Recently, my girlfriend and I met up with our two closest friends from law school to catch up over drinks and pizza. She and I left school after completing our first year, so when the four of us get together, our conversations usually abide by a similar format: how is school going for them, how is life going for us, and what drama have each of us missed out on between hangouts?
Because we’re all nonwhite and of varying socioeconomic backgrounds, related topics likewise arise. On this particular Friday night, our friend Doug, who is given to discussing the ways in which his socioeconomic background has shaped the person he is today, went into greater detail on the subject. In describing the false comradery his peers sometimes attempt to forge with him simply by virtue of their shared Asian-ness, Doug said, “They’re rich but because their parents were working class back in the day, they think they know what it’s like—well, I’m still living it.”
When we all get together, we talk about white folks and their ignorance. Doing so seems natural because we’re all children of diaspora. Doug’s parents are from Vietnam. Our other friend Chase’s parents are from the Philippines. My girlfriend and I are each mixed-white: her mother is from the Philippines; my father is from Iraq. We bond over our brownness. We are alike, yes. But we are also not, and in more ways than I had taken care to analyze up until that point—because we had all gone to the same school, because we all dressed the same, and, in many ways, because we all looked similar on the outside.
Aside from the fact that almost no American-born person perceives me as Asian, Doug’s comment applied perfectly to me. I had heard, read, and engaged in countless dialogues with friends of color about colorism, but this was different. Yes, skin color was very much a factor in Doug’s economic background.
But there were so many other factors influencing his family’s status, their inability to move up in the ranks of a society that classifies Asian folks, in one fell swoop and in all their cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity, the “model minority.” His parents emigrated from Southeast Asia. His mother struggles with mental illness that she never received help with, and his father is a veteran dealing with the fallout of his service in the Vietnam War.
Whether he intended it to or not, Doug’s comment acted as a mirror for me. In recent years, I have begun to consider—and needlessly dissect—the economic struggles of my parents and my grandparents. I have gone so far as to mistakenly attribute, if only partially, my inability to fit in with some of my former friends, who’d descended from several generations of well-to-do white folks, to these struggles.
Moreover, this dissection has confusingly coincided with my inability to suppress painful yet critical realities that have informed my identity: my American-facing upbringing has been more white-coded than it has anything else. For example, although my parents guarded me ferociously against school bullies, they were each conspicuously hands-off when it came to the taunting I was subjected to by my white classmates post-9/11.
My father’s side of the family, in many ways, fits the ideal immigrant narrative nearly to a T: Christian, hardworking, and constantly vocalizing their gratitude for the country that gave them a chance at a better life. While they do not favor Republican politicians who push Islamophobic agendas (a phenomenon far more common in the Assyrian American community than I was once comfortable admitting), their relationship to politics in the United States is complicated. In Iraq, they were a religious minority, and although they live in America, they still feel connected to their community back home, and to their complex relationship with a religious majority the U.S. has branded the enemy.
In short, my family’s desire to seamlessly blend into the fabric of America has rendered them apolitical in certain ways—particularly because it has required that they differentiate themselves from a religion whose adherents we in the U.S. consider inherently dangerous.
I believe it is this unique condition upon which my family’s assimilation has been predicated that has prevented us from engaging in meaningful discussions about our individual experiences with xenophobia, though I am certain I am not the only one who has experienced it—especially considering my brother and I are the only ones on our dad’s side who are “mixed.” In fact, en route Greece in 2006, my parents, brother, and I were subjected to a lengthy TSA inspection. When I brought this up with my mother a few weeks ago, she couldn’t quite remember the incident.
My mother was raised by a family to whom adopting and abiding by American customs was imperative. Her father is a racist, and although she works harder than anyone I know to challenge the toxic beliefs she was taught, my grandfather was an abusive and controlling man, and many of his prejudices made their way into her ideas about the world.
I was, at first, offended by what I had initially interpreted as her refusal to acknowledge a memory which was so vivid and shitty to me for the nonsensical way in which it crystallized my state of otherness: the agents had searched my belongings in an effort to determine whether I was carrying anything dangerous aboard—to determine whether I, at age fifteen, travelling with my white mother, was dangerous.
But then, I realized that this experience for my mother hadn’t been sandwiched by other disorienting moments of xenophobia. This moment wasn’t even about her. And because my mother and I have always been so close, it was easy for both of us to ignore the ways in which xenophobia affected me, because I was of her. She could pretend that ugly things like white American suspicion of American-born, part-nonwhite folks like myself didn’t apply to me, because I came from her, and she and I were cut from the same cloth, and being viewed with contempt or suspicion simply for being had never been her experience, so how could it ever have been, or ever possibly be, mine?
