Racism and the raw deal of the middle ground

Art: Harmony 2 by Alima Newton

I have lots of white people in my life. I’m married to a man who is half Puerto Rican but whose family disowned those origins and changed their name in order to pass as white in the racially charged environment of Hawaii in the early 1900s. I have many beloved white friends and in my twenty-one years in the United States I have more often than not been the only, or one of few brown people in my graduate and writing classrooms, places of employment, spiritual and activist circles, moms' groups. Everywhere.

Having more privilege than most Latinos here opens me doors to whites-only clubs, then pressures me to endure the unspoken norms in those environments and try to assimilate. Some of those norms, while not overtly racist, tend to erase people of color. They are full of covert micro aggressions, erroneous assumptions, and the expectation that I will tiptoe around their fragility.

I am light-skinned and tall. My English is proficient. I have lots of formal education. I am good at reading people. If I wanted to, I could opt to stay quiet and fall into the illusion that I am included or welcomed. Because I carry the emotional load of my interactions with white people, they forget that my experience is not like theirs.

I came to the United States through marriage, and when my marriage fell apart, I got my first social work job. I started working in agencies that served the poorest Latinos in Oregon, a state renowned for its white supremacist policies.

First in a shelter for homeless youth, then in a rape crisis center, a domestic violence intervention agency, and a torture treatment program, I served people who risked their lives crossing the border to flee from extreme poverty or persecution. The ones who recently arrived, who speak no English and sometimes no Spanish because they are indigenous. The ones who are overworked, underpaid, get no benefits and send money home to their families. The ones who share one apartment to two or three families, or live in farmworker camps.

Seventeen years ago I was coordinator of a torture treatment program for Latin Americans. From Mexico to Argentina, every country was represented among our clients who were tortured and persecuted by CIA-backed regimes, by soldiers and death squads trained by the United States at the School of the Americas in Georgia.

When I worked at Amigos de los Sobrevivientes I met a recently arrived Guatemalan couple. They spoke no English and were new to our agency. The woman had pale skin like peach yogurt and the man was clearly an Afro Guatemalan with ebony skin and coarse black hair. I am familiar with the ethnic diversity of Guatemala because my father is from there, and my own family members range from looking Caucasian to having some indigenous and African traits.

Spanish colonization enforced a careful racial hierarchy: white people at the top and indigenous and enslaved Africans at the bottom.

Wanting to connect with this couple, I told them my father is from Guastatoya, Guatemala. The man responded, “I don't believe you.”

He didn't say that because of my own light brown skin. After all, his own wife looked much whiter than I. What he meant to say, was: “I refuse to identify with you. You stink of privilege.”

I could have been offended, and to be sure, his remark hurt me a bit, but I knew perfectly well that the people who oppressed him back home look and sound like me. What possible purpose could be served by dramatizing my hurt or trying to make him wrong?

At the time I had two jobs that paid me an average of $12/hour, I didn't have health insurance, I lived in a tiny converted garage, but I had all my needs met. My simple life included several luxuries: I ate organic food, I had managed to buy a car and I flew to Mexico twice a year to visit my parents because I could afford it and especially because I had a green card.

This man and his wife were traumatized from the violence at home and the risky journey north. They were staying with other Guatemalans, being fed by charity, had not found jobs. They were weary and scared. My job was to help them, and that's what I did.

When I confront white people with their often unconscious, unintentional racist patterns, they tend to act defensively. I suspect they think I am coming from some moral high ground, as if being Latina, I didn't have to do this myself.

White people don't want to feel the discomfort of their guilt, of the ways they've participated in the oppressive society and taken the benefits that racism confers to them. As Reverend Nadia Bolz-Weber said, “Why fight a system that has done nothing but love you every day of your life?”

I belong not only to an economic middle class but to a racial middle ground. Being in the middle is a raw deal. It is the age-old divisiveness of the house versus the field slaves; the foreman versus the farmworkers; the social worker versus the poor. There is a special stress that comes with being the one who directly witnesses the great suffering of the most oppressed, while also getting the table scraps of the rich. Your expected role is to keep the privileged comfortable while your heart breaks with the misery that you see up close. Your payoff is the luxury of being second class.

I remember feeling guilty when I bought my car. I was an environmentalist and had been riding my bike for transportation, rain or shine. Then a friend co-signed a loan for me and I bought a new but simple small Nissan and paid it off over the next 5 years. I felt guilty for burning fossil fuels, embarrassed every time my clients saw me drive my shiny new car. But when I asked myself if I should give it up, I realized that without a car I would be unable to drive my clients to appointments, or give my girlfriends rides home after late parties. Without a car I wouldn't be able to pick up my mother from the airport when she visited or take her anywhere. I understood that I'd rather be a Mexican woman in the U.S. with a car, than one without a car.

I still feel guilty sometimes, which is uncomfortable but bearable. I’d rather feel uncomfortable than renounce my privilege. The more choice and agency I have, the more I can help others.

But helping my clients has required me to do a lot of inner work to identify and start eradicating my own oppressive patterns. It was one thing to own my privilege, and another to change my behavior, my language, even the way I dress, to earn my clients' trust and improve my ability to serve them.

When I said to that man, “My father is from Guatemala too”, I was giving myself undue importance, asking him to identify with me. He refused because he felt miles away. I was playing the “I have a black friend” card that so many white people pull when racial tensions are high. The moment required that I focus on him, that I listen to his pain and his needs and I do something to meet them, not that I force a connection between us without doing the work of earning his trust.

The work of owning our privilege and uprooting our oppressive behaviors is uncomfortable, but necessary. Public demonstrations and mass movements are important, but we must dismantle racism every day, in all of our interactions. We must awaken to the ways our privilege makes us ignorant and fragile. We must identify the places where denial and defensiveness crop up. This is long-term work. We needed to do this yesterday, but today will do. Let's start today.

My daughter and her friends during the MLK Jr. Day March 2019