Hold my hand, cancer doesn’t discriminate.
Imari DuSauzay,
New York City, NY.
Brooklyn
My friend is full of ideas and fighting with cancer…We hold hands to share love.
I am experiencing too many friends facing cancer, it makes no difference what your color is..
Cancer does not discriminate.
Yes, I transitioned. Still white, though.
Jonah F.
Brooklyn, NY
As a transgender man, I can relate to being marginalized. But still, my whiteness (and now maleness) affords me privilege in 99% of my everyday life, and I know that’s still 100% better than what BIPOC people are experiencing.
Adopted, how much did she cost?
Gail O’Rourke
Brooklyn, NY
White Mom + Chinese daughter: Said right in my face, with my 5 year old daughter in my lap. She clutched me, buried her face in my chest and sobbed. I put my arms around her said don’t be disrespectful and walked out of the shop.
He’s my dad, not the gardener.
Kelly Stuart,
Brooklyn, NY.
I was five when my mother married my stepfather, Alfred Brown, Jr. in 1980. My stepfather, or, as I think of him, my father, was 21 years older than my mom and had already raised a daughter by the time he met me, but that didn’t stop him from getting a second job at the Ford plant in Mahwah, New Jersey so he could give me what I’d asked him for when he married my mom: my own room, and a back yard with a swing. He got me the room and the backyard and the swing, but what came with moving from the city where we were to a small rural town where a different set of understandings, like when I went from a place where I knew other mixed-race families to a place where kids used to throw Oreos at me on the bus to school to symbolize my black-and-white family. Even after the Oreos stopped flying in middle school, I dealt with people’s fear of and prejudice against my father every day.
Now that I am grown and my father has passed away, and people see the blonde, blue-eyed, upper-middle-class, NPR-listening, Brooks Brothers-employed me, people think they know who I am and who I must have come from. This was brought home to me recently when someone looking over my shoulder as I tried to find a picture on my computer pointed at my computer and asked me whose house was in the picture that was currently on my screen. I said that it was a picture of the house in which I grew up. My dad was also in the picture, pulling weeds, and the person looking over my shoulder said, “And was that your gardener?” I said no, that he was my father, and in that moment, I was so angry at the implication of the assumption, and yet, I was so, so very grateful that I got to claim him again, publicly, as the man who made me who I am.
*PHOTO CREDIT National Geographic
Pale freckled redhead burned by words
Marie Farrell,
Brooklyn, NY.
I grew up in San Diego, California where the sun shines all the time. I was the kid that never tanned, just freckled and burned. I was also raised by an Irish mother so there was a lot less love than fights and tension. I recall a day when I bravely went to school in shorts and was destroyed by the words of a black girl who said “You need to get a tan”! I was often looked at weird because of the pale skin, being told to tan as if it were that easy. I was told by a girl in my gymnastics class “You have freckles on your knees,” as if that was such an odd thing. I was called “Annie”, “Pippi”, “Strawberry Shortcake,” and later I was called more inappropriate names like “Fire Muff” and “Ginger”. Since having cancer and losing my hair it has grown back less red, but I feel I am always and will always be a redhead on the inside and out; always feeling like a fish out of water in a hot, sunny climate, being called names that most people might not think are racist, but no matter what they thought it stung. It burned me more than the awful sunburns I grew up with. As an adult I take pride in my “spots” and my pale skin, in my sort-of red hair, and my Irish heritage, but sometimes those words still burn
.
Not THAT kind of Black Girl.
Lateefah Torrence,
Brooklyn, NY.
At the corner bodega, I’m one of those Black Girls who the Middle Eastern owner must watch from his elevated podium behind the bullet-proof glass. On the subway, I’m a Black Girl on WIC who can give Russian ladies directions to the welfare office. In the taxi, I’m the Black Girl the Mexican driver tries to deliver to the Projects towering behind my co-op.
I’m not That Kind of Black Girl. But even if I were, I’d like you to stop assuming you know me.
I feel invisible, while standing out.
