(Sometimes I think about how Armenians are a chameleon people: Our colors change depending on the environment. Whenever I am traveling to Armenia, waiting to board the plane to Yerevan in Sheremetevo airport, and I see all the haggard looking grey men with dusty boxes and old shoes, smelling of sweat, on their way back home from months or years of working in Russia, and I look at their dark bushy eyebrows and I notice the worry in their dark eyes, I feel I am white compared to them. Almost as if the United States bleached me of the difficulty of living in the Soviet boss’s belly to be pushed around like an undesired, backward people. So whenever I’m in the United States I feel how my experience is void of being the color grey and all blood pressure, heart attack, diabetes, and chain-smoking-until-death symptoms associated with living a daily racialized struggle. On the contrary, I benefit from the daily racialized struggle of those who didn’t make the cut in the United States. As an Armenian, it is a question where you end up, and being on the border of whiteness, you will be best ending up in a developed Western country, against the backdrop of a history of colonialism, genocide and slavery that did not happen to your own people, where your un-recognizability, although an erasure of your difference, can bring with it the security of whiteness.)
Not really sure about the white-poc binary as depicted in the article. I've definitely struggled with my identity as Armenian and white-but-not-quite in the United States, but really, the best I've come up with so far is defining myself as someone who "benefits from white structures of power". I can navigate spaces dominated by whiteness with relative ease (although why that is the case is a long story in and of itself), which is a privilege that I acknowledge as not accessible to everyone, even to my some in my family. At the same time, I definitely don't identify as white. Growing up Armenian in extremely white 1980s Glendale was hard. And dehumanizing. And boy was I reminded about my otherness all the fucking time. But hey, you grow up, you learn the terminology and you start putting words to peoples' attitudes and actions and although that doesn't subdue the rage inside, it is empowering.
turnnoffyourmind
vaporwave
janainaart
origamiaround
pixelskylines
