There is an expression: it's in our blood. I think about that a lot. Not about our genetic makeup, but what we are inside the heart and the mind, our mothers and fathers, our grandmas, the stories we hear. I was made blue eyed and light haired. That is what people see when they look at me. But I don't see blue when I look out of my eyes. I am the sum of a poor German family who lived in a cabin in the woods, a Mexican immigrant family who changed their name to pass as white, and a lot of English. I am the doctors and carpenters and farmers; the mamacitas and the grandmas; the pedophile and the man who gave up his life to save a homeless drifter. A lot of people go into us.
I don't mind when activists say that I am privileged because I'm white. I figure it has to be true. All else being equal, I must be better off than I would have been if I were dark skinned and had a history of no civil rights. Our parents grew up before civil rights. It's not the past. It's still right now.
What I mind is being made invisible. I was made invisible by my friend who said that all white people are racist; I was made invisible by a writer who complained she couldn't stand 'nice white people' and all the shit they say trying not to sound racist; I was made invisible by an activist who said that the Cherokee relatives we once boasted about were figments of our imagination. Maybe my ancestor, Tilden Coburn, was not Cherokee, I wouldn't know. But it was beautiful to think so, that's all. It was beautiful that my Grandfather was proud of his alleged non-white self. And my mother was proud of her Mexican family. She told us so many stories they swirl together: my doctor grandfather, La Paloma, Tia Carolina and the little oil well, Pancho Villa and the revolution. My first free act as a brand new adult out of school: I went to Mexico to live and to speak the language of my mother's family.
Outside of this, what I remember most is being scolded by strangers about racism; don't say negro, say colored; don't say colored, say black; don't say black, say African American; then black again, say black. What are you ashamed to say it? Are you ashamed to say black? You associate the color black with dirty don't you? Well, yes, I do. It's an unfortunate coincidence is all. Dirt is dark brown. I associate pale skin with sickness too. It doesn't determine my opinion of an entire race of people.
We moved to the south after my parents divorced and it was the black and Mexican girls who befriended me. They were kind to me. I loved them. It was the school who took them away from me. They put me in the white classes where no one was kind to me. I had a crush on a boy named Addis, a shy boy who never talked to me. But I remember his face when his friends told him I liked him, the flash of his white teeth when he smiled and looked at me across the yard before he folded back into the other kids on the playground.
Do we really have to crush white people to make room for black people? Is that the only way? Can that ever work? I am not a racist. That is not who I am. If you say that to me, you don't know me.Â
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