“What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity and the Social Construction of Race in the Us Page: 53
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never sure that any of the rules made sense, but yet those same rules had a profound impact on
my life. When I was growing up, the biggest amusement park in the area invited white visitors to
frolic in the pool and ride the roller coaster, but in my neighborhood we knew the invitation
wasn't for us. My uncle, who was a field secretary for the NAACP and a columnist for a black
newspaper, tested the racial segregation of the park by showing up there with another black man
and perpetuating a ruse. While his friend tried in vain to buy a ticket, my uncle, who was a
brown-skinned man with crinkly hair, put on a fake accent and a headpiece and succeeded in
buying a ticket and being welcomed into the park as a guest from a foreign country. He wrote a
column about how white Americans treated foreigners better than their own fellow black
Americans. He said that people who looked very much like American Negroes but perceived to
be from another country, were treated like white people, but black Americans were discriminated
against. This story was told to me as a cautionary tale about the social construction of race. It
helped make me profoundly skeptical about segregation and racism and made me more
determined to follow my uncle's path of challenging and decrying stratification and the
arbitrariness of race.
Many decades later I was working at a newspaper in Texas, when I became embroiled in
a protracted controversy over how the paper would cover the burgeoning minority communities
in our area. The controversy would flare up over stories and assignments, even words used in
stories, as it did one night when I was called out of a school board meeting I was covering to go
to the city's Juneteenth celebration where thousands of black people were gathered to check on a
disturbance involving police and young black men. When I got there, I noticed that some of the
crowd was excited but not all of it because families were picnicking into the night. I talked to the
young men involved in the disturbance, and they said the police had formed a crowd control line53
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Smith, Starita. “What Are You?”: Racial Ambiguity and the Social Construction of Race in the Us, dissertation, May 2012; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc115163/m1/60/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .