The concept of “whiteness” is probably foreign to a lot of people. Race, as we popularly view it, is something simple. Unambiguous. Either you have white skin, or you don’t. In reality, who or what qualifies as “white” is far more complex.
The George Zimmerman verdict shined a very public light on this concept.
Was George Zimmerman a white man, as the prevailing narrative described? Or was he a Hispanic man, a minority just like Trayvon?
In reality, his ethnicity was Afro-Peruvian on his mother’s side and German-American on his father’s side. The difficulty here comes from the fact that race is, in fact, not a real thing. By that, I mean scientists have no conception of race.
It does not exist in nature. Vague groupings of ethnicities can be made via genetic haplogroups, and lineages can be traced back to certain ethnicities. There is nothing in nature that says a dark-skinned man from Sierra Leone and a similarly-toned woman from Madagascar, 4,000 miles away, have anything in common besides skin tone. Similarly, a Slavic woman from Moscow has little in common with a man from Iceland.
Grouping these people together into a vague category of “black” and “white” is something we humans have invented, hence the difficulty in tagging someone of mixed ethnicities as a particular race. There’s no objective standard for it, and while the U.S. census does its best with demographics, there will always be people who slip through the cracks.
Have you ever noticed on census forms that there is no option for Arab people?
If they have fairer skin, like many Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians, they may feel comfortable choosing “white.” Technically the Middle East is in Asia, so they could realistically also choose Asian. However, this category is typically associated with people from East and South Asia, not the Middle East.
Is the dilemma clear?
This is not to say that race does not matter.
As a white, third-generation American of European heritage (Greek-Irish), who does not speak with any kind of foreign accent or possess a particularly foreign surname, I carry an immense amount of status in society. People who do not fit that description carry far less. This power given to me is arbitrary and does not reflect my achievements or moral character.
Race matters then because we say it matters. When white people treat other white people better than non-white people, and when our institutions and social structures are built around this assumption, the system becomes self-perpetuating.
This brings me to the case of Zemir Begić.
A brief recap for those who do not follow local St. Louis news: a Bosnian man, Zemir Begić, was beaten to death by a group of three teenagers, two identified by the police as black and one as Hispanic. The brutality of the crime rocked the local Bosnian community, a community of immigrants who came to St. Louis within the past twenty years in order to escape genocide at the hands of the Serbian government. So, soon after the grand jury results, St. Louis was alive with the spirit of protest. In that light, many local Bosnians gathered in the street to protest the crime. It was a bit unclear what exactly they were protesting, as all three suspects were apprehended within 24 hours of the crime, but a visceral reaction to a shocking tragedy in a tight-knit community can be expected.
However, conservative pundits online and in the media were quite sure what the Bosnian community was protesting. (In the wake of the crime, I waded through quite literally hundreds and hundreds of comments from white conservatives on the case.) To them, it was a clear-cut case of “black-on-white crime,” typical black “thugs” attacking innocent white Americans for no reason other than their ethnicity. A hate crime.
The St. Louis Metropolitan Police (a separate entity from the St. Louis County Police in Ferguson) stated in their investigation that the crime was not racially motivated and that all three perpetrators had been apprehended.
Interestingly, these white conservatives, who decry the very concept of hate crimes, defend the police to all ends and publicly supported Darren Wilson, suddenly suspected the police of lying and insisted the crime was an anti-white attack.
A video surfaced of a resident (who did not witness the crime) paraphrasing the Ferguson protestors, who marched through the neighborhood several days earlier, as saying, “Kill the white people” (no one has reported any protestors using this chant). Conservative pundits like InfoWars’s conspiracy-theorist-in-chief Alex Jones misinterpreted the video and spread word that the perpetrators had yelled, “Kill the white people” before murdering Begić, despite Begić’s partner and friend, whom were in the car with him before he was murdered, both denying this.
His partner, Arijana Mujkanovic, whom Begić died defending, gave an interview to the UK Daily Mail saying she believed the attack was not racially motivated but rather, the result of a conflict Begić had with a former family friend.
Another man was non-fatally attacked by the same group of teens down the street.
Seldin Dzananovic, in an interview with The Gateway Pundit, was explicitly asked whether or not the teens made any racial comments to him, which he denied, saying that they had only insulted his girlfriend as they passed and began attacking him when Dzananovic responded. Many other members of the Bosnian community stated that they agreed with the police report that the crime, while tragic and brutal, was not racially motivated.