Being so close with my mother while simultaneously nurturing this unspoken part of my lived experience because it is uncomfortable, because it is what separates us, has created a painful disconnect in our relationship. I think it has been more comfortable for my mother because it does not disrupt the course of the conservative American way of living she was raised to believe is proper.
However, she and I have been talking about these experiences, about our differences, and about the lack of understanding that has permeated not only our relationship, but her upbringing, and she is exceptional in her willingness to open her mind and to embark on a mountainous journey of learning and unlearning, all on her own, despite the chorus of naysayers by whom she is surrounded.
Last year, when I told her about how my Trump-supporting coworker said she “understood” that Americans don’t want people from my dad’s country coming to the United States because “they’re the ones doing most of the bombings,” my mother suggested I complain to HR and management or quit after seeing how unhappy I was with the hostile work environment.
My father’s reaction, on the other hand, was silence. Certainly a thoughtful one, but silence nonetheless. While I had raged about my coworker’s comment—and about other such comments made throughout the office in the aftermath of the election—my father’s reaction to my experience was subdued and made me feel a bit like I was howling my frustrations into a void. However, the sensation was not new to me, because I had long been aware of the vast differences between our experiences with otherness.
Internally, my family has abided by its culturally conservative traditions, inherent to which, on both sides, are religion; my father’s side of the family is Assyrian, and my mother’s, Greek Orthodox Christian. Though I am in my late twenties, bringing a male partner as a guest to a family function on my father’s side is still out of the question (marriage would need to seriously be on the table).
My being in a queer relationship, then, is, to put it mildly, out of the question on both sides. Although the United States lags far behind dozens of countries when it comes to the acceptance of queerness, both of my parents’ ethno-religious backgrounds are still significantly less forgiving.
For a time, I opted to dis-identify with my Assyrian heritage. This is due to the fact that—to put it lightly—I don’t get along with my dad. My issues with my father are deeply personal and I will not explain them here. My unhealthy relationship with my father has long served as a source of insecurity for me when it comes to my Assyrian heritage: because he is cut from the same cloth as his family, and from their community of friends, I am not close with them either.
The nonexistence of my relationship with my father and his family has often made me feel stateless. This feeling has been compounded by the fact that there is often pressure on the children of diaspora to offer family members unconditional acceptance, love, and understanding under the basic premise that “sticking together” is crucial to our survival.
What gets left out of this equation, however, are important relational nuances, such as abuse, and the ways in which it is coded (for example, along the lines of gender and sexuality). And while some might choose to forgive family members who impose abuses of that nature upon them, I am absolutely against the concept of pressuring others to do the same for the sake of preserving one’s heritage. In short, I do not believe that one has to compromise their own psychic survival in order to maintain their cultural and ethnic ties. That being said, while I am not by any means close with my Assyrian family, I have valued learning about our history.
Before my grandparents brought my father and his siblings to the U.S., they were wealthy. When they did arrive here, the adjustment, which involved a lengthy financial struggle, a severe climate change (from Baghdad to San Francisco), and a loss of community, led to my grandmother’s developing mental health issues that to this day have, unfortunately, gone untreated. Eventually, however, they recovered financially and became economically stable, with my grandfather making a living for their family as a wine and spirits salesperson.
The female sexual organs The pelvic area (below the belly button) houses a woman’s reproductive system during love making. viagra ordination Inform your healthcare provider in case, you have an incomplete injury at the lower end of the area mentioned earlier then the area of the spinal cord, are more likely for achieving a psychogenic erection than if you have an incomplete injury at the lower end of the area mentioned earlier then the area of the spinal cord, head or on sexual organ. viagra online consultation Reduced online levitra tablet thought about this signs of aging such as coordination and balance. Some foreign sources of order cialis without prescription that operate outside America are not required to pass the cost savings on their functional expenses to their clients by means of decreased and reduced price runs. I cannot say with certainty whether anything else factors into my father’s family’s ability to achieve the “American dream” as much as the tax bracket they belonged to in Iraq. In revisiting my misplaced belief that my parents’ meager beginnings—of which I was only a part until I reached puberty—were critical to my experience as a nonwhite person, I am reminded of a bit of wisdom bell hooks insisted upon when my partner and I went with some friends to see her speak at my alma mater: the institutionalized violence done to people of color is predicated upon, above all else, capitalism.
