As someone whose side of the story has been routinely disbelieved by white people, I know that too many of us begin to doubt what we experience. You doubt your feelings and recollections and you begin to think that you exaggerated the scale of the situation. I have done this many times, where I thought I was insane. I have even been called insane when I have retold stories about some of my more heated interactions with white people. I have even been told by other BIPOC that I am a liar about my interactions with white people. White people are so convinced of their goodness that we begin to believe it too. We regulate how other BIPOC react to white people’s vitriol, and we take the blame for situations that we did not create.
When this ordeal went public, on Tuesday, May 26, 2020, liberal Democrat Amy Cooper released a public apology, after she was put on administrative leave from her place of employment, the investment company Franklin Templeton. She also had her dog taken from her by the rescue center, Abandoned Angels Cocker Spaniel Rescue, Inc. The dog was eventually returned. But the entire internet was upset at her behavior. Her apology had the audacity to state, “I am not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way.”
White women are allowed to question other peoples’ humanity and are still allowed to be read as well-meaning. White women’s tears stop conversations on race, class, and gender in their tracks because white women’s feelings are considered sacred. White women become untouchable in a white supremacist society. They can be racist on camera and then deny their participation in their racist actions, and people will believe it. We know, and history knows, that white women are just as complicit as white men when it comes to the oppression and killing of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color.
White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived. None of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual antiracist practice.
—Robin DiAngelo
We have all come into contact with a liberal Democrat Amy Cooper. I remember mine was called Sam. Sam grew up in Florida, like I did. But we grew up in different areas; I grew up in the Caribbean-immigrant-friendly Florida and she grew up in the Trump-supporting Florida. That is a clear distinction for me when we talk about Florida.
In graduate school, I was reading and writing and exploring chola subcultures with the help of Chicanx and Mexican American material. I became fascinated with the similarities that cholas had with what South Floridian Latinxs call chongas. I had identified as a chonga growing up but was shamed out of this identity.
Still, I was fascinated. I wrote about chongas often, and I reflected on this subculture because I was finally learning to make sense of my experiences growing up. In high school specifically, I had created distance from chongas because I needed to assimilate into whiteness, and because people called them cheap and ugly. Chongas were just being proud and bold in their identities and aesthetics, but still, the white gaze considered them threatening.
In graduate school I was finally learning the language around this subculture by studying chola subculture. I was finally embracing my identity and started posting about this on Facebook, when this white woman in my program privately messaged me.
We were both in the same progressive graduate program, but we were two years apart. We had been friendly toward one another, which was my first mistake. I have learned that liberal white people will be white people before they are liberal—leaning into their whiteness as is convenient, and leaning into their liberal ideals with that same strategy.
In her message to me, she said she did not like that I talked about chola subculture because she was bullied by cholas and was scared of them. She also said that their “gang affiliations” should be noted, and that I had a responsibility to not uplift such a violent group of people.
I was floored. Still, like many BIPOC, I had learned to disengage because reason is not the friend of white fragility. I told her she was being racist, and then I immediately blocked her from all my social media accounts. And when I heard how she had told others her version of the story, I was of course the aggressor and she was the victim of my aggression, despite the fact that I was minding my business and she slid into my DMs.
Understanding white fragility means self-preservation. I am not comfortable in rooms that are predominantly white, because white people have shown me that my presence is only enjoyable so long as I do not object to how they choose to interact with me. I am not comfortable in rooms that are predominantly white, because white women have shown me that I am to be grateful for their friendship, and that they enjoy our friendship only so long as they can dictate how it looks and feels. I am not comfortable in rooms that are predominantly white, because white people can be racist and the only acceptable response is to laugh it off and hide my humiliation. I am not comfortable in rooms that are predominantly white, because I have to watch what I say and how I say it, because otherwise they will assume that they can say things like, “I went to your country once with my church group, and the people are so beautiful and humble.”
In these interactions, it becomes mandatory that I am receptive and positive, never to respond in anger or push back or even feel hurt. White people demand docility from us, and when that demand is not met, we are treated like social pariahs at best or, at worst—well, just look at the prison population or the latest trending hashtag.
Criminalizing Blackness means that Brown people are given the terrible option of either aligning ourselves with white people or suffering similar results. And aligning ourselves with whiteness has never saved us from anything. White adjacency just enables white supremacy. Being “one of the good ones” just turns you into a tool for white people to use to attack “the bad ones.” If you do not get that, you are not paying attention.
But even so, Brown girl, whatever choices you’ve been backed into, I know you are trying to survive as someone Brown in a racist country. More importantly, I hope to make moments of dissonance with whiteness and white people feel less suffocating. I hope you start reframing racist interactions with fragile white people as just that. I hope that you feel free to wash your hands of their fragility and racism, but it is not about you—it is bigger than you—so do not let these moments take the wind from your wings.
