Despite being a relatively mature and worldly eighteen-year-old, at least for suburban American standards, I was still naive enough to believe that 'kapeesh' was a common household phrase. From Tulsa, Oklahoma to Fargo, North Dakota, I pictured old sweaty Southern men on tractors and young blond-haired blue-eyed housewives with Scandinavian ancestries 'kapeeshing' their offspring from dawn till dusk.

Perhaps it wasn't actually naivete that drove me to this conclusion, but rather the fact that I had never really thought about it before. Don't talk back to your mother, kapeesh? Take out the trash and we'll go for ice cream, kapeesh? Don't tell Aunt Lena that I threw out her moldy leftovers, kapeesh? The word was far less foreign to me than most of the vocabulary I encountered and stumbled over during my formative years. Kapeesh was short and to the point. It rolled off the tongue pleasurably, a rush through the first syllable in order to savor the long 'e', the whoosh of the 'sh' as it cut the word furtively short. It was a code that everyone understood; it revealed a contract of responsibility and sometimes secrecy, an unrivaled bond between the kapeesh-er and the kapeesh-ee.

This abrupt discovery, this hidden enlightenment, was probably the first time I ever realized any important distinction between myself and other white people. It was only when someone revealed to me their ignorance of the word that I finally realized - not everyone was Italian-American.

This small and ignorant gain towards a sense of my individualized Caucasian identity led me to investigate other insignificant differences. People found my pronunciation of the word 'quarter' - 'water' flooding into my enunciation - nothing short of hilarious. Realization: not everyone was from central Connecticut. And what about 'pellow' and 'melk'? Not everyone was the child of a second-generation working-class immigrant family. My 'chasm' didn't hide the 'h' but rather pronounced it with New-England pride; and my 'subtle' was anything but, as I revealed the holes I had received in my seventh-grade education. I wasn't White. I was different. I was me.

It didn't make me special, because no one else saw. That was fine with me. At least I knew I wasn't White anymore. I wasn't bland. I wasn't categorized, shipped out on a conveyor belt to be coupled with those blond-haired blue-eyed Scandinavian housewives or those sweaty men on tractors with whom I shared no real common identity save that which society imposed upon us. And I realized the ludicrousness which shaped my Caucasian identity, this system that robbed me of my heritage just because I had no pigment in my skin. To be White was to be bland. To be White was to be judged and to never be able to call other people on it, because inherently to be White was to be racist.

I became a Spanish major. And I started speaking about the reverse-racism in our society because I got sick of hearing about how I was the oppressor. I wasn't the oppressor because I refused to buy into the system. And people looked at me in disgust when I suggested that I felt uncomfortable around the Hispanic population in Allentown, NOT because I was racist and because they were different, but because they robbed me of my ability to be different right along with them. They bought into the White label. I wasn't allowed to speak Spanish because that difference didn't belong to the label I was put under.

I am fed up with being told what I am and what I am not.

But don't tell the other people I told you, kapeesh?