What's Your Complexion?

The other day, I started filling out an application for a Queensland driver's license. I'm not very excited about it because the licenses here in Queensland are lame. They're like the library card your little country-town library gave you in 1975. Pretty poor stuff. And there's more.

I only made it halfway down the first column of the application before I was met with the usual physical characteristic requests: Eyes? Brown. Hair? Black (I normally would have said brown, but the girl tells me it is black). Complexion? Bl-- Wait. My complexion?

I knew immediately it was one of the stupidest questions (besides "Your race?") I had ever seen on an application. But my next thought was that it might very well be an easy question to answer. Benefit of the doubt. They do things differently down here. So just answer it, I thought to myself. Okay: Light? No. Dark? Nowhere near. Then I'm thinking they're looking for stuff like "olive-skinned" or something. Green? Kalamata? Black. Figures.

Some might not consider this a big deal. Just answer the question. But I'm sick of it always being up for discussion. And maybe that's because the only link to my skin color is, well, my skin color and not. I wasn't raised in that culture bit of it that people might assume I was raised in. The rub. So I hate such questions on an application, because all I do is stare at them and twist myself into circles trying to answer it in a way that will satisfy me.

The first time I got all circled up was just after I graduated from my undergrad in 1996. I went to a job fair all nervous-like and kind of dressed-up. I had a leather case thingy that was filled with college-level editorials I'd written, despite the fact I wasn't trying to be a journalist. When I arrived, they told me to fill out their application.

So I sat down all confident with pen in hand and wrote my name in full. Then I got to that question -- "Race" -- which was followed by a whole bunch of words that were preceded by boxes. One of the words was "Other." But that was followed by a line. Explain yo'self! Well, there's never enough space for me to really explain myself fully, so I just sat there. For ten minutes. I can't put just white, because I'm not. I can't put just African American because I'm not. And I had just graduated from college and left friends of all ethnicities and races who told me I belonged to theirs. I kept sitting, thinking, for ten minutes. I don't remember what I put.

I stopped filling out the driver's license application, because I had run out of energy. I'm assuming I'll have to present it at a window to a personn, so I'll just tell them to fill it in if they insist. But then today we saw "Australia," and I learned a new word that just might fit perfectly. It's a word that a driver's license official here might just have no problem using to describe my complexion: "creamy." It's used over and over to describe the young Aborigine in the film. He's mixed. Aborigine mother and white father. Half-caste, they were called. "Creamy." I hate people sometimes.

Creamy. Jesus.

What's your complexion?