The Difference that Makes a Difference
I was a divorced single mom with health problems going deeper in debt every month. I lived like a mile from my parents' house and if I was in serious "I can't afford groceries" type trouble, I would call my mom and walk to the grocery store and she would drive up and hand me cash and drive off like a clandestine drug deal in the open.
On one occasion, I guess it was summer and she was in dark sunglasses and I didn't immediately recognize her. I was baffled by the strange Black woman driving up to me.
In her youth, my mother looked somewhat like Lucille Ball with pale blue eyes and olive skin. Her distinctive coloring made her highly recognizable, but with sunglasses hiding her pale blue grey eyes, I didn't immediately recognize her.
I got my father's pale Irish complexion and burned horribly in my youth. My mom was a sun worshiper and avid reader who had friends and other means to have pool access though we didn't have one. She frequently took us to the pool and kept an eye on us while reading and working on her tan.
She picked weeds in a string bikini and shorts well into her forties. She needed the shorts to have a pocket for her keys because if she set foot outside, dad would lock her out. He was something of a paranoid fruitcake who habitually checked that all doors and windows were locked, by God.
My understanding is that the Black American gene pool is about 70 percent European. My mother's skin color was identical to many light-skinned Blacks and I once discussed that with an online friend with a Black husband, German relatives and an interracial child and she commented on how aggravating the racism was because she had German relatives whose skin color was identical to that of her child.
If you couldn't see Mom's very pale, distinctive blue grey eyes, she was potentially someone you could mistake as Black, a fact she didn't really want to hear.
When National Geographic published drawings of Lucy, I was a child and based on Lucy's high cheek bones, I commented to my mother "She looks like you." My mother was visibly uncomfortable.
When I met the future ex, I had relatively short hair for a girl and he had relatively long hair for a guy. His blond hair was longer than mine and unruly and he desperately tried to control it and keep it combed down in a hair helmet.
I took him clothes shopping and got him a short haircut so he could lose the Revenge of the Nerds vibe. Before that, instead of your usual "dating," we often went swimming together at his house and his mother kept his little sisters out of our hair and let us have a little privacy.
After swimming, he would towel dry his hair and briefly have a massive blonde afro.
I have participated in online discussions where people from other countries have a completely different set of mental models about ethnicity based on ethnic groups particular to their country. I'm fairly confident most Brazilians find American politics baffling and likely see "Black American" politicians like Kamala Harris and Obama as White.
I'm aware that different demographics trend towards having sets of physical traits that add up to a distinctive appearance. That's not really what causes racism because it's not really what makes us meaningfully different.
Skin color or ethnicity is a proxy for membership in a group with different life experiences, different social status, different debfacto rights and sometimes different de jure rights.
It's a proxy that isn't ALWAYS accurate. My failure to in some important way fit in with White American culture informs my opinions of the MMIW crisis.
But I also don't really fit into Native culture. I fit nowhere and belong nowhere, making me an equal opportunity offender desperately trying to figure out how to make that a feature, not a bug, and seemingly failing spectacularly.