Discovering White Privilege
How a conversation clarified how it truly feels to be white.
I was recently interviewed for a podcast and had my eyes opened to what white privilege is. I don’t take that phrase lightly as I don’t want to misuse it. I have probably never even said it (or wrote it) until now. I tend to avoid topics that I am not one hundred percent certain on. And I have not been one hundred percent certain that white privilege was even a thing, until now.
In talking to The Nasiona Podcast host, Julían Esteban Torres López, the topic of growing up Latinx, specifically Chicano, and its struggles came up. Of these struggles, the most prominent for me was and always has been my Spanish. Growing up a non-Spanish speaking Mexican-American was a little rough. It even stings to this very day, at the age of forty-five, that I am not fluent.
In our conversation, I relayed to Torres López how it felt to see presidential candidate, Julían Castro, admit in an interview on MSNBC that he was not fluent in Spanish. Castro’s reason is for not being fluent is the same reason why I and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Chicanos don’t speak Spanish; our parents and grandparents were discriminated against for speaking it.
When this Mexican-American presidential candidate shared that he has had the very same…
