Learning to Be Brown

My first memory of being in a grocery store: I’m with Lala, we’re loading the sliding black belt with our food, and a little blond behind me, about my size, asks her mother loudly, “Mom, what is she?”

The little girl is pointing at me.

“Don’t point,” says the mother, lacking conviction. The girl asks it again, and neither her mother nor I know what the girl is talking about.

“She’s black,” the girl says, now pointing to the cashier ringing up our groceries. “And we’re white. So what is she?” Again, pointing to me.

Answering that question has been a big part of my life. At that moment, as a five-year-old child, I wanted to say, “I’m white too, you idiot,” as a means of feeling safe, feeling one of the rest of them, and also because it wasn’t totally a lie. Though my mother had arrived here from Ecuador without American language or mentality, my father was half-Sicilian, half-French, and that was good enough for me to feel acceptable.

Only it wasn’t enough for lots of people. My mother dated a string of white men in the early 80s, and the one she married (and whom fathered my two sisters) had a penchant for calling us dirty Spics when he was at his drunkest. (Incidentally, he also liked to call me a prima donna, and for many years I interpreted that as my being a forerunner of the Madonna, and could not for the life of me figure out how that was an insult.) Girls in school, too, were vaguely hostile, as if I might start doing a Mexican hat dance at any moment. I was brown, I was bookish, I was weird.

I don’t mean to overemphasize my struggle. Lots of friends look at me now and say, “I didn’t know you were Hispanic! It just looks like you have a tan!” And in late high school, early college, during the meteoric rises of J-Lo and Ricky Martin, brownness suddenly became hip. At one point I might have offered translation services I was so proud of my darker heritage.

But other moments I’ve been accused of being too white, not owning my roots enough. In graduate school, a blue-eyed blonde I later became friends with but, during the incident I’m about to recount, I was deathly frightened of, told me she was more Hispanic than I was. She’d grown up in a heavily Puerto Rican populated neighborhood. She knew more rituals, had more Hispanic friends, felt love from more Hispanic people than I ever had. We were both drunk at an English department party when she said this and I hoped she didn’t mean it, but still I was livid and hurt and I felt she was right.

(Side note: not that I’d have the balls to compare myself with the leader of the free world or anything, but I get truly pissed at people of all stripes and races and creeds who’ve decried Obama for not being black enough. And obversely, for not being white enough. Or more disturbingly, I’ve heard, “If he were a white man, he would never have (fill in this blank).” As if the man could have ever chosen who he is. Learning to navigate two worlds is difficult enough—to hear black and whites both say, “Hey, stay in my world!” must be as maddening for him as it is for me.)

I, unlike my blond Hispanic-esque friend, had grown up in a New Orleans neighborhood that didn’t exist to me. In Gentilly Woods it was me and Lala (inside, ironically, the only unbarred house on the street), and the outside world was filled with white people who were out to get us. When I started going to school with whites and longed to be confident and loud as they were, Lala balked. The gringo language was hideous, she’d say, with the exception of words like motherfucker, and she didn’t want it spoken in her house. When Americans spoke, they didn’t know what they were saying, she said. (I didn’t argue that just because she didn’t understand them, it didn’t mean they didn’t understand one another.) Her ban of English didn’t bother me. But when she would pick me up from school some days, she’d bring her brownness into the white world and embarrass me. Rather than going to the principal’s office to check me out, as per the rules, she’d march directly to my classroom and address the teacher, Mrs. White (no shit—her actual name), in Spanish. When someone doesn’t speak your language, it’s hard to argue with them. I was always let go immediately when Lala showed up, and my classmates thought she had some special power. We understood words they didn’t, and that made us doubly weird.

When my mother would come home from work, I was in the white world again. It wasn’t as if she loathed her first language or her heritage, but I sensed it was sort of uncool for her. She had gone to an elite Catholic all-girls school, had zero Hispanic friends, wore the frosted hair and pink lips of the 80s. Rosita was doing her utmost to be a material girl in a material world, and I wasn’t sure whether to follow her lead or Lala’s. Both of their lives seduced me, both were beautiful. But while I was a part of them, deep down I felt detached from each. Many years I spent avoiding making a decision about who I’d be. Which side was I on?

Here’s the real reason I’m writing this, and it’s a shift from the personal to the political: for me, learning to be brown is also a simultaneously struggle with learning to be white. Learning to be myself. And lately I’ve been dismayed at the passionately intense hatred I’ve felt toward white conservatives in recent months, and I’m looking for ways to cure myself of it, for what it is inside of me that boils these political waters.

Many people, including my very liberal husband, want to know why I’ve lately got a near zero-tolerance policy for conservatives. Here’s the simplest definition I can give: 1963. 1968. Jim Crow. The Voting Right’s Act. Lilly Ledbetter. Jack Johnson. Brown vs. Board. Social equality. Civil Right’s Act. David Duke. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Selma, Alabama. Birmingham, Alabama. The 19th Amendment. Water hoses. George Wallace.

I feel that if one is not working for social equality and justice, then one is working against it. As a teacher of rhetoric, I usually abhor the either-or fallacy, but I think it applies here. For the most part, conservative Americans (obviously, especially those in power) are historically on the forefront of denying all people their rights rather than bestowing them freely as our Constitution promises it shall do. I’ve got staunchly libertarian friends who make everything an economic issue, and if you know me at all, you know I’ve got no claims to understanding our vast economy and want can be done to heal it. I see issues such as health care reform, civil rights reform, equal opportunities, in strictly humanitarian terms. Balancing the budget doesn’t interest me (though I’ll concede it must be done), but healing people and old hard wounds does. The work in healing our nation’s ills isn’t finished, and if you think it is, then…I won’t be cynical and say what I truly think, but I will pray for you. I know conservatives don’t speak my language, and I don’t speak theirs. I am working on it: speaking more softly than I once spoke, listening more closely. I’ll try to whisper the last lines of this blog.

I won’t make this into a political party thing, as I know that southern Democrats of the past and present have been particularly repugnant, but I do believe it is about a liberal versus conservative thing. I will agree with what Patrick Kennedy said as he was eulogizing his father: we must agree that Americans from both sides of the political spectrum love their country equally.

But I have a question to ask: when people at tea parties and town hall debates hold up signs glorifying our country’s past, saying they want America to be the same America they grew up in, with what perspective are they viewing the world? Through what lens do they see themselves? How did that America seem to other folks?

I grew up in this country and wanted to be nothing more than a real, proud, white American. Now I want to hug that little brown girl, hug the little white girl who didn’t know what to call her. I want them to love each other before they don’t know how anymore. Before it’s too late.