I used to watch a good amount of television with my family. Whenever any commercials came on, my dad told us to take note.
“Count the number of Latinos you see in this entire commercial break,” he would say. We did, and what we saw wasn’t anything truly surprising.
It wasn’t the first time I remember understanding that there was something different about the way people who looked like me were represented in the U.S.
Every year on the first day of school at the Catholic school I attended as a child, I was always so excited to see the display of classmate photos and names waiting on the door of my new classroom.
Unfortunately, my excitement was too often met with confusion and frustration, as my photograph or name was almost always misplaced and labeled above another girl with a Spanish last name. We were some of the only brown faces in the school, and it might have been an easy mistake had it not continued to happen, year after year.
Things like this happened all the time growing up, even if I didn’t always understand what it meant. These things didn’t become internalized until much later, as my education allowed me to more closely examine the implications of being a little brown girl — and now a grown brown woman — in the U.S.
But last week, a very good friend of mine asked me a question that made me rethink how all of this was interpreted from a different side.
"Have you really ever felt discriminated against?” she asked. “Like can you name a time when you felt like you were actually treated differently? How do you know?”
I was, honestly, shocked. The questions first infuriated me and then made me seriously think about privilege and how people measure each others’ racial inequalities these days.
I wasn’t quite sure what to say, but I started by telling her about my Catholic school name mix-ups.
“Right, but that kinda stuff has happened to me too before,” she responded.
I had so many stories to tell her. So many testimonies of how being a Mexican-American woman has made me feel. Stories of how I’ve been looked at, talked to, joked about and teased, left out and made to feel like an 'other' in the country in which I was born.
But proposed in that way, how does any explanation of my experiences as a Mexican-American growing up in America suffice? And how do I articulate these things and not sound like I’m trying too hard to prove that I’ve “had it harder”?
To those whose privilege perhaps shields them from understanding the experiences of many different kinds of minorities in the U.S., what do my experiences mean to you?
When another friend asked what I wanted to do after school, and my answer was “a writer,” and he responded, “A Latina writer?”
What does that mean?
When I am criticized for pronouncing my last name correctly and for ordering Mexican food in Spanish, what does that mean?
I told a friend that I was writing about Selena last week and he said, “jokingly,” “Spanish people aren’t relevant; they’re dogs.” What does that mean?
When one of my best friends, who is so routinely made fun of because she is Chinese, sums up her experiences as, “I’m just used to it now,” what does that mean?
And what does it mean that some think all or any of these things are acceptable?
This isn’t about comparisons among minorities, but instead the fact that minorities can’t escape these kinds of things, while others have the privilege of not dealing with any of it.
This all seems like a broad, no-brainer topic of conversation, but we can’t ignore the implications of the fact that many people think that for non-whites, racism is a whisper now where it once was a yell.
I get it: Things in 2013 don’t look like they did in the '60s, the '50s, or the Confederate South. But that’s why it is so important for all of us to talk about.
In her Washington Post op-ed in March 2012, Reniqua Allen echoes these ideas in her article, “The first black president has made it harder to talk about race in America.”
“Even the most well-intentioned white people who fundamentally understand the challenges of race in America, often can’t understand why race, as a subject to wrestle with, can never be 'over.' They can’t understand what it’s like to walk down the street and have someone fear you just because of your race. Or to go to your doctor’s office after-hours to pick something up and have someone think you’re the maid. Or to have someone give you a virtual pat on the head for being 'articulate.'”
So how do whites determine who is suffering from racial inequalities and institutionalized racism these days, and who is allowed to validate the truth of the suffering, discrimination and racism felt by minorities?
They can start by researching the production of inequality: institutionalized racist practices and standards that were set up long before so many of us were born.
Things like the formation of “race,” segregated schools, redlining, the prison system, environmental racism, whiteness as property — these are all things we are still dealing with today. These things have trickled down and formed our present reality, however different from more “apparently racist” times they may seem.
There doesn’t have to be segregated counters or “No Dogs or Mexicans” signs like the ones that were so prevalent in the 1950s and ‘60s to understand that there is still racism everywhere in America.
When our realities differ, we might never truly understand what it is like to walk in another’s shoes, but the least we can do is talk about it.
Reach the columnist at andrea.c.flores@asu.edu or follow her at @bowchickaflores
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