I am unaccustomed to thinking of myself in terms of race or ethnicity, because all the world has been a hive to me, and I was just another WASP in that hive, busy amongst the buzzing multitudes, but not always keeping the collective purpose intact. I grew up white, lived white, and—until the third grade—hardly knew anything but white. I was a part of the typical white, the average white, the middle-class white. And I came down with white-blindness at a very young age.

I remember discussing Huckleberry Finn with my senior English teacher, Mrs. Reeves, and commenting on how great it was that this white kid had taken so many pains to save a black man from slavery. She then told me about her son, Shawn, who saw a black man for the very first time at the age of four years old. She and her son were sitting quietly in a crowded church before services, when an African-American man with an unusually large proboscis strode down the aisle in a dignified manner, searching for a pew. Shawn took a good, long look at him, turned to his mother, and said in a voice that everyone in the vicinity could hear—including the black man—"Mommy?"

"Not now, Shawn."

"But MOMMM…"

"NOT NOW," she urged, in a suppressed whisper. Everyone was getting tense by this point, as if a cannon was about to go off.

"But, Mom, why does that man over there have such a big nose?"

Twenty simultaneous sighs of relief—which probably sounded like a giant wick getting snuffed out. The African-American man smiled and sat down, relieved. Mrs. Reeves was so proud. By failing to distinguish color, Shawn had passed the test. The whole issue of race and color was neatly side-stepped; and everyone could proceed, business as usual. Sort of in the way that Jim Hawkins was neatly discarded at the end of Twain’s novel.

As this story was recounted to me, it brought back a painfully embarrassing memory from my own childhood—a memory that still makes me cringe to think of it. My first encounter with a person of color was far more eventful, far more humiliating, far more catastrophic than the experience Shawn and his mother had had. I was in the third grade, attending a school that was probably 98% Caucasian. I was the class smart-ass, and it was my job to be funny from the time class started to the time it was dismissed. One day, a couple of older kids arrived at the door of our classroom to deliver a message to our teacher, Mr. Sidney—and one of them happened to be African-American. Before the two kids could leave, I had to open my mouth and say something in the way of a joke: "Before you come back next time, make sure you take a bath."

Everyone laughed, which was all I wanted. I did not want them to laugh at him, of course, but merely to laugh on account of my glib and wonderful tongue. I cannot begin to imagine how humiliated that boy must have felt. An asinine comment, little laughs going off like pop-guns everywhere, and him just standing there at the door. I feel wretchedly about the whole experience now; but at the time I had no idea what I had done, or what had actually taken place, or how it would affect my attitudes and opinions later on, and probably his as well. Mr. Sidney yelled at me and told me that he and I would have a long talk during recess. I was embarrassed, now. I had stumbled big time, yet was not entirely sure why. I realized I had done something wrong, and that was all. And, remarkable as it may seem, that discussion with my teacher never came. I went to recess with everyone else and the issue never came up again in his classroom. I wondered about that a great deal. Did he feel I had learned my lesson and would never commit such a blunder again? I certainly never repeated the mistake—but had I learned my lesson? Or was my teacher just shy of discussing these delicate matters with a six-year-old boy?

The strangest thing to come out of that experience is the memory of the boy’s reaction to my numb-skull outburst. He did not rush over to me and crack my skull open. He did not wait for me after school. He simply made a wry and knowing smile and shook his head a little. Nothing more. He did not appear wounded by my remark in the least. I recall that his companion said to him as they were leaving, "Man, I can’t believe that kid actually said that to you." He replied, "I know."

I felt like a moron, stumbling across the boundaries that everyone else wisely avoids or else assiduously respects. I had just blown through a stop sign and t-boned someone. Yet no one wanted to discuss it. This head-on collision and the silence which followed it very discreetly altered the way I was beginning to perceive race. I had suddenly discovered a boundary between myself as a Caucasian and others who were not Caucasian. There were certain things you were not permitted to say to African-American people, which might be okay to say to other Caucasians. In this case, my friends and I were always running search-and-destroy missions, trying to isolate the differences and the weaknesses we all possessed, so as to turn them to comedic advantage. That was life for our group. But when I tried to apply those same rules to a black person, I immediately hit a wall. It was a silent, seemingly impassable gulf that formed between us, white and black. A gulf of silence. In a way I treated that black boy no differently than I would have treated any of my friends; but then again, to one who knew the hidden subtext of race relations, my comment must have appeared as a prejudicial, racial slur. I had stepped right into the pattern. But the subtext became tangible for me only after I had hit the wall. It was an invisible wall. And after the wall I knew about it, the wall managed to gain in strength by means of its very nebulosity and ambiguity. I still did not comprehend exactly how my actions were wrong. All I knew was that black people had become untouchable in a way. They were different and it was wrong to focus on that difference. They were who they were and we were who we were and some indeterminate quality existed between the two of us. And no one wanted to discuss it. I was no longer white-blind. There were race groups, and I belonged to one of them.

