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Pale on the outside, dark on the inside.
It's International Blog Against Racism Week: (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
ibarw). I'm hoping for something more eloquent later, but for now, I say this: I am mixed and I'm proud of that. My mother is an adventurer like Indiana Jones who used to fangirl Cicho Buarque and Caetano Veloso as a pretty teen (I inherited her silver elbow-length Edie Sedgwick gloves): when she was just a teenager, she left her home continent to go to college far away. When she was there, she met a handsome white boy who wanted to go sit in fire towers in the US West like his hero Jack Kerouac (I still have some of his very old black turtlenecks and Park Service uniform shirts). They had an INS shotgun wedding. I was conceived on the honeymoon.
The issue here is that she is brown; he is white--and I am white, because in the genetic-roulette game, I came up looking much more like him. My complexion and climate tolerance is that of the Irish-women-raped-by-Vikings-a-thousand-years-ago color that he has. It doesn't mean I'm smarter or anything, it just means I'm that much more susceptible to skin cancer. And that much more likely to get hired through no merit of my own. There's a whole litany of white-privilege possibilities foisted on my socially-inept lower-middle-class Appalachian ass. I know I've barely managed to score jobs no matter how badly I dress (I've overheard bosses' conversations) - can you imagine how poor I'd be if I dressed this badly and was also brown-skinned?!?!?
It also means that any time you've made a joke or offensive remark about brown or black people in my earshot? You've attacked me. All my relatives by blood in Brazil are brown, and many of them by marriage are black. Any time I have done so, in my life (I admit I have; I'm ashamed of it, but the whole spirit of IBARW is admitting to that, right?) I was lashing out in my fear of other lives I could have lived. It means that whenever a fictional world is created where people of non-European descent don't exist or are disposable? Please don't write my mom and her whole family out, because I would not exist without them--and I wouldn't want to, because I love them.
The book that moved me the most that I've read in the last half-decade was Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama. I read it in '04 because I live in IL and he was running for Senate then. And when I got to the parts where he went to Kenya for the first time as a young man, meeting relatives--grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, half-siblings--who lived in a different world and spoke a different language, who vaguely resembled him but had a different skin tone, ate different food, listened to different music, argued about different politics, knew different landscapes and foliage and yet still were family, I wept. Because that is my life too. I have had that experience. Can I even tell you what it means to me, as a biracial binational person, to have a biracial binational person as President? It means a LOT. Yet he cannot claim that with pride. As a visually Black man, even now if he walked out on the street in Washington DC without the Secret Service, some cab drivers would STILL refuse him. He cannot be openly proud of being binational, because even now there are conspiracy-theory dipshits convinced he can't be a legit citizen--I dunno why, because of his "foreign" name?
I don't know. I just conclude this post to say, don't assume that because some random person in the bar next to you has pale skin that it's OK to tell racist jokes. You never know. Just fucking don't, that shit is never funny. And don't assume that just because your mental map of the US in the seas of the world is full of "here be dragons" everywhere that you're among fellow-feelers. If you think that, why don't you just keep your mouth shut? (Fuck American exceptionalism. I'm 40, laid off, with pre-existing conditions, lusty and kinky, 35-27-36. I am single and TOTALLY in the market for a Canadian or EU mail-order spouse, for the vastly greater healthcare and general "freedoms".)
(Though I must admit, I'm totally "white" in the following ways: I can't dance, and I really, REALLY fucking hate temperatures above 75F. It's fun travelling with Mom. She likes to lie out on the beach and soak up the winds, and thinks the water is always "too cold" no matter how close to the equator we are. I think the whole point of going to the beach is about the sea, and I spend the whole time there in the water. Very likely, that may have something to do with our respective orixas.)
It's International Blog Against Racism Week: (
ibarw). I'm hoping for something more eloquent later, but for now, I say this: I am mixed and I'm proud of that. My mother is an adventurer like Indiana Jones who used to fangirl Cicho Buarque and Caetano Veloso as a pretty teen (I inherited her silver elbow-length Edie Sedgwick gloves): when she was just a teenager, she left her home continent to go to college far away. When she was there, she met a handsome white boy who wanted to go sit in fire towers in the US West like his hero Jack Kerouac (I still have some of his very old black turtlenecks and Park Service uniform shirts). They had an INS shotgun wedding. I was conceived on the honeymoon.The issue here is that she is brown; he is white--and I am white, because in the genetic-roulette game, I came up looking much more like him. My complexion and climate tolerance is that of the Irish-women-raped-by-Vikings-a-thousand-years-ago color that he has. It doesn't mean I'm smarter or anything, it just means I'm that much more susceptible to skin cancer. And that much more likely to get hired through no merit of my own. There's a whole litany of white-privilege possibilities foisted on my socially-inept lower-middle-class Appalachian ass. I know I've barely managed to score jobs no matter how badly I dress (I've overheard bosses' conversations) - can you imagine how poor I'd be if I dressed this badly and was also brown-skinned?!?!?
It also means that any time you've made a joke or offensive remark about brown or black people in my earshot? You've attacked me. All my relatives by blood in Brazil are brown, and many of them by marriage are black. Any time I have done so, in my life (I admit I have; I'm ashamed of it, but the whole spirit of IBARW is admitting to that, right?) I was lashing out in my fear of other lives I could have lived. It means that whenever a fictional world is created where people of non-European descent don't exist or are disposable? Please don't write my mom and her whole family out, because I would not exist without them--and I wouldn't want to, because I love them.
The book that moved me the most that I've read in the last half-decade was Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama. I read it in '04 because I live in IL and he was running for Senate then. And when I got to the parts where he went to Kenya for the first time as a young man, meeting relatives--grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, half-siblings--who lived in a different world and spoke a different language, who vaguely resembled him but had a different skin tone, ate different food, listened to different music, argued about different politics, knew different landscapes and foliage and yet still were family, I wept. Because that is my life too. I have had that experience. Can I even tell you what it means to me, as a biracial binational person, to have a biracial binational person as President? It means a LOT. Yet he cannot claim that with pride. As a visually Black man, even now if he walked out on the street in Washington DC without the Secret Service, some cab drivers would STILL refuse him. He cannot be openly proud of being binational, because even now there are conspiracy-theory dipshits convinced he can't be a legit citizen--I dunno why, because of his "foreign" name?
I don't know. I just conclude this post to say, don't assume that because some random person in the bar next to you has pale skin that it's OK to tell racist jokes. You never know. Just fucking don't, that shit is never funny. And don't assume that just because your mental map of the US in the seas of the world is full of "here be dragons" everywhere that you're among fellow-feelers. If you think that, why don't you just keep your mouth shut? (Fuck American exceptionalism. I'm 40, laid off, with pre-existing conditions, lusty and kinky, 35-27-36. I am single and TOTALLY in the market for a Canadian or EU mail-order spouse, for the vastly greater healthcare and general "freedoms".)
(Though I must admit, I'm totally "white" in the following ways: I can't dance, and I really, REALLY fucking hate temperatures above 75F. It's fun travelling with Mom. She likes to lie out on the beach and soak up the winds, and thinks the water is always "too cold" no matter how close to the equator we are. I think the whole point of going to the beach is about the sea, and I spend the whole time there in the water. Very likely, that may have something to do with our respective orixas.)
