Privileged “Others”
This past weekend I heard something that put a lot into perspective for me. As a Mexican woman who is also extremely white-passing, it’s somehow hard to know what to identify as. However, someone explained it to me as “privilege at the expense of erasure” and the grey area that I have now been swimming in for the last 21 years suddenly became a whole lot clearer. My privilege comes in being able to make a choice in what I identify as each day, rather than having it projected in the pigmentation of my skin each and every single second without choice. However, this comes at the expense of the erasure of my history and many of my ancestors who I carry with me in my soul, many whose beautiful melanin-filled skin made them wrongfully be perceived as something lesser than me. It comes at the expense of, even just for a minute, giving up a gorgeous culture of family, resistance, and wisdom filled with poets, warriors, intellectuals, romantics, artists, and revolutionaries. But again, this erasure comes with a privilege that many just don’t have.
Of course, I know that this struggle is not nearly as bloody or violent as the struggle that those who can’t ever take the cloak off endure daily. I am afforded the privilege of having this struggle be an internal one of identity, and not a forcibly external one of justice. I am given both a close view and better understanding of some who are not given a seat at the table, and a seat at that very table. It’s unfair in plenty of ways, to say the least, but perhaps it can serve as a good revolutionary tool.
Logically, the question of identity is usually posed as one of “Who are you?” However, when posed as one of “What kind of privileges do you benefit from?” it can become much more insightful. Are you white? I don’t know, it depends on who you ask. Do you benefit from white privilege? Absolutely.
However, it’s imperative to me to extract as much power from my own privilege and into amplifying indigenous and often impoverished voices. The truth is that although I am Mexican, I will never be able to feel the connection that many other Mexicans feel with their indigenous roots. It would be wrong for me to mislead people to believe that I could. In comparison to many, that particular blood is not quite as recent or dominant in my ancestry. Nonetheless, there’s something to be said about the immigrant experience that not only bridged my reality from one country to another, but my existence to that of an “other”.
“Other”.
I always felt like an “other”; afforded the privilege of being able to camouflage into a crowd of American kids, but never quite on the same page as them. I never saw my skin color not be represented on TV, but I never saw my customs or specific struggles projected either. At seven years old I had no idea what “assimilation” meant, but I desperately wanted for people to stop approaching me — a chubby and freakishly tall, white, androgynous first grader — expecting me to speak their language only to be perplexed when I had to pause them and pull out my English-to-Spanish dictionary. Simultaneously, I was embarrassed of going home and admitting to my family that my inner-voice was starting to speak in English for the first time. On one hand I was terrified of not fitting in, and on the other I was terrified of leaving a whole history behind that I hadn’t even had the chance to learn yet. Privilege at the expense of erasure.
I now feel much more comfortable outwardly owning my origins, however, to have lived my developmental years in a cloaked “otherness” is something I would now consider indispensable. The more that formal institutions expected me to forcibly assimilate, the more I needed to grip beautiful parts of Mexico that I perhaps wouldn’t have felt so close to, had I stayed there. Struggles like that of the Zapatistas, like that of Ayotzinapa, like that of the teachers in Oaxaca are at the forefront of my mind daily. The reality is that Mexico is plagued with the same classism and white supremacy as much of the world and all of the United States, with one difference being that our indigenous weren’t immediately exterminated, but pushed to the bottom of civilization if they weren’t deemed “European enough” only to be left there with very little resources or justice.
Admittedly, where I would have been part of a formally powerful “we”, they are considered the “others”. This is not a comfortable truth to acknowledge, but a necessary one. It is only through this acceptance of ones own privilege that one can begin to join in true allyship, begin to unlearn the problematic behaviors that these societal structures have instilled in us, begin to tear down these very structures, and begin to be truly revolutionary. I hope that more and more of us “privileged others” come to the necessary realizations to join the fight.