Do not let them silence you or insinuate you are the aggressor. In fact, boldly pick up that phone and start recording, because most video recordings are legal with or without consent in public places. That is how we will persevere.
Keep showing them how ugly they are, keep exposing their vitriol, and keep putting them on blast.
I audio record most of my interactions with white people. The majority of states allow one-party consent, meaning you can be the one party who consents to said audio recording. Look up your state laws around audio recordings in public and private spaces. Keep those emails, screenshot those texts and download them into your laptop. They are not going to stop shifting blame, so we might as well create endless archives of these encounters for us to know who to stay away from and who to create communities alongside.
These videos, audio recordings, emails, and texts all serve as reminders that our experiences with white fragility are real. We cannot be gaslighted into believing that there was no harm done.
Whatever happens, affirm what you know to be true within yourself first. Then empower yourself to self-preserve. Set rules with the white people you choose to trust. Create boundaries for yourself, and decide when and whether you want to educate them. Do not succumb to their guilt if you need to shut someone down or cut someone out of your life for your own mental health. Do not shrink yourself for their comfort. Fight hard to find your footing and center yourself. Do what you must to protect yourself.
And find your people. You literally cannot do this alone. So find your people, push agai
nst individualism, and push toward community. Challenge yourself to be less alone by decolonizing what it means to live in a white supremacist society as a BIPOC.
CHAPTER 10
DECOLONIALITY
[Decoloniality] is a way, option, standpoint, analytic, project, practice, and praxis.
—Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh
Like I have said, I am the first in my family to do a lot of things, specifically in the realm of education. I longed to be seen as cerebral and rational. I knew what made women valuable in my community, and it was not their abilities or intelligence. In fact, I have never heard mi papi call a woman smart. The first time I saw a woman preach at a church, I was in my midtwenties and the men wouldn’t comment on her words; they only wanted to opine on her body, clothes, and hair. I remember them talking about her untamed curly hair, and that it made her look “loca.” What she said was not discussed because it was not valued. I have heard mi papi weaponize his misogyny to silence me, mi mami, and my sister. And when I have pointed this out, I have been dismissed.
As a result, all I wanted to do was run toward the very values that were dismissed in women. Once in college, I joined clubs for brainy people; I tried to situate my worth in relationship to my braininess. When I gained admission into a touted elite private university, I felt validated. And all of my accolades began to go to my head. As I saw myself rising toward the status of intellectual, I knew that back home I was being perceived differently.
I know I had deliberately sought out this distance, but when I did come home and saw what I had done, I didn’t have the sense of accomplishment and pride I thought I would feel. Instead, I just felt distant from my own family and friends. I had transformed myself, but I did not foresee the ramifications of this change. The thing I was told was going to make me stand out became the thing that eroded my community ties.
I began to feel like I was better than the people who made it possible for me to do what I do. And when I was around the intellectuals, the ones I thought I wanted to be like, I felt alone. Because I was not like them; to be an intellectual and working-class is as ironic of a statement as it gets.
When I first read about decoloniality, I started to shift and question what I had been taught, including about superiority and intellectualism. And that work of unlearning, for me, started with how I viewed mi mami.
Up until the point that I gained the language to name and understand decoloniality, mi mami and I only had a surface-level relationship based on our shared gender and oppression due to the men in our lives. But otherwise, we lived in entirely different realities. As I shared earlier, growing up in a fundamentalist, patriarchal Christian tradition meant that I developed maladaptive skills to survive, and those maladaptive skills meant that I measured my worth through colonial concepts like the male gaze, respectability politics, and meritocracy. As I constructed this image of intelligence during college, I knew that women were not seen as intelligent, and so I was urged to downplay my femininity and align myself with the men around me. I did not have many female friendships, and I had male lovers.
My maladaptive survival skills meant that I sought male approval. I had understood that since men were the respected ones in society, winning them over was a strategy for rising above other women. I wanted to be different from other women, and in seeking male approval I did not build a real relationship with the one person who loved me more passionately than anyone else in my life. Finding my way back to mi mami was a healing decolonial practice.
I am mi mami’s revolution, I am the dreams she dreamed, and I am the possibilities she spoke into my Brown body. But learning to value that type of love took time, and if I am being honest, I think it took me way too long to get here.
Mi mami is not terca, nor is she ignorant, nor is she someone I need to teach all of my academic knowledge to forcefully, or even at all. Mi mami is a fountain of knowledge and wisdom that I was taught to not respect.
I have a mami who loves me, despite how much she will try to indoctrinate me into becoming a mujer virtuosa. She is a product of her time and her societal limitations. To her, where I have been and where I am going is entirely different than what she imagined for me, and when I was younger, I resisted her and argued with her nonstop.
