Pride & Prejudice
A Call to Dismantle Whiteness From Within
As a “white” Hispanic person, my position in this conversation is...idiosyncratic.
One day, I’m a victim of racism. Then next, I’m directly benefiting from white privilege. It’s all enough to make you dizzy. It depends on the season—my skin color changes drastically with the sun. It depends on how tired or inebriated I am—the Spanish comes out more if I get a little tipsy or turvy. It depends on which of my cultural behaviors are showing. And, of course, it depends on the mood of the white person in front of me.
Living on that ridiculous, flimsy line is why I have this present need to talk about “whiteness,” and why I think that “Allyship 101” has long since shown us it isn’t enough.
The construct of “whiteness” is a tool of oppression. Those of us I’m talking to? We know this already. It’s Allyship 101. But it’s not just a weapon aimed at BIPOC. It’s also a poison fed to white people. It has robbed them of their actual culture. It has whisked away their German, Irish, Scottish, or Polish heritage and replaced it with an empty, meaningless abyss whose only defining feature is “not being one of them” and appropriating every new fad coming out of the third world country featured on ChildVision this fiscal quarter.
Why does this matter? Because without culture, you cannot have pride. And pride isn’t just about “feeling good.” It’s about building strength. It’s about forging resilience within yourself. It’s about learning to show esteem for something greater than yourself, and then translating that esteem into self-esteem, a practice many of us would benefit greatly from. You can’t get that from the poverty of melanin in your skin. You get that from the meaning that comes with building and being a part of a cultural legacy, whether it’s just starting or whether it’s older than dirt. (Lookin at you, Jews! Sup! Love you! 💙)
We—Black people, indigenous peoples, and peoples of color—are able to stand against systemic, violent, and often deadly oppression because we have a strength you may not see, and our cultural pride serves as the backbone of that strength.
Chinese Americans know they built the railroads, and they hold that pride even as people shout at them for speaking their own language on their own property. And this is after they’ve agreed to try capitalism out because we’ve been saying it was cool for decades. So it’s extra rude on our part.
African Americans know they are the backbone of American culture and vibrancy, and they hold that pride even as the nation punishes them for it. And it’s really hard to argue with a straight face that people with their history should in any way not be exceptionally pissed about it. Most are just trying to move the fuck on from our ancestors’ bullshit, and that truly speaks to their character as a people.
Hispanics know we created the foundations for international diplomacy, and we hold that pride even as we’re told to farm berries and take out the trash. I’ve literally been practicing therapy with a client when they told me that Trump was going to take away my citizenship. After all, I wasn’t American (you know, despite being acculturated as an American my entire life, being a natural-born citizen—a Constitutionally protected status in the U.S.—and having lived in this country my entire life, not to mention knowing English a hundred times better than they did), so I didn’t belong here. And I never even spoke a word of Spanish to her. It was February, so I looked white as the driven snow. No idea what clued her into my diversity, but hate doesn’t actually need a reason, does it?1
We are able to live vibrant lives against this impossible burden because we have a shared pride in who we are.
Is There Such a Thing as an “American” Culture?
Yes, “American” is a culture, and a very complicated one involving rites of passage like homecoming and high school prom, annual cultural festivals like the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards, cultural milestones like Black Friday and opening day of Major League Baseball (marking the official end of winter in the U.S.), and even our very own cuisine, including delicacies like chicken fried steak and the chocolate chip cookie. We love guns, rock-n-roll, drugs, sex, sports, and explosions, and we pride ourselves on our love of individualism, competition, and uncompromising tenacity. We are raised to believe that we can do anything if we only set our minds to it (note: intersectionality may cause experiences to vary).
And like any culture, we have our own litany of negative characteristics. We’re xenophobic and almost enjoy being cruel to people we don’t know, particularly if they don’t look or act like Americans. Many Americans seem to think rights are only theirs, and we behave that way on the world stage. You’re often one of us until you prove you’re not, and then we will fucking make you pay for it. And it doesn’t take much if you’re not don’t fit the American ideal—a thing we have in the U.S. that most other cultures only get when they’ve theocratically bound themselves with religion and politics. Despite our intense and somewhat obsessive attachment to our quasi-Christian traditions, boy is this ideal a secular one: a man, a wife (not a woman, mind you), two-point-five-children, a dog, and a fence. But not too aggressive a fence. Just one that the police can easily tell which side of it the garden boy is on.
We are big on punishment, but not so much on accountability. We are an obnoxious people for many reasons. Many reasonable. And a few less so, like, dude.... Let us smile from time to time. It feels nice. Go read Dostoevsky or something and be frowny over there. Goodness gracious.
So how are white people (you, presumably, dear Reader) to stand against the white supremacy that holds us aloft, if we have nothing to keep us from falling after? Shallow appropriation isn’t pride. It’s just consumption. How do we stand up against anything without any sense of esteem in who we are and how we came to be? Without knowing that you’re good, and that you’re loved, and that you belong somewhere?
This is why the current “Allyship 101” framework, which demands that white people “own their whiteness,” is an ouroboric Catch-22—a self-devouring trap that leaves behind neither mouse, nor trap, nor house. It asks folks who benefit from white privilege to identify with and cling to the very poison that hollowed them out. It asks them to be accountable by reinforcing the tool of oppression.
I reject every tool of oppression. Especially the double-bladed ones. They hurt everyone the most.
Here’s the different path: True accountability is not owning “whiteness.” It’s dismantling it. With fire. 🔥
Racial Colorblindness: The Trojan Horse that Keeps on Taking
This is not a call for “colorblindness.” Please don’t think that.
Even if racial colorblindness existed (it doesn’t), it’s only homogeneity with extra steps. I couldn’t imagine living in a more dreary, dead world than a colorblind one. No, this is the exact opposite. It’s an active, conscious, and fiery rejection of the “white” label. It’s the hard work of reclaiming the spirit that construct stole from you. Of finding your strength in real roots, not in the parasitic fiction that was built on our oppression.
The Unique Experience of the Multi-Rooted
But what if you can’t find roots already attached to you? Many of us have trails of dead and forgotten ancestors. Some were stolen from us by genocide. Others sacrificed everything, even identity, to ensure their next generation would live to have children of their own. And some are a beautifully messy quilt that is practically impossible to make sense of without 23andMe and Walter Mercado working together in the ultimate astrologenohistorical team-up.
So what if you look back, and the trail is cold as Nazi’s heart? What if the erasure was so complete, the assimilation so total, that all you can think to call yourself is “mixed” or “a mutt”? What if, like me, you are a Third Culture Kid (TCK), a bridge born and raised between worlds, belonging fully to none? What if you descend from a melting pot of so many tribes that claiming any of them feels like a little like wearing problematic costume on Halloween night?
This feels like a void. But all blank slates are empty until you decide it’s time to etch on them. And that’s what we who have little to no legacy to inherit have instead: a cultural tabula rasa, from which we can forge any identity that we wish.
Many of us—children of diaspora, immigrants, refugees, and those whose European ancestors dissolved their heritage for the privilege of acceptance—share this same lived experience. Our community lies with those that share this lived experience. This is what culture is: a shared moral and historical consciousness, and indeed often one born of suffering and disconnection.
And