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When Am I White?
Last night, I was speaking with an indigenous person (he didn’t mention the tribe) and a mixed Black person, when the former casually mentioned that a white woman like me had more privileges than he did.
“I’m white?” I asked.
“You know what I mean — you look white enough,” he replied.
This is definitely true, so I accepted that and the conversation moved on.
I’m not quite white-passing, but I am, as he mentioned, white enough.
When he said it, it made me realize that I’ve been called a “white woman” a handful of times in my life, if that.
So I began to think — When am I white?
Or, put a better way, in what spaces am I perceived as white?
I definitely was not white when I went to NYU. I was surrounded by rich white students who seemed eager…a little too eager…to hear tales of Latin American poverty. Did I know how to make tortillas? I felt like I filled the “brown” quota of some friend groups. My white half was completely ignored. I was introduced as purely Costa Rican (I’m also Peruvian), and my efforts to explain that I didn’t cross the border with a chicken and a burro (and actually lived in a suburb of Dallas before college) were ignored.
