CUL-DE-SAC

Last Friday I was on the deck of the decommissioned USS Midway in San Diego bay to see about 90 sailors and marines take the oath of citizenship. The Navy Band Southwest performed and four sailors paraded the colors. The ceremony was rich in military tradition but it was also a picture of a changing America that lots of people find unsettling.

Yes, there were one or two immigrants from Europe who became Americans that day. One from Italy and one from Poland, as I recall. But the vast majority were Asian, African, Latin American or Caribbean. It was hard to find a white person among them.

There are still an awful lot of white people in this country and they still dominate positions of power and status. But that’s a reality that may not last long. So I wonder, what does it mean to be white and what will become of me and my fellow Caucasians?

If you watch Fox News you see white people acting pissed off as they spend great energy blasting the Obama administration. Barack Obama is a bit like those sailors on the Midway. He’s scary because he is a powerful symbol of our country’s future, which is non-white and culturally complex.

But the feelings of the angry conservative white man don’t tell the whole story. For instance, post-election polls show that if white people had been the only ones voting in California in 2008 we would have approved gay marriage. A Canadian comic and blogger named Christian Lander wrote a book called “Stuff White People Like.” His list of stuff includes Barack Obama, coffee, The New Yorker Magazine, bike shops and recycling. Clearly, he’s talking about highly educated white people living in blue states or large urban areas.

The American notion of being “white” is a strange one, though it’s not unheard of outside our borders. I assume our national whiteness was created to define who was a free person back in the days of American slavery. There were white and black people and not much in between.

The burgeoning ethnic variations now living together inside the U.S. have made it harder and harder to determine who or what is really white. Speaking of the old world, if white people begin in Europe where do they end? An Iranian acquaintance once told me that the Persian people where white but everyone to the south or east were not. He imagined a kind of Persian line of demarcation. Compare that worldview to the small town in the Midwest, where I grew up, which was so ethnically northern European that Italians were people of color.

The great white race will become something quite different, worldwide, as birth rates in Europe decline and the developing world industrializes. We’ll become fewer and less powerful. Ultimately, this could mean Fox News gets fewer viewers or it could mean countries like the Netherlands become more religious and more conservative.

Race is one in a long list of things humans have used to decide who are members of their tribe. Once it was family, then it was language, then religion, then nation, then skin color. Sadly, in the U.S. today, social class may be the most powerful determinant of our caste. It largely determines where you live, what car you drive and how you vote.

As long as I live, I’m sure skin color will continue to determine a part of what we are. That will change with time. But tribal instincts are too strongly ingrained in us to ever let us look at every human being and conclude that person is just “one of us.”

Parents want to have normal children. It’s not because they won’t love them if they’re not normal. It’s not because they don’t understand that the world needs people who aren’t normal. It’s because they want their kids to be happy, and children who behave like their peers seem so happy.

I didn’t realize this before I became a dad. But now I have two kids, and my son is not quite normal. Did I imagine he’d want to play sports? Did I imagine he’d enjoy rough-housing with his friends? I guess so.

My son has Asperger’s Syndrome. He has an attention deficit and he has something called a coding problem, which means it takes him a long time to do any school work that involves writing.

But he does his homework because he’s conscientious. He’s gentle and he’s more polite than he needs to be. He’s very smart. When he takes standardized tests he blows them away. I just wish he were normal.

When I attend his school’s outdoor assembly I see him standing in line with his eyes cast down while his classmates are joking around. During recess he wanders around by himself holding a stick. Sometimes he gazes at the ground to study the movement of ants. There was a time when he collected junk all over the school yard and brought it home. Bottle caps. Pieces of paper. Lots of hair bands that girls had left behind.

His little sister is five years old. She likes pink. She likes Barbie. She is also my son’s very best friend. They’ve played together joyfully ever since she was an infant. It frightens me to think how lonely my son would be if we hadn’t had his sister.

Kids with Asperger’s Syndrome are mildly autistic and they have a hard time relating to other people. They’re awkward and nerdy. My son’s deficit in social skills has made him an outsider since he was in preschool. He now attends a Catholic school which is a den of rules, and I love that. Rules protect vulnerable kids like my son. They give him a structure he can relate to and they shield him from bullies.

Yet there are rules my son finds very difficult. They are the rules of human interaction that say you have to read subtle expressions and gradations of attitude and emotion. At the age of ten he understands jokes and sarcasm. But he doesn’t look people in the eye when he talks and he doesn’t understand that you’ve got to stop talking when people aren’t listening to you anymore.

We all see the world from inside a human skin so none of us see it perfectly. My son may be more normal than I think he is and I may not be what my parents expected. All of us rely on some mercy and indulgence and maybe those things will bring my son friends aside from his little sister. I know he’s happy at home and he may be perfectly happy wandering the playground with his stick as other kids swirl around him in pairs and foursomes.

I can’t make my son normal and I will confess I don’t want to because he’s what I want. As for his happiness… I can wish for it, but it is something he’ll eventually have to find on his own.