Racial identity

Warning: This gets a bit ranty. Just feeling the need to share and this feels like the most appropriate space.

I had to get up and take a break when one Latino guy said that he thought his name was Sp*c until the age of 13.

I found it tragic and enraging that the last boy in the video of black people speaking on race, when given an opportunity to tell us whatever he wanted us to know, chose to tell us that he's not going to do anything bad. He shouldn't have to be politely subservient for us. I'm glad for his sake that he seemed full of love.

I've watched a YouTube video showing how black families have the race conversation and teach their kids how to respond to the cops carefully and respectfully to avoid getting arrested or shot, and I've seen black people say after recent events they now realise there's literally nothing they can do to protect themselves or their children. That they previously thought they would be okay if they were completely subservient, composed, cooperative and respectful, no matter how unreasonable the behaviour of the police officer, and that they now realise black people will continue to be murdered by the police for doing literally nothing so they just have no safety.

I've cried so many white tears here at home and carefully kept my sadness and my shame away from black people who don't need to have to deal with my emotions. I've picked up the emotional labour tab where possible and spent time and energy calling people out in places where I feel unable not to, where it feels like saying something is necessary so that I am not complicit in my silence, because as nasty as people can get, minorities need privileged people to speak up - and my privilege actually belongs to them. I've also made an effort to quieten down and let black people and other POC speak and be heard.

I've celebrated as protests lead to plans being put in place to defund the LA police with millions of dollars to be redirected to local community projects, as all four of the officers responsible for George Floyd's unlawful death are finally appropriately charged with the main culprit's charge upgraded to second degree murder after international outrage. I've enjoyed watching protesters in Bristol, England pull down a statue of a slave trader and throw it in the river to rapturous applause - after peacefully and reasonably campaigning for its removal for years.

I've had all the 'all lives matter' I can stomach and more. There are now so many wonderful videos and memes explaining this concept that thankfully a few genuine folk have stopped saying it, and the rest it seems must be there just to insult and degrade black people. It's getting really hard to believe their bias is implicit at this point.

Right now I'm feeling overwhelmed at the sheer size of this issue, wondering where and how we strike a balance between running at it full speed and pacing ourselves, remembering that this stuff is centuries old and cannot be fixed in a day, whilst remembering it will take a concerted conscious continuous effort and probably should be exhausting if we're doing it right.

I'm clinging to this course for my sanity right now. I also have a couple of blog posts listing anti-racist resources and realising I've got to just keep working through all of those resources and that will help illuminate what's next. If I didn't have lists of specific things to read or watch I think I'd feel totally powerless.

Reflect on your own racial identity. Are there any experiences that you related to in the videos above?

Think about some of the discussion in the videos centered around colorism and privilege. In the racial group that you identify with, has the societal favoring of light colored skin ever impacted you? Were there any experiences from racial groups you don't belong to that surprised you, or that you had never considered before?

This is a great opportunity to share your thoughts with other participants.

Re my racial identity - I know I'm a mix of several different things with lots of unknowns and I always felt that helped me avoid agreeing consciously with racist narratives. I'm a white Londoner with Spanish, Irish, German and Portuguese blood, and I don't know what else, but very little actual culture from anywhere. Just what I got here in London. It seems like my grandmother's family was probably Jewish, although so much of the story is lost we can't figure it out for certain and the lack of history coincides with a period when many families decided it was safer not to raise their children Jewish.

The race boxes on forms never made sense to me and I never knew exactly where to go and didn't want a box anyway. I suppose I've had folk music and some folk culture that is English and Irish.

I will say my sister and I always felt a strange affinity for the Spanish language and Hispanic cultures. She has lived in Spain now since 2007 and I spent 6 years living in South America and definitely felt like perhaps there was some connection there with our Spanish-Irish heritage.

Living in South America, I started dancing. Dance actually became a huge part of my life and I noticed how disconnected white Brits are from their bodies and how it seems like we are cut off from our passion, our urges, our humanity, in many ways. Disconnected from the body to me means living in our heads disconnected from ourselves, the planet and each other. Disconnected from our intuition, our knowing, and the grounded loving safety that comes with that, where we can come from love and not hate.

