always Latina, usually wise…
"Always Latin@, Usually Wise"
Random Acts of Whiteness
This story is a story about the everyday manifestations of white privilege. The subtle behaviors by which white folks perpetuate a sense of entitlement that is denied to people of color, for should people of color behave in this same manner, serious consequences would certainly follow. I was home a few weekends ago, immersed in my usual weekend chores, when my dog, who was outside in his kennel, began to bark. My dog rarely barks, so when he does I typically look outside my window to see what is calling his attention. When I looked outside my window on this occasion, I saw a white woman with her dog, walking right into my driveway.
Let me pause now to set the scene for you. I live in a suburban town in Connecticut. Our family is one of a handful of families of color in the entire town. Our house is located in what I call the more “woodsy” part of town. All the houses sit in the middle of large wooded yards, with large front lawns and tree-lined backyards. Our dog’s kennel is right next door to our barn where we keep all the necessary tools and equipment that come with suburban life, like a large lawn mower and snow blower. The kennel is a descent size, fenced in concrete area. In this kennel we have a little house that keeps him warm and comfy. The kennel also is partially roofed so he can stay nice and dry during rainy days. To get to the kennel from the street you’d have to walk into the long driveway, past the side of the house and into the backyard. In other words the dog is nowhere near the public street area. Unpause.
As I looked outside the window and see this strange woman walking into my property with her dog, I of course, become curious as to why she’s coming onto my yard and not walking towards the front door, where you might expect a neighbor to head if she’s coming over for an unannounced visit. I head outside and find the woman standing deep inside of my property, right at the gate to my dog’s kennel. ”Excuse me,” I called out, “can I help you?” She turns to me and with a meek voice says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize anyone was home. Is it OK if we give her a cookie? We see her in her kennel and feel bad for her and come by to visit from time time.” Ok, here are all the things that are wrong with what she’s just said to me. 1) She could’ve found out if someone was home, if she’d bothered to ring the doorbell and check with the owners of the house and the dog before trespassing onto my property. 2) She admitted that she repeatedly trespasses onto my property and feeds my dog, Lord only knows what, without the permission of the owners. 3) Even though my dog does not wear underwear, she has failed to notice that he is a male dog.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, she proceeded to give the dog the cookie and walked away. At no point did she introduce herself. At no point did she ask me my name. She was solely concerned about the dog, who by the way, is better fed, better medically cared for, and better housed, than most people on the planet. So this is not a living creature to feel sorry for. Far from it. I was so aghast by her audacity that I couldn’t say anything. I walked back into my house, after she’d left, mumbling to myself. And then it hit me. She was wearing a hoodie! That’s when I realized this wasn’t just some crazy lady who goes around feeding dog cookies to her neighbors pets, this was a white woman completely oblivious of her privilege and feeling fully entitled to walk into someone else’s property without permission, never stopping to consider that, at best, what she was doing was inappropriate and at worse, illegal.
Could I have done the same thing? Could I have gotten away if I walked onto her property and fed her dog something? How quickly might’ve the police been called? Would she have even bothered to come outside to see who I was? What if it was a young African American male, wearing a hoodie, could he get away with walking in my neighborhood, trespassing onto someone’s property, and walk away without a scratch on him? I’m guessing, not.
Read MoreSurviving the Hunger Games
In case you’ve missed the chatter, there’s been a lot of hoopla around the African American characters in the recently released blockbuster movie, The Hunger Games. The movie, which is based on the popular book by Suzanne Collins, depicts what some have described as a post-apocalyptic world, where the citizens are subjected to sacrificing children as payment for their past sins of rebellion. Two kids from each of the 12 districts are chosen to participate in the Hunger Games, a kind of brutal olympics where there is only one gold medal winner at the end, the one that is left standing, after having killed all of the other competitors. Like most tweens and teens, my daughter was captivated by the three books in the series. Once we found out that the movie was going to come out I felt obligated to read the books as well.
Admittedly, the books are very well-written, with characters that truly capture your heart. I was looking forward to seeing the movie, curious to see how not only the fictional world was going to be recreated on screen, but also how the characters would be portrayed. Frankly, I was disappointed. The special effects were mediocre and the relationships among the characters, which were deeper and more complex in the book, appeared flat on screen. While I expected to hear critiques similar to my own related to how well or not the book made it onto the big screen, I was dismayed by what I heard instead. Racist reactions appeared throughout social media because one of the beloved characters from the book, Rue, was portrayed by an African American girl. Engrossed in the action of the book, I must admit, I totally missed the physical descriptions of the characters, where indeed Rue is described as having dark skin . Of course, for me this wasn’t a disappointment, but a pleasant surprise when I watched the film. For the apparent younger viewers sharing their sentiments on twitter, Rue’s appearance as a dark skin child was everything from disappointing to horrendous. After reading about these reactions, I was curious about how my daughter’s friends, most of whom are white tweens, were talking about Rue in their conversations about the movie.