I felt guilty about the existence of this wall that suddenly had appeared or that I had somehow managed to construct subliminally as a white person. I felt that I should not even notice color, that making this distinction between black and white had somehow branded me as a villain or marked me as a special kind of social failure. I was no longer white-blind, but neither could I become color-blind, as the four-year-old Shawn had been. The chasm was there. Even today, especially when I interact with male African-Americans, I feel this unspoken apology rising up within me—I’m sorry I cracked that awful joke, I’m sorry my ancestors enslaved your ancestors, I’m sorry the moneyed elite of this predominately white culture still oppress and degrade your people. The guilt trip is a bumpy ride. But do I need to take that trip? Does this racial boundary really exist in the way I had been conditioned, by this experience, to think it exists? Is there really a your people and a my people? These were considerations that began to take shape in my mind as I was growing up.

The special transgression, which my joke came to symbolize, not only created a chasm of silence between the Caucasian and African-American races for me, but it also instilled the idea that people of color have a racial identity. They are all brothers and sisters; and as brothers and sisters they possess but one goal and one opinion. They are collectively treated as an oppressed minority, and therefore are expected to maintain a solid front of resentment toward anything or anyone associated with that oppression—especially joke-cracking honky boys. So the irony, in my case anyway, is that the attempt of Mr. Sidney to institutionalize a racial blindness, or at least to qualify my behavior with a proper respect for racial subtexts, also established a dividing-line between the Caucasian and African-American races for me. The races, presumably, possess collective identities which can not or do not easily intermingle.

This "solid front" I projected onto the African-American race, however, did not seem to apply reciprocally to me as an adopted Caucasian boy, who had no sense of his own biological or racial heritage. My legal parents had baptized me in a Lutheran church; but my family and I never attended church while I was growing up. My ethnic associations could most accurately be described as poor white trash. My grandfather was an alcoholic mechanic, born and raised in Arkansas, and who later transplanted himself and his family to the Metro Detroit area to land a job with General Motors. I once asked what the origins of the family name of Blake might be. My mother and father suspected it was Irish, but neither was certain. Nor did I grow up with a very concrete impression of the idea of family, as my father was a sales representative, and was forced to settle in areas that were far distant from the rest of our relations. I had no brothers or sisters. I never joined any groups or clubs. For the most part, I would say that all of these factors contributed to making me an ethnic, if not a racial, isolationist.

This singularity of my identity had advantages and disadvantages. I had the option of choosing my own racial and ethnic identity. For instance, I could claim any religion as my own without any hesitation whatsoever. I was a Tibetan Buddhist for a time, a Mahayana Buddhist, a practicing Zen neophyte, a student of the Hebrew Kabbalah—but ultimately decided to uphold ancient Gnostic Christianity as my own religion. I actively cultivated the ethos of the individual, against the arbitrary demands of race, culture, creed, and society. I changed my name to reflect my intellectual and spiritual affiliations. I became my own person, and passionately vaunted my determined achievements as an individual in search of meaning. In my own struggles to create this sense of the Self, I was beginning to see how the "united front" of any racial or ethnic group was something of a sham, because it precluded the notion of individuality.

In addition to the more liberating aspects of this individualistic stance on ethnicity, there was an expansiveness that tended toward vertigo. Not being able to draw on racial and ethnic connections left me ungrounded, insecure at times, and wistful about the notions of shared goals and communal strength. I remember a relationship with a Mexican woman I had. She would tell me of her home town, of her large extended family living in a single, expansive hacienda in Monterey. Her father was indio—a descendant of the original races that inhabited Mexico before the Spanish Conquest. His hair was reddish, which explained how my friend came to have reddish tints in her hair. He was strong and patient; so was she. There was a reassurance of identity in this proximal and visible lineage of hers. In my halting Spanish, I began to speculate on the possible racial connections we might have shared. Many people on different occasions had told me that I looked Indian—that is, Native American. At least in facial bone structure, anyway. Since I was born in Texas, it was quite possible that I could have had some Native American blood in my lines, or perhaps some Mexican blood. But she just looked at me and said, "Los ojos son azules." Your eyes are blue. Implying that such an idea was absurd.

Although I could easily have considered myself as belonging to a predominating Caucasian race, I suddenly felt displaced and cast out. I contained such a hodgepodge of racial identities that no one could lay claim to me, and nothing was traceable. My lineage was self-referring—a closed loop. I began to realize that there was no easy way to identify myself in an ethnocentric way. To define myself racially was like saying, "I’m vanilla." There was nothing distinctive about my race. There was no cultural history acting as a foundation for the growth and pursuits of my own individual identity. The cherished connection to an Indian heritage looked more like a pipe-dream. I was cast adrift once again.

I began to understand how it could feel to be a minority standing at the door of the world, not sure about entering into its systems and categorizations, since the ideas of race and ethnicity can be both deceptions and enhancements at the same time. The boundaries which define these categories are established along collective wavelengths, to be sure—but also at the individual level, where boundaries may be actuated or negated at will. As I began to see the hidden subtexts surrounding and informing our concepts of race and ethnicity, I realized how inhibiting these could be. Yes, I saw color; but at least I wasn’t white-blind. I could see. I could visualize color as a potential resource in an individual quest, just as whiteness lent its context of anonymity to my quest for individuality. When passing through the doorway, we can become circumscribed by race and ethnicity through the agency of our attitudes about them. Perhaps the only way to pass through those invisible walls and conceptual barriers is to slip through at the level of the individual, where the perspective of generalized attitudes toward race and ethnicity need not apply. Let me be an Indian in the way I tend my spirit through directness, simplicity, and strength. Who cares about the color of my eyes.