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i want to write about something that is hard for me to voice, explain, and be a part of – prejudice, racism. there is, i think, within our culture, and within the church a very accepted form of covert racism/prejudice that is not questioned.
my mother is mexican, yet she hates her heritage. she has been driven to call herself white my whole life, yet she holds her heritage out to me at times as a gift. my family, her family is – immigrant, hard working, faith believing, charity-eschewing, strong-bonded, beautiful. while i was not permitted much access to them, i have seen these things from afar. my father, obviously is white. i’m a mixture, and i find myself awkwardly placed between the two cultures.
within my siblings, we range in color. my older sister is darker. when she married an american african, no one said anything about mixing. everyone was relieved (this after bob jones and the date-race-choice fiasco). my youngest sister is very fair skinned, she married an african american. my parents were very upset, even my older sister was. and the ‘mixed children’ card was played.
why did this matter? i never expected to marry someone who is externally white, i expected to marry a person of color. my husband straddles his own cultural divides, having grown up in africa. but that’s another story.
i’ve written about a couple of times on my blog (racism) where it was more overt. oddly, those were always easier to navigate. i could face down the immediate and painful senstaion of being marked as less-than. i didn’t feel driven to speak. as i grew older, though, the prejudice snuck inside the conversations without being overt. that was harder. while it has been easier to call out racism against african americans, the prejudice i’ve run into being hispanic has been more subtle at times.
i am not white, i am mexican, i am hispanic. i am not white. yet i can ‘pass’. the comments of ‘well you don’t look mexican/hispanic’ are ones i frequently hear. and i never know how to take it. is this a compliment? is this something i should reject? and when i try to explain, i commonly hear ‘you know what i mean’ or ‘i’m not prejudiced’.
i have heard ‘o, she’s *mexican*. that explains it.’ when i would unthinkingly answer the ‘what are you? what is your mother?’, which always felt intrusive. we have a large family, she’s mexican. that explained everything.
trying to counter this is hard, and often i am so ashamed that i remain silent. if you have to say you’re not racist-prejudiced, maybe it’s time to slow down and re-examine? it’s funny because i get that our culture is different, i get that people can feel outside of it. i get even the ugly sides of my heritage. i get all of that, but i feel like i have to reject things and accept that if i want to align myself with my ethnicity, race, culture that i’ve got to quietly accept the subtle digs.
other times, i hear people say something about mexicans, or hispanics in reference to a neighborhood or culture in a way that is dismissive. talking about us as a group as if we are not capable of achieving more. or as if we are just low-income people. using hispanic as a way to describe people who work blue collar, are in gangs, drink, or don’t go to college is another example of covert prejudice. sometimes i try to point out this is a stereotype, or that i’m mexican.
the responses are again ‘you know what i mean’ and ‘i didn’t mean *you*, you’re an exception’ and ‘people say these things all the time’. somehow these are supposed to convey that i’m not really a part of my race-ethnicity, and that as an exception i’m allowed to pass as white. the painful part of this is that i am not white. i am not part of the culture that derides my own heritage. yet i look like one, so people feel freer to say things they might not in front of an obvious hispanic. then again, i have heard plenty directed at my mom and other ‘obvious’ persons of color.
being able to pass is painful. being mixed is painful. because i will always be slightly less than white, because i am not white.
historically speaking, my heritage centers in mexico. we are a race, a nation of children born of rape and survival, of interracial blending. the first mixing was the result of indio women who were forcibly taken from their families. husbands, children, were enslaved (there’s debate about how much was by force, how much consensual, i’m leaving that alone). but the children of the conquistadores, those were not indio, therefore no one knew what to do with them. they couldn’t be slaves, and so a caste system was born that valued whiteness.
we are descended of bastard children, the result of rape. we are descended from a culture that began to elevate whiteness along with the indio heritage, a duality of thought that is painful. to be fair-skinned matters, yet we are not white. from there interracial marriages mixed us and mixed us until one thing was clear – we were not what we descended from. we are new.
from there, the fight in this country for latinos has been to pass as white. we have fought as a culture for a very long time to be called white. because it was obvious there was prejudice. by riding the edges between black and white, hispanics fought for and sometimes found a place. by gaining permission to be called white on census papers, we got around segregation. but it never did away with the prejudice, the hatred that is by now an accepted part of this culture.
if we have to ask to be called white, we’re not white.
i have included some links that detail better than i have here. i am hopeful that a conversation could be started about this.
this is written by my youngest sister, she’s studying race and slavery and theater all in one swoop. she includes a lot about the history of white, and labels and culture. http://www.ushistoryscene.com/uncategorized/changingwhiteness/
thank you for reading this far.
Powerful. Thanks!
This is so good shadow.
AnonymousWow. Such a strong testimony about where to fit in. I work at a highly selective university and we work hard to maintain the diversity of our campus. I’ve had to face some of my own hidden prejudices, and work at being a little more careful about how I speak of people from different cultures. It’s so ingrained in our society to assume a poor kid from Texas means Hispanic. All the great universities in our country are flocking to Texas to get those smart kids of color, I actually heard this at a meeting last week. I have worked hard at educating myself on the differences between our kids that we recruit. And you know what? The differences are small. They borrow the same for their educations, they have families who’ve invested in them, they have teachers and counselors who work hard to help them. And when they get to our campus, there is a sense of equality. Is it their generation? Is it mine? Are things finally changing for the better? Do we still have a long way to go? I don’t know, but I do know we have have some of the happiest and most satisfied kids in the country. I would like to think that was by design, but I suspect it’s more of how this generation views on another. Thanks for sharing your experiences on Racism. So many of us need to hear these stories. Thank you.
This is a really good post, Shadow, and it does a beautiful job of pointing out just how insidious these covert forms of prejudice can be. I’ve encountered similar as a woman in all-male environments and as an LGBT person in a predominantly hetero world. I’m increasingly coming to believe that we are all prejudiced in some way or another (including me!), and the best we can do is pay attention so that we notice when those prejudices show up so we can work on them and continue to speak up when we see them around us to help break the systematized prejudice that takes place. Humans seem to be so skilled at creating “others” in order to feel better about ourselves that I’m not sure that we will ever completely eliminate it, but I do think that younger generations seem to have moved in the direction of equality (racially, gender-wise, LGBT, etc.) in significant and noticeable ways. I hope that trend continues and grows!
Thank you for having the courage to speak up about this hear to allow us to share in the challenges you face. I’m really sorry you still face this so often, and I wish I knew how to change our culture faster to make the prejudice you face disappear!
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