I suppose I am equally amazed when a white person claims not to be white. Maybe curious is a better word than amazed. I'm certainly not in a rage. You can identify however you want.

Whiteness is not something I chose as part of my identity. It is a social construct that was put on me. When I walk into a room, people will notice that I have pale skin and make assumptions about me, whether those are true or not. It doesn't matter if I don't define myself as white. Society sees me as white.

Perhaps this is place and time-dependent. Where I grew up in Wisconsin, at least 90-95% of the people in my school were white. I don't remember a single non-white kid until junior high and high school, when there was a small influx of Hmong refugees and I played soccer with them. So for most of my upbringing, my whiteness did not seem like a big deal. Everyone around me was white. What distinguished me from others as a kid were my religion, my gender, my athleticism, my grades, my social class, and my status as a person who lived in town versus those that lived in the country.

I suppose I knew I was white, because I watched tv and read books and I wasn't unaware of race. It just wasn't something I thought about or considered a key part of my identity. Perhaps your childhood in Denmark had some similarity to mine in Wisconsin?

I think my unawareness of my whiteness was and is a sort of privilege. If a person grew up Black in the same town (or anywhere in the USA), you can bet they would have been aware of their Blackness. So I suppose if you are getting rage from the left, then maybe they think that you not claiming "white" is a an example of a privilege that Black and Brown folks don't get.

My own idea about identity in general is to (1) claim it (2) clean it up (3) throw it out. I think this plan applies to any of my identities.

For example, I am a het cis man. Until recently, I had not really examined any of those identities. I was just raised in a culture that projects binaries onto people and I accepted them. I learned to live in the boxes that society's expectations put on people. It was relatively easy for me to accept the box, because the identities I carried were inside the box and carried power, privilege, and acceptance. All of this identity formation and binary identification was not consciously done by me.

Now, as an adult, I want to become aware of and question each of my identities. I want to understand how I perform them as if I were acting in a play. In order to do that, I need to study them and claim them. I need to hold up a mirror to myself. Then I need to "clean up" my identities. I don't know exactly what "clean up" means, but I think it has to do with rejecting the parts of the identity that are not me or are harmful to other people. In my peer counseling group, we "counsel on" the patterned responses that we reenact whenever we are "restimulated" by situations. By counseling on these patterns, we sometimes can let go of the original hurts that were done to us that got us in (or out of) the boxes in the first place. Sometimes, this process is like peeling back layers of patterns only to reveal more layers. Then, eventually, I want to "throw it out." I want to live my life outside of the binary identities that society puts on me, or at least choose how and when I perform those identities. I don't want to be defined by my whiteness any more than you do.

I think I might join you someday in rejecting the label "white." But at this point, I am still learning what it means to be white in this time and place-- by claiming my own whiteness and attempting to clean up any "white patterns" that I am unconsciously performing. I don't want to skip the step of claiming my identities.

That doesn't mean that I am proud of my whiteness, nor does it mean that I think there is anything superior about being white.

Thanks for writing this piece. I appreciate your perspective, especially as you call out inflexibility and reactionary responses.