I felt like she suffocated me, but not because she was more aggressive than mi papi with her indoctrination. Rather, I valued her less, and therefore her guidance felt like a burden.
I have been able to do things that no one in my family has ever dreamed of doing, and I thought that made me more special than other women. I thought I was more special than other Brown immigrant women.
And then, one day, mi mami said something that I will never forget. She looked straight at me and said: “Yo no soy estúpida.” Like she knew what I was internalizing and she knew what I thought about her without me uttering a word. She was right. I thought she was too emotional, too irrational, and too different. She was not like me. I created an image of myself that was as far from her as I could imagine. I reshaped myself to get away from her.
I have a mami who dreams of our mistakes before they happen. I have a mami who gets “feelings” about things and warns us, randomly, much to my embarrassment growing up as an immigrant trying to assimilate. I have a mami who has kept a part of her spirituality alive, a nonmainstream type of spirituality that is messy and unpredictable, which goes against everything within Eurocentric Christianity.
When mi papi suspected he was diabetic, it was mi mami who suggested first that he put his urine in a bowl outside. She said that if the bowl had ants in the morning, then we would know for sure. Mi mami is wickedly smart and does not devalue ancestral knowledge in the ways that modernity teaches us to do.
And somehow, I could not see her wisdom as valuable for decades. I have a mami who is strong. And still somehow, with my newly acquired book smarts, I forgot.
When mi mami read my mind on that day, and knew exactly what I was thinking without me ever saying any of it, mi mami pulled me back to reality. The veil of superiority was lifted instantly. I saw this woman fight for her daughter, and fight to see her daughter outside of these impossible colonial narratives. It is like she knew I was not meant to be included within intellectual circles, and she challenged me to see yet another space that displaced me, this time from her. I saw a mami demand respect out of someone she respected—someone she raised to be respected—and I felt embarrassed.
Mi mami is where she is today because she is a survivor.
Mi mami received the education she was given access to. She had aspirations outside of motherhood; she wanted to be a reporter or a detective. When disasters happen—floods, fires—when everyone flees, mi mami runs toward danger. Growing up, mi mami would put us all into her Kia Sorento and storm chase hurricanes with her three children in the car.
I have a vivid memory of our car almost floating because we were driving in a flooded area of town. Everything had just been ravaged by rain a few hours prior. Mi mami wanted to see the damage up close. Growing up, I would groan and complain about her escapades, but this is how she gets to fulfill that part of herself that she could never fulfill, because not everyone gets to go to good schools. Not everyone gets to go to college. Some of us have to play this game of life with no cards, and surviving is the goal, not winning. The game was rigged to begin with.
Mi mami could not become who she dreamed of becoming growing up, because of societal expectations and lack of money. Instead, she decided to love the person she became: mi mami.
So, the minute that my education teaches me to look down on her, I have failed her and myself. Not only that, but my education has failed to teach me how to treat people with compassion. Modernity had institutionalized me through the uninviting ivory towers, and then spit me back to my communities without the proper tools to help them. Liberation cannot come from institutions not built for us.
Mi mami disagrees with who I have become, in more ways than I can name.
Mi
mami would prefer that I be a stay-at-home wife and mother, not traveling and working.
Mi mami has told me that she is scared that I do not have kids yet, because quien me va cuidar cuando sea viejita.
But mi mami also has a glow in her eye when she hears about me being flown across the United States to speak to college students. Mi mami has told my sister, when my dad has treated her poorly: “Si Priscila estuviera aquí, ella me hubiera defendido.”
Mi mami knows no man will ever treat me like she is treated, like some of her friends are treated, and like some of her friends’ daughters are treated. Mi mami is proud of me and shows me that in her own ways.
I am proud of her, I am proud that she has always fought. Even when she does not win arguments or decisions are made without her input, she has pataleado and screamed and never succumbed to making herself invisible, and I have seen that resistance. I have learned from her how to resist the labels, to resist shame, to resist control.
Mi mami would tell me about how a partner should treat me by sampling from her own marriage. Since I was young, I knew that men should not lay their hands on you, and male partners should not make decisions about the shared household on their own, and that a true partnership demands mutual respect. I know all this because whenever she was wronged, by our church and mi papi, she would tell me eso no es bueno. She would confide in me in moments that felt like they could sully my own perception of what is good and not. Yes, she stayed, but she imagined with her words a new reality for me. And she did small acts that showed me that sometimes outsmarting systems can be rewarding. It was mi mami who owned our home in Managua before we migrated. When all the elite Nicaraguans fled the country after our civil war, empty houses were left behind, and our president allowed the citizens to claim these empty homes. Mi mami scouted homes until she found ours and claimed it; the deed had her name in it. She was a homeowner before any other woman in her family. I had no liberative models that I could mirror, but I had words, affirmations, and her acts of bravery to guide me.
For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts Page 20