At first, I had trouble wrapping my mind around this concept; admittedly, I was skeptical, as questions about racial profiling by the cops and Homeland Security percolated through my head. It took learning about the foundations of our country and understanding that they have not been eradicated, but rather, that they have merely mutated to disguise themselves as examples of “progress” for me to grasp the what hooks was saying.
The successful employment of money-making schemes—like our country’s private prison system and unilateral wars that begin and end with our invasion of countries in the Global South—requires know-how on the parts of our country’s wealthiest members (such as the heads of arms dealing companies, for example) when it comes to choosing scapegoats. Members of our country’s white majority who do not stand to profit off of these systems are nonetheless determined to see that genocide is done to these scapegoats, either through incarceration, deportation, or murder. They subscribe to the patriotic rallying cry, Keep our country safe! (read: white).
The point is, my failure to understand the reality of hooks’ claim—instead willfully conflating my brownness with that of my friends’, whatever our economic backgrounds—equated to my trying to force a square peg into a round hole. When my brown friends made comments about my seeming white, my liking white things, or my not being a real brown person, I felt an infuriating mixture of confusion and anger which only ever distilled down to resentment, because I couldn’t understand where their resentment was coming from. They all knew that I was white, yes, but they also knew that I was Assyrian.
More than half of them had initially asked, Syrian? before I’d explained that no, this was different. I thought, You don’t even know what I am and you’re telling me what I’m not? Many of them didn’t speak a lick of their own native tongues—and true, I barely speak my own, but I fought my insecurity over my lack of fluency with regularity, reminding myself that it was the result of my parents not sharing a common language, that I was shy growing up, and that learning a language as an adult is hard enough as it is, let alone one that is practically dead. It drove me even crazier when folks who were similarly light-skinned or ambiguous—or even white-passing!—made these sorts of comments. What the fuck? I would think. You and I are not different. But in reality, we were. We are.
Before my family and I moved to our Pleasantville-like neighborhood, we were living in a smaller, lower-income town. Nonetheless, my brother and I wanted for nothing, and as far as I knew, my childhood was the stuff dreams were made of. All the adults on our street were friends; so were the children. We had block parties regularly, and there was a true sense of community. I was a child living in an idyllic, multicultural neighborhood. And because of this, the differences in skin color between my childhood friends and I didn’t matter.
But once I changed schools, they did. Because I was new, and because I was a question mark—not only not white but unfamiliar for my not-whiteness—my new brown classmates and I didn’t seem to have much in common. I was, however, excited to find out that we liked a lot of the same music. Like me, they had grown up watching shows like 106 & Park. Every once in a while, one of us would get excited because the other was singing a song that the other liked. Otherwise, we really just didn’t have much in common.
Admittedly, most of the music I’ve become meaningfully attached to throughout my life has been introduced to me by someone that was important to me at some point. While I do hold dear some of the songs and artists people from my past have shared with me— because I see music as a reflection of one’s personal growth, which necessarily includes their community—my music tastes have evolved significantly. For example, because I grew up listening to hip hop and R&B exclusively with my closest childhood friend, the combination of (mostly) losing touch with her over time and having no friends who listened to such music resulted in my listening to it far less as I aged.
I eventually made a friend in junior high whose music interests skewed “alternative,” and it was through her that I was inducted into the overwhelmingly white punk rock community. At the time, I was barely a teenager, and I didn’t perceive the music I listened to through the lens of skin color. I liked my new friend, and she was the only one I had, and I liked the music she liked. It was new to me. And no one I was hanging out with in Pleasantville liked the music that I grew up listening to. Looking back, this switcheroo in my taste in music made sense—though some of the albums I grew up listening to remained fixtures on my playlist.
My tastes simply changed as a result of my environment. I was suddenly surrounded by mostly white kids whose parents had evidently filled their heads with shitty ideas about folks who didn’t look precisely like them. The music I listened to and the cable television shows I watched as a teenager, for example, are the results of my upper-middle class upbringing which, despite by no means being reserved for white folks, I see now are white-coded. But being a member of a minority that was foreign even to the other brown children rendered me even stranger to the white children.
However, I wasn’t properly assimilated into my own family, on either side, either. I was truly an island. But I didn’t want to be. Enter my “white girl music,” introduced to me by my white friends. Nonetheless, I felt it spoke only to me, to my complex brown girl feelings, and to my experience of feeling isolated in my brownness while coming of age in a white world. TV was my best friend, providing me with all the refuge I needed as I learned to make sense of my family’s abrupt and drastic ascendance into the upper-middle class.
