is?

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Amber Dickey- Co-Editor
She received an M.A. in English with an emphasis on literature and a B.A. in English with an American literature concentration from CSU Sacramento. As an undergraduate, Amber won second place in the Bazzanella Literary Awards for her critical analysis of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. She is an avid fan of the Lost Generation writers, Héléne Cixous, bell hooks, Judith Butler, and many, many others. Her interests lie in the arts, poverty and race studies, gender studies, queer theory, pedagogy, and the Feminist Movement debate. She credits her mother's strength and perseverance as a single mother of three with inspiring her to work hard for everything she wants and never take shit from anyone.

Autumn Newman- Co-Editor
Autumn is a feminist new-formalist poet who received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast low-residency program where she had the opportunity to work with poets Annie Finch, Baron Wormser and many other talented writers. She also holds a BA in English from California State University, Sacramento, where the poet and professor Joshua McKinney infected her with a seemingly innocent, yet unyielding, addiction to formal poetics. Autumn’s poems have appeared in various small poetry journals and most recently online at Able Muse and Cider Press Review. Aside from poetry and feminism, Autumn’s passions include: pedagogy, graphic novels, music, film, domestic violence education, race relations and all issues that affect and contribute to the unequal power structure of our society.

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Insurgents’ Ink is a labor of love, and at no moment were the labor pains more evident than when we struggled to come up with an appropriate name for this blog. French feminist Héléne Cixous in her well-known piece from the 1970s, Laugh of the Medusa, famously explicated her concept of insurgency. In it, she urges her female readers to commit an act of insurgency by the simple act of writing, an act, she argues, that allows females to actively resist the historical imperative that women remain in the background. Writing allows women to reclaim their bodies and their minds.

Of course, the term “insurgent” has taken on a far more insidious connotation in our post-9/11 world; read anachronistically, Cixous seems to be likening écriture féminine to terrorism. While we certainly do not wish to take Cixous’ words out of context, we got a chuckle out of the female-writer-as-terrorist connection. But more importantly, we wanted to acknowledge the feminist thinkers who have come before us.

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