I'm an Albino Black Person

Sorry for two in one day, but this is technically from yesterday at the dentist.



So, I have problems with being Caucasian, the first being that my old roommate, Marianne, decided it would be funny to mess with me and make me believe that I didn’t look Caucasian. One night as we’re falling asleep she asks, “So, do you mark the Caucasian box on things?” and I said, “Uh, yeah, why?” and she said, “Because you aren’t Caucasian.” A few weeks later a guy who has never met Marianne asks me in the middle of conversation, “So what ethnicity are you?” I didn’t know how to answer, at first I was wondering who put him up to it, but Marianne honestly had never come into contact with this guy, finally I said, “I’m just white”. So it became kind of a joke for us and since I have a cousin who’s Caucasian-ness is also constantly in question it continues here at home.
Lately the concept of an Albino Black Person has been raised. I think I know what they are talking about, but to be facetious I said, “Isn’t that a white person?”
But other than that, I do get bored sometimes with the idea of being Caucasian, or as we like to call ourselves, white, so I think I will begin to refer to myself as an albino black person.
I find it especially interesting when I’m at the dentist office and am perusing the covers to all the magazines. Not only is my dentist office one of the only dentist offices in the state where you could read the Ensign or Book of Mormon while waiting, or if you so desired grab a pass along card (this is what happens when your dentist becomes a Stake President) but he’s probably the only white male Mormon who subscribes to Ebony magazine. Yes, I have thought that possibly someone else in the office is the subscriber, but his name is on the cover and the staff is all white except for one Latino woman.
Yes, this magazine interested me, and I wanted to pick it up and flip through the pages and read a few articles but I felt as though a middle class white girl isn’t allowed to do that. So I read the cover more than once. One little headline read, “How to be a rich, black woman.” I thought to myself, “I don’t think that article can help me.” Sure, it could help me learn to be a rich woman, but not a black one. Then there was another article, “Black men talk about what gets them to commit.” I didn’t realize that it took different things to get a black man to commit than a white man, but you see I could easily be wrong. The point is, I wanted to read these articles but didn’t feel like I was allowed to because they were very race specific. I think that it’s interesting that if you saw a magazine with headlines such as, “How to be a successful, rich, white woman” or “How to get a white man to commit” those magazine editors would be in a pot of boiling water. But maybe if I were on the other side I would think that those magazines that seem Race-neutral are really just the magazines for white people, maybe we can’t get rich the same way, maybe we don’t have the same type of problems with guys. I don’t know, I claim to know nothing and that’s my safest bet…