Even when some of my brown friends from my hometown and I reunited in high school, they were no longer interested in my friendship: I had officially and sufficiently whitened up. Even though I was perfectly happy with my new friends, it stung, and I couldn’t understand what had changed in two short years; although we had ceased to correspond via phone and email nearly as regularly as time went one, we had once been so close. I’d expected them to be as excited to see me as I was to see them. Throughout high school, I witnessed them maintain their friendships with each other and expand their peer group, never making an effort to include me. The sting became a dull ache that was increasingly anchored in a nagging curiosity: What happened? But eventually, it all made sense.
My being called a white girl is in part a reference to my having light-skin, my being white-passing, and my being mixed-white. But it is also largely, I believe, a reference to the socioeconomic class from which my family and I hail, and the ways in which I carry myself.
I am not, never have been, and will likely never have to be familiar with so many of the institutional barriers that have been erected before some people of color at every turn when it comes to attempting advancement in our capitalistic society. The discrimination I have faced in relation to my nonwhiteness has not come in the shape of institutional and therefore capitalistic barriers, but rather, for the most part, in the form of completely manageable micro-aggressions.
I erred in living first, by believing that these micro-aggressions put me on the same plane of experience as my light-skinned peers simply by virtue of the fact that our skin tones were similar, and second, by becoming resentful when I felt judged by them because I felt entitled to spaces that were theirs despite my undeniable class privilege.
I am well-aware that racism and xenophobia do not come with one-size-fits-all approaches: dominant classes have come up with coded language and systems, for example, that apply to specific cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. In other words, I am not saying that the xenophobia I experience—whose undercurrent is that Middle Eastern and North African folks, particularly if they are Muslim, are dangerous simply by virtue of their national origins—is the same as that an East Asian person might experience.
In this way, of course, it is possible that not all of the folks who have deemed me white could have understood my experience of being othered, just as I could not have understood theirs. However, I did not want to share my experience with them, because, again, I felt as though they were judging me, positioning me as a member of the dominant class.
My partner told me about a song called “Don’t Call Me White,” which is basically what I was screaming in my head whenever I felt that way. I was screaming, Do you know how people fucking see me? But truth be told, I really don’t know how people see me. A lot of the time when I look at myself in the mirror, I don’t know how I see me. It’s a strange sensation, because for a time, I felt secure in my nonwhiteness, in my “mixed”-ness, in my me-ness.
But my lack of understanding as to exactly why I wasn’t the same as my peers—why our brownness didn’t magically render our experiences unequivocally identical—and my failure to examine the resentment it cultivated, separated me from my own experience with nonwhiteness. I had rushed out of my vaguely country, inland bubble and straight into drawing a false equivalency between myself and my peers solely based on our skin color—and the result was a lack of clarity. Eventually, I begun to feel that I had only ever been imposing on the identities I had once claimed as my own.
I was angry at not ever having had anyone to share my shitty experiences with—not even within my own family. And now, brown people were making me feel like I was white. I guess if I’d realized sooner that they were perhaps taking note of more than my skin color, I would have let my guard down—and engaged in a much-needed release of this resentment—much sooner than I did. What I learned eventually was an invaluable lesson: in order to see yourself, you have to see—perhaps not first, but simultaneously—more than just yourself.
Earlier this year, I wrote a personal essay while I was still in the thick of my resentment over feeling excluded from communities of color. Reading back on it, my bitterness jumps right off the page. But I don’t cringe as much as I’d expect to while reading it, because navigating white America—particularly without any frame of reference for how to claim agency over one’s diasporic and queer identities—is tricky as fuck.
I am grateful for the loved ones I do have, like my mother, my friends, and my partner. I am always learning from them, and they, from me. They trust me enough to mine my own experiences and to independently evolve my ways of thinking. They care for me enough to extend their patience to me when I am growing, even when I take my sweet time doing so—though they may not have had the same luxury.
Whether Doug intended his comment to resonate with me or not, it undoubtedly sent me into a tailspin of self-reflection. And although I don’t know if I will tell him so, I do know his words have changed the way I interact with others, even if this change is barely perceptible. His remark catalyzed somewhat of an epiphany for me, and I can only wonder how my externalized lack of perspective has grated others, and for how long.
One thing is for sure: if my friends and loved ones can be soft with me, then I can be soft with me, and with them too.
