जॉन फेस दैट आई हैव टू बुक्स लंदन गायत्री राइट द रिलेशनशिप यूजिंग लेटर एक्स
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
Summer 2006. I am traveling to Berlin to speak at a conference, “Black European Studies in Transnational Perspective,” stopping for a month in Oxford on the way. Dragging three overweight suitcases stuffed with books and notes about Simone de Beauvoir, I land at Heathrow and find myself in a longer immigration queue than usual (because England is playing in the World Cup), and I fall into conversation with two very young American women, recent college graduates. One, who asserts gamely that she “works in improv in New York,” is coming “to study Shakespeare at the Globe”; the other, nervous and asthmatic, is emigrating, moving to (I think) Hertfordshire to get married and live happily ever after. She is carrying her wedding dress with eight-foot train in a monster-sized garment bag over her shoulder, and oozing anxiety about her prospective in-laws, who appear to have a great deal of money. “I’m from a humble background,” she explains to me, a total stranger. She’s from New Haven, but she didn’t go to Yale … This isn’t going to work, I think, but of course I don’t say so. As an older woman, a “frequent flyer,” I make reassuring noises to both. “We’re almost there,” I say.
As we finally approach the immigration desk, the budding actress asks me to look over her landing card, because she isn’t sure she filled it out right (I have admitted to being a teacher). I see that in the box for “nationality,” she has written, “Hispanic, Jewish.” So I say gently, no, that’s where you put “usa.”
And the other young woman says “Oh. I just put ‘White.’”
...
A funny story (sort of); when I told it in Oxford, D. started teasing me: “when are you going back to White?” But how does it happen that perfectly likeable, well-meaning, well-educated young people seem oblivious to their own nationality as a salient fact about themselves even when traveling? Is it that Americans “generously” assume all human beings to be American till proven otherwise? Or, that within the United States questions of race and ethnic identity are so heated and vexed that they block out all information about the rest of the world?
Issues of nation and race were urgent for Simone de Beauvoir and her intellectual and political traveling companions in the years following the Second World War, as the Cold War consolidated American hegemony, while old-style European colonialism exploded, decayed, shifted shape. Such issues are equally urgent for feminists today: in France, where questions about hijab and secularism have divided feminists, with Beauvoir’s legacy claimed by both sides; in the United States, where the lip service given to multiculturalist ideals in mainstream civic life seems to