Aman Agah,
Brooklyn, NY.
I am Iranian, Irish, Azari, and German. Being Iranian means being called Arab. I am not Arab. Being Iranian means being part of a group of people that so many don’t know – even if I say “Persian” – and yet I am part of a group labeled terrorist. I am the enemy that no one knows anything about. And my Irish identity has so often been denied to even exist – because how could I be any part “white!” – that I hold strongly to that part of me too. I am proud of my heritages and anyone who is not mixed will never understand the isolation that comes with it. We mixed folks are our own little community of outcasts. Something else to find pride in!
Got tired of straightening my hair
Sophia Farber
Brooklyn, NY
Of course, when envisioning ideal partners, I do give a thought to what our daughter’s hair might be like. Guilty. Wondering if and when Michelle Obama will let the girls go natural at a state event.
Mass Incarceration, Stop and Frisk: #NewJimCrow.
Ray G
New York City, NY
Brooklyn
The Black Liberation struggle did not go far enough — did not uproot oppression, disassemble power structures, create a new state power of the people — did not make revolution. We are seeing how all the successes of these past struggles have been reduced and reversed, and the situation is now worse. We can emancipate all of humanity, through revolution.
I am proud. I am sorry.
Rebeka,
Brooklyn, NY
Like the majority of immigrants who have come to America, my ancestors came to this land seeking political, religious and economic freedoms not open to them in their native country, England; arriving in the early 1600s. I am proud that they fought in the Revolutionary War to found this country, to create a nation that sought to safe guard personal freedoms and liberty. At the same time, I am sorry that those liberties did not extend beyond the white Europeans. I am sorry about the long term generational impact that their immigration caused by opening a door which resulted generations of displacement, death and discrimination of first nations people as well as slavery. And that, while they did not own slaves, they did not work towards equality and freedom for all. I hope that in this generation, we can start to make amends to those who have been left behind by a system that for generations favored European immigrants.
White/Hispanic looks/is all white not sorry
Ruby Marlowe,
Brooklyn, NY.
Italian-Irish mom, Puerto Rican-Mestizo dad, never met dad’s family as his side was pretty bad along with dad who was never around. Me and my little brother look and act “Caucasian” (laughing at the now PC whites who treated us like crap in the 80s and now identify us with people who emigrated from the former Soviet Union because they feel bad) and I changed my name to stop getting harassed by Hispanics and blacks who accused me of being a typical hipster white person that treats race as a fad.
Still healing from my internalized racism
Dominic Bradley,
Brooklyn, NY.
I’m an Arab named Dave Hall
Dave Hall,
Brooklyn, NY.
I get my name from my Yankee (English-American) father, whose ancestors arrived in Boston in 1630 but I get my complexion from my Arab-American mother. People do a double take when they first meet me after only hearing my voice on the phone. And new friends quickly learn that I am passionately insistent about discussing Arabs in truth, not in myth and stereotype.
My brother doesn’t look like me
Caroline Foster,
Brooklyn, NY
I’m white, my younger brother was adopted from South Korea when I was five. I forget that we don’t look related because although I remember picking him up from the airport with my family, we’ve been siblings since before I understood that his experience being adopted by a white family in America would be different than mine. Sometimes I need to clarify that he’s my brother to friends or acquaintances because it’s not immediately obvious. I used to have a picture of him as my lock screen on my phone. People would always ask me if he was my boyfriend. I always wonder how he feels about it. We don’t talk about it much as a family.
I don’t speak Spanish, just Russian
Michelle Del Pin,
Brooklyn, NY.
I can’t even tell you how many times people have come up to me and started speaking Spanish. Sometimes it even goes as far as telling me that it’s sad I don’t speak my native language. Yes my skin is brown and my hair is black. So? There are other types of people in the world who share this phenotype and are not Spanish. There was a time when I thought I should learn a whole new language just to make them happy. Today’s me really does not care what they think. I grew up in an English speaking country with Italian parents. I may be me and if you have a problem with that maybe you should learn a new language.
