Dark White
ONE WARM EVENING in Berlin, I wandered over to the ice cream shop facing a lively square. “Can I try this one?” I asked in my halting German. The woman behind the counter glared at me. “Dieses hier,” I repeated, pointing. Wordlessly, she handed me a tasting spoon. I tried the ice cream and started putting the spoon into an empty cup atop the counter.
“Nein! ” she shouted, snatching the cup away. “Wo soll ich? ” I stammered. She pointed at the garbage and turned away, muttering to herself. I backed away, stunned, and watched from a distance as she politely served the family next in line.
I had this kind of experience puzzlingly often during my time living in Germany in 2019. Why did people on the subway stare at me with what seemed like disgust? Why did they yell at me when I asked where to find something in the supermarket? Berliners are notoriously brusque, but I was used to that. I’d spent a year in Berlin in 2007 and one in Leipzig in 2014 with my husband, who teaches German literature; our second child was born there. Germany was familiar, if not quite like home. But this felt different. A boundary had shifted, and suddenly I was on the dividing line.
In the United States, I’m white, a conclusion I draw from the trusting smiles of white strangers and my pleasant interactions with police. Once in a while, I’ll be asked: “Where are you from? ” The answer—Connecticut—sometimes seems to leave the questioner unsatisfied. But mostly, I blend in.
My mother’s family is Syrian, my father’s Polish. My combination of big nose, dark hair, and olive skin often prompts people to ask if I’m Italian or Jewish. People rarely guess that the otherness they see is Arabness, because most people in the United States don’t really know what Arabs look like. My confident English puts any doubts to rest. I act like I belong here, and people believe me.
Not so in Germany, following the recent influx of 1.7 million refugees largely from Syria, Iraq, North Africa, and Afghanistan, adding to well-established communities of Turks and Arabs. In this context, my whiteness became less reliable. Germans seemed to see some darkness behind it, as if it were a threadbare sheet.
Not until I read Isabel Wilkerson’s (2020) did I find words for my experience, and how it related to my parents’ and grandparents’ process of becoming white in the United States. Wilkerson explains that caste is “neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive” with race; it is “the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.” Indeed, the boundaries of whiteness have shifted over time—coming to include Eastern European and Middle Eastern immigrants like my grandparents—while the caste privileges of white people have remained fixed. The status of Arabs has always been ambiguous, contested through court cases in