This narrative being pushed by conservative bloggers and pundits, however untrue, hits at a deeper issue. The fundamental nature of their claims depends on categorizing these Bosnian men as “white.”
They have fair skin, to be sure, and if that’s the only criteria for whiteness, they pass. However, Bosnians are immigrants.
Many of the first-generation immigrants like Begić do not speak English well or at all. Their Slavic last names are difficult for some Americans to pronounce. Almost all Bosnians are Muslim, though many are non-practicing.
Does this sound like the description of a privileged white person to anyone?
I grew up in South St. Louis, an area with the highest Bosnian population anywhere in the world outside of Bosnia itself. I observed racism towards these people over and over again. Whether for their religion, their accent, their names or their immigrant status, white people did not treat them anywhere near as well as they treated other people. If you were not Bosnian, you did not go to any of the many delicious Bosnian bakeries or restaurants in the neighborhood. My mother would always make a comment when she found out that a new gyro shop down the street was run by Bosnian people (although this came far more from her Greek heritage than a place of racism).
These same white conservatives who claim this murder case as an example of “white genocide” and call for the lynching of its perpetrators (yes, I actually saw both of those phrases used) would not and do not hesitate to trash the Bosnian community for its immigrant status and their adherence to Islam.
The hypocrisy and cynicism, then, of those who claim this murder as an anti-white hate crime is evident. If it was a hate crime at all, it would be a hate crime against Begić’s immigrant status or his religion, not against his hesitant membership among the ranks of the white.
We see here the problem with our society’s construction of race.
Fair-skinned minorities, whether Bosnian or otherwise, are never considered white until it is politically convenient to include them under that label. If a Bosnian man is worshipping in a mosque, he is a subversive immigrant ruining America. If he is killed by a black person, he is a pure white victim, an example of everything good about white people.
These white commentators are using the Bosnian community in St. Louis as a cudgel with which to beat black people by proxy. They get none of the benefits of whiteness, but when it comes down to whites versus blacks, they’re one of us.
We saw this in the Zimmerman case as well, only in reverse. Zimmerman, in the eyes of white racists, became suddenly a Hispanic man when it came time to claim that he was not motivated by race.
We broaden and narrow our definition of whiteness when convenient, using race as a tool of oppression, as it always has been.
A parallel can be drawn between the current state of Bosnian immigrants and Irish immigrants in the 1800s.
Noel Ignatiev, in his seminal book “How the Irish Became White,” describes how the Irish were not seen as white, despite their fair skin and European heritage, much like today’s Bosnians. Their “Papism,” as Catholicism was called, was seen as un-American. Their accents and their immigrant status communicated that they were here to take our jobs and displace us white folk. Today, though, a white man claiming oppression because of his Irish heritage or Catholic faith is laughed out of the room.
After generations of assimilation, these traits have been subsumed into the cultural void that is whiteness. Ignatiev details how the Irish used anti-blackness as a means of gaining acceptance into the fold of white privilege. Support for slavery among the Irish community was rampant. As some of the poorest immigrant laborers in America, the Irish could only demonize the last rung on the ladder, the black worker, slave or free. Instead of uniting as a working class, the Irish Americans fought for black-exclusive labor unions. The vigor of their anti-black hatred painted them as white in the eyes of the WASPs.
We see this happening again with the Bosnian community, though not intentionally.
Through the white racists’ misinterpretation of the Bosnian response to Zemir Begić’s murder as an act of anti-blackness, they are quick to declare Bosnians white. The Bosnian community, by and large, has expressed a desire to separate themselves from this narrative. They are not a monolithic block of course, and I have both seen and heard some anti-black sentiment from Bosnians in the St. Louis area. In this case, however, many in the community have stepped forward and said they bear no ill will to blacks and do not see the crime as an act of racial hatred.
When Deepa Iyer, former leader of South Asian Americans Leading Together, visited campus last month, she made a point I felt was prescient.
She exhorted other South Asians not to give into the fallacy of the “model minority,” not to ally themselves with white anti-black hatred in order to gain the petty status benefits it would gain them but instead, to stand in solidarity with all other minorities against the universal threat of white supremacism.
Thankfully, it seems the Bosnian community, in their response to white racists’ co-opting of this horrible tragedy, has taken Ms. Iyer’s advice.
Robert McAuliffe is a junior international studies major from St. Louis, Missouri.
