Tales from a whitewashed childhood

Once when I was about 17 or 18, I had a bunch of friends over at my house, and served them hummus and chips. One (white) friend told me she had never even heard of hummus until recently. She said that was because she had grown up poor, and hummus was a luxury food enjoyed by the middle class in the U.S. At the time, I took it as an example of my class privilege and found it interesting that our differing class backgrounds had introduced us to different foods.

As I look back now, I realize how whitewashed I had been. It didn't occur to me at the time that eating hummus had nothing to do with my family's socioeconomic class and everything to do with the fact that my family is Iranian and Jewish, and that's what we eat. (Of course, hummus was not traditionally a part of Iranian nor Ashkenazi cuisine, but it has become popular with both groups, at least in diaspora). But back then, I thought of myself as white and identified with my white friend, so I couldn't see that she was the one who was exercising privilege. (Certainly the fact that my olive complexion often enables me to pass as white contributed to my thinking that I was white, but there were other factors in my upbringing that played an even bigger role).

In the following years I gained a more sophisticated knowledge of self, aided in no small part by moving out of the Iranian bubble that is southern California and having my race read differently in different locales. (Reading Fanon didn't hurt, either). I now see the above episode as instructive, not just of where my thinking on these issues was at the time, but of the confusion engendered by the disconnect between the way I was taught to view myself and the different ways others view me. See also Hoda's excellent piece on these same issues.