During this lockdown, as racial tensions climax, I have wanted so much to come together and all dance and feel that connection beyond words and beyond fears - a connection that wasn't part of my childhood, wasn't something I ever experienced with my blood relatives, but with other humans, and most powerfully with embodied Brazilians and Argentinians.

I feel so sad that we white people have forgotten we came from Africa first and that some generations ago we knew who we were before having our distinct cultures violently driven out of us by various conquering empires so that now we're somehow on top with nothing. We're all immigrants, and many of us completely divorced from wherever our ancestors came from. Misplaced, out of context, and in an unwanted and unwarranted power imbalance with a chip on our shoulder about anyone with a distinctive culture. Perhaps the inferiority of our nothingness is why we insist we're superior. Perhaps that's an effort to identify as something and feel valuable.

I never knew how important was race for other people, I never stopped to think about it because the city where I come from it seems that people do not care about it. I live in a border city in Mexico and completed my education up to high school there and then I went to the US for college. The First time someone asked about my race was in the university application. It was so weird being asked was was my race, it was so unfamiliar for me like when people are talking about their dog's purity or something like that, but it was on the application so I had to fill it in.

What people in the past, before college, at school or at institutions, tended to ask me about race was "where where you born?" and that was the closest think for me to categorizing people. But once I spent more time in the US race was more important than ever. Maybe I never pay attention to those details about race because the city where I live in is very diverse. It is home for people from a lot of different backgrounds. Since I was little my dad has worked with people from the south of Mexico, from France, Morocco, Barbados, and their families were friends with my family. So it has always been normal for me seeing people from different places.

I had studied in my books how there used to be slaves in the New World when people from Europe wanted to conquer everything, and I also learned how slavery had ended more than 150 years ago so I thought it was it about being inferior, but that was not true. As a teenager I used to spend time with my family in the US, especially cousins. We spent time in the streets, at parks, in the mall, or picking up something to eat and obviously there were more more people at those places too. I remember my cousins telling me " don't worry, as long as you don't speak you'll be fine" or "we don't need to talk to them they just want to tease up" or "It does't matter they don't understand." I understood later that they wanted to kind of protect me from the rest because of my thick accent.

I could relate to a lot of what people shared in the race identity videos. Being African American and Puerto Rican has been a source of great pride for me, but within my own culture I have had to endure being ridiculed for being lighter skinned or having "good hair." This hurt a lot because I didn't think I was better because of this. I just wanted to be accepted. I even get ridiculed for not speaking Spanish fluently because my dad didn't teach me. I feel as though I was stuck between a rock and a hard place because of not being Puerto Rican enough or Black enough. I have learned that being myself is enough. Having to work through the issues of skin tone, language, and hair texture within my culture can often be harder to deal with than explaining it to other people outside of my cultures.

When my kids were in second or third grade, their social studies teachers asked them to do a "genealogy project" where they were supposed to represent their "heritage" with national flags, foods, etc. As the teachers talked about "how wonderful this activity would be for kids because they could talk to their grandparents about their countries of origin" I watched the Black parents get increasingly uncomfortable. I made a stink about the assignment. My kids turned in a pie graph with their six different national origins, but I also made a stink in the back to school night about what about the families who were "completely American." I remember saying "What about families who have been here since the beginning of the 17th century? If this is about migration, maybe people should put their grandparents' state flags on the project." The teacher objected and said "Everyone knows what country their ancestors are from." At that point, I pointed out, "What about kids who are adopted, what about people whose ancestors didn't agree to come to the US?" I knew that as a white parent, I had an obligation to throw the fit about the extraordinary insensitivity of the exercise. I realized that if the Black parents objected, the teacher would respond negatively, or minimize it, or become even more explicitly racist in her description of the task. It also made me realize that white people get to resist racialization by relying on national origin while Black families wound up (largely) deprived of an opportunity to talk about family origin in positive ways. I also discovered that the schools (two different districts) had been doing the projects for years without having any awareness of what they were doing.

Thank you for sharing, Felicia. I never really thought about that from the teacher's perspective. They just don't know. I have had this conversation with some friends about ancestors and how they don't know their roots because slavery happened. Or the video about the Natives talking about how the identification of them as from a certain tribe is a marker that controls them and even sets them apart from other tribes. I want to learn how to ask questions about identity to learn about the individual students in my class without isolating people negatively.