"The Tannest White Girl I Know": Life In The Passing Lane.

[nyssa23]

Because of my ambiguous skin tone, I am often taken for races other than Latin; I've been called everything from black to Korean to Hawaiian. This amuses me now, but in years past I considered it vital, a survival mechanism. My mother was obsessed with the idea that I needed to "pass" in white society by any means necessary to ensure my future

Comments

[invader_tak_1]

Passing has a whole different meaning to me.............

[nyssa23]

So it does! I never even thought of that...which just goes to show how much we all have to learn about our own sets of privileges and beliefs. *hugs*

[kassrachel]

I stood by and let a lot of things slide that I shouldn't have, too. I should have known better. I tell myself now that adolescence was a miserable age and that it was normal for me to be as self-consumed as I was, but I'm still angry with myself about it sometimes.

I remember being hypersensitive to insults against my friend who was missing a limb. I can still recount the cruel things girls said about her when we were eleven. But somehow I wasn't as sensitized to the cruel things people were saying about Latinos, and I'm sorry: I wish I had been braver and more awake.

[nyssa23]

Those were miserable times to be sure; plenty of insults around for all. I absolutely don't hold you responsible for any of it, especially not when I didn't even speak for myself. *hugs*

[nyssa23]

I have to say, I'm kind of with your best friend on the question of the character in "The Punisher." There are so few characters of color in mainstream movies & TV that some of us feel desperate to see ourselves reflected. When we do, however, it's nearly always as a criminal--a hooker, a drug dealer/gang member (hello Latino stereotype!), a crooked cop

[girllikething]

you know i'm white and i've also encountered a bunch of hate. growing up in a small, mostly black community in south carolina i was put through the grinder so to speak because i have really really pale skin and my hair is a different texture. when i moved to texas it was the latina girls who gave me grief, who called me "Cracker". i had no idea what that word even meant. i remember being afraid to change into my dance uniform in the locker room because they would corner me and shove me around and say mean things. i have never in my life been racist. i grew up watching my family use the N word like it was going out of style. when i was old enough to not fear defending myself i would tell them that if they said things like that they were not welcome in my home.

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[nyssa23]

This is an excellent point; thank you for bringing it up, Lin! Too often we forget that racism is not just about people of color being discriminated against; racism is about ANY person being discriminated against because of their race

[girllikething]

I don't talk about it much because every time i've tried to people just laugh at me like i couldn't possibly know what it's like to be hated on. once in high school, a black girl told me that my people needed to pay for what they did to her.

this struck me as odd. no one that i have ever known of in my family EVER owned slaves. not a one. my family is mostly irish, which people seem to forget that the irish were considered "white niggers" and were treated much the same. the other part of my family is german and people go "OMG NAZI!" and i feel like slapping them because my great opa bombed his own home town AGAINST the nazis!

and to be perfectly honest, here in texas.. at least here in my part.. i see more people of color being racist because "they need to remember who they are and what happened to them" than not. i hate when ANYONE says the N word. i don't care what the color of your skin. you shouldn't want to own a word like that.

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[eumelia]

As a white person I've never been where you were, obviously.

Sometimes, because we are all human, we contract foot-in-mouth disease as I like to call it and we say stupid, stupid things.
I think just acknowledging that, owning up to our fallibilities and such is probably one of the best steps into unlearning racism, of any kind, institutional, internal, whatever.
We will fuck up. But mistakes are for learning from.

[nyssa23]

I agree totally; I am absolutely willing to give people another chance if I find that they did not willfully say something stupid. A lot of times people I've spoken to don't necessarily realize that what they've said was even offensive.

Last year, I wrote about a prominent lady at the temple whom I caught making a racist statement. It took every ounce of courage I had but I called her on it, and I have to give her credit--she owned it and apologized for it right away.

We've actually gotten closer since then, and she gave me some terrific advice and a place to vent when I was upset over some bad behavior by my in-laws. It was an important lesson for me, too; if I condemn someone outright because of a momentary misstep I could be missing out on a possible friendship.