So I opened the conversation, “what did your friends think of Rue?” She talked about how they were all so sad to see her dying, some even cried while watching the film, even though they’d read the book and knew it was coming. I asked her if they were making any comments about Rue being Black. ”No, why?”. So then I proceeded to tell her about those twitter reactions. What came out of her mouth was very telling. ”People still think that way? I thought all of that was over.” ”All of that” being racism. I took a deep breathe, as I began to burst the bubble of my daughters sheltered life. While she’s very aware of her own racial difference and we’ve had many a conversation about her own difficult experiences “fitting in” or negotiating her otherness in a predominantly white school, somehow in her 11 year old mind, she could not connect those experiences with the comments surrounding Rue’s blackness. ”Yes sweetie, people still do think that way, a lot of people still do.” I saw her go through the different stages that many of us go through when experiencing or witnessing racism. First she was angry, then she was sad, worried about the actress who played Rue and how hurt she must feel reading those reactions.
All I could do was listen and console her as she went through these different stages. But what became very clear to me was that she is no longer living in the realm of childhood innocence. If she’s going to understand her own everyday experiences, I can’t shield her from every other form of racism that is going on outside of her world. She needs to understand her own self in a broader context if she’s going to develop the skills to simultaneously have a strong sense of self while being bombarded by messages that try to weaken her.
In some respects she’s living her own Hunger Games, where the individual reigns supreme over the collective, where she’s constantly competing against her peers for social status, and queen bees swarm around her capitalizing on her weaknesses to try to take her down, where she’s taught that the easiest way to the top is to step over others. In this version of the Hunger Games, I play the role of the Mentor (Haymitch in the movie), the one giving her guidance hoping that at the end not only will she remain alive and whole, but will actually bring the system to a grounding halt. Instead of fighting for sponsors to provide tools for survival, I fight against both traditional and now social media, the tools of the “Capitol” in our real version of the Hunger Games, that are so prevalent in Lina’s world, constantly working to undermine her. Will we succeed? I guess we’ll have to wait until the third movie.
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Oh Geraldo, Geraldo, Why?
In the classic, blame the victim-type of rhetoric, reminiscent of the ways female victims of sexual assault are judged as responsible for their own assaults if they were wearing anything remotely revealing, Geraldo Rivera has claimed that what Trayvon Martin was wearing (the hoodie), on that fateful day when he was killed, is as much to blame, as George Zimmerman is for pulling the trigger. In his comments during his appearance in the Fox and Friends television show last week, he went on to explain how the hoodie serves as a trigger for people when worn by Black and Latino young men, because of the constant image in the media of these young men wearing hoodies when they engage in criminal activity. So instead of blaming the media (unlikely thing for him to do as a journalist), for the unbalanced image of Black and Latino young men as criminals that is consistently portrayed, and which therefore contributes to the stereotypical view most Americans have of black and brown men wearing hoodies, he blames the victim for fitting the image.
As a parent I can understand wanting to feel like there was something within your power that you could do to protect your child from racist violence. So maybe if we make our sons of color dress differently, speak differently, act differently, then, maybe, just maybe, they won’t be victims of racism and discrimination. If that were the answer then how do we explain the many experiences of Black and Latino professional, educated men, wearing business suits, who still today, have a hard time hailing a cab in New York City? Who still have to prove themselves more than their white colleagues in order to get the job or the promotion? And who still continue to earn less than their white counterparts? What is disheartening is that Geraldo Rivera’s narrative isn’t a new one. Historically, the problem of racism has always been discussed as the problem of people of color, not of whites, not of the oppressive system. What may now be described as “the hoodie problem,” is what in times past has been discussed as “the negro problem,” or “the Puerto Rican problem.” Never is it a social inequality problem or a white privilege problem. The problem must be embodied by the victim of the problem. After all, if their bodies weren’t around to offend, to threaten, to carry diseases, to live in poverty, then “the problem” wouldn’t exist. Right?
As if the message itself wasn’t bad enough, for me, it is made that much worse by who the messenger happens to be. Another Latino who has forgotten his past “as a long-haired, semi-hippie, storefront lawyer working mostly with poor clients being harassed by slumlords or being denied access to health care,” as he described himself in this piece. He’s forgotten his days working with the revolutionary, beret-wearing, definitely non-conformist, Young Lords Party. How many young black and Latino men and women did Geraldo Rivera represent and defend for their audacity to believe they had the right to walk the streets of New York City unafraid of being targeted for any form of abuse or violence? For this is the right that Trayvon Martin was enacting the day he went out for a stroll in a street in Florida and was brutally violated, not because he was wearing a hoodie, but because he was Black.
The sad fact is that it does not matter how much we change ourselves. It is not our outward appearance, but our perceived essential difference(s) by those in the majority, that is the source of the racism that manifests itself in tragedies like the death of Trayvon Martin. No matter how much we change ourselves, assimilate, or try to forget our past heritage and history, for those that choose to believe we are lesser than, we will always be lesser than, expendable, and therefore ok to be obliterated.
The culprit in this tragedy is the disease called racism. This social disease cost Trayvon Martin his life and George Zimmerman his humanity. And I would even venture to add, it has cost Geraldo Rivera’s disconnection from his own past and apparent cultural amnesia. It would be easy to dismiss him, to negate him, to distance myself as far away as possible from the likes of Geraldo Rivera. But if I did, I would not be much better than him. I too would be succumbing to the racism that lurks all around us, that wants us to hate one another. Instead, I claim him, as my misguided Latino brother, who I pray will hear the pain his words have added to this already painful situation.
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