There are two aspects of my identity which help define me, and aide in the telling of my life experiences. Those two aspects are my race and my ethnicity. To the average person, these two things seem interchangeable. A common example is “I am white” or “I am of European Ancestry.” Those two things serve the same purpose and elicit identical responses. For me, the difference between race and ethnicity is almost completely character defining. It is important to note that I was adopted from Russia when I was 10 months old, by an all white family who lived in an all white town. That being said, my struggles are not caused by me being from Russia. In fact, I don’t identify as Russian at all—not even a little bit. I am ethnically a Romani. The Romani people fled India in the 15th century because they were part of the lowest rung in the metaphorical ladder that is the Indian Caste System. The Romanies fled to Europe, but met resistance everywhere they went. An important but totally random coincidence which had terrible consequences for the Romanies was the outbreak of the Bubonic Plague. This plague, also known as The Black Death, wiped out about half of Europe’s population and hit very soon after the Romani people were beginning to settle into European towns. Being both foreigners and of darker complexion, the Romanies were blamed by many for bringing the plague to Europe (though science later found out that the plague was zoonotic and was carried by fleas and rats). Tensions increased between Romanies and Europeans for decades until year 1500, when Germany announced that Romanies, who were then called a slang word: ‘Gypsy’ (which is still used improperly today), may be murdered and no charges will be pressed against the aggressor. Switzerland followed just a decade and a half later with government-sponsored “Gypsy Hunts. ” Fifty years after that, the Pope at the time, Pius V, banished all Romanies from “Christendom.” Many religious people, following this decree, took up arms against the Romani and many were slaughtered in the name of the Lord. Things got worse for my ancestors as time went by. Countries started legally passing nationwide extermination acts targeting Romanies. Drawing on the angst of his predecessors, Adolf Hitler joined the crusade when he rose to power and killed more than 25% of Romani people who lived in the entirety of Europe. Adding insult to injury, no one gave a damn about anyone killed in the Holocaust except for the Jews (who, let me make clear, do deserve to be acknowledged). Today there are but a few million Romani left. I have gone my whole life to this point without meeting someone the same ethnicity as myself. I have been the ethnic minority in literally every situation I’ve ever been in in my entire life. That in and of itself is depressing, but what makes that worse is because anyone I would have come into contact with was probably killed by a European King, Fuuhrer, Archduke, or Religious Zealot because of the nature of his ethnicity and he or she was likely never thought of again.

This brings me to my race, the second defining aspect of Dan. I define my race as white. This puzzles many people, including myself sometimes, but I’ve developed a strange sense of self growing up in a town where, out of my graduating class of 300, I was one of about 12 minorities. I never viewed myself as any different than any of the kids I hung around with. All the kids I hung out with were white, all the girls I’ve dated were white, and my entire family is white. I never viewed myself as “the brown kid.” I was socialized to eat, talk, walk, live, pray, and dress like a white person. As a result of me choosing (whether it was a conscious or a subconscious choice I will never know) to blend in with everyone else at my high school, I simply became just an average everyday white person. Sometimes I would look at my arms in class and think: “this has to be a  mistake.” That being said, I rarely thought about being brown. If I had to give you a statistic, I would say that maybe one day out of every two or three months a thought would pop into my head which went something like “you’re brown and different and it’s stupid.” During all other times, I viewed myself as white, and so did everyone else. Directly resulting from that, I didn’t even know what ethnicity I was until my freshman year of college when I was forced to do a research project on it. I was always treated completely normally and fairly by my teachers and peers in school. A lot of this probably had to do with the fact that I was a fellow white person, but nevertheless, I was but a cog in the big, white, redneck machine that was Byron Center High School.

Probably the most unfortunate thing about my educational upbringing was that I was never taught about race or ethnicity. I wasn’t just not taught about my race and my ethnicity, but I wasn’t taught about race or ethnicity in general at all by anyone. I didn’t learn the difference between the two until college, and I never dug into my ethnicity until college for that exact reason. I didn’t even know that 25% of Europe’s Romanies were killed in the Holocaust (or Porajmos, as they call it) until freshman year of college, and I think I learned about the Holocaust in school at least three times a year, every year, since probably fifth grade. My schooling experiences taught me absolutely nothing about race and ethnicity, and at the time that was fine. But now, when I look back on it, I wish I had known. I feel like I could have been my own person—I could have been who I am, and I was not.

Schooling is complicated. Teachers all think they can change the world, and students don’t give a flying fuck about anything the teachers say to them unless what is being told to them will have a very large and concrete positive or negative effect on the students’ lives. I don’t think my ethnicity or race made any real impact on my schooling, but I certainly feel led to teach my future students about culture, identity, class, etc. and try and help them understand who they are. That would have benefitted me, and if I can benefit even one other person by learning from my teacher’s mistakes, I think I’ll be able to lay down in bed next to my inevitably smoking hot wife and feel like I made a difference in the world—the feeling every teacher wants to have.

Signed,

Dan Martel

Sources Used:

romanies.wordpress.com (created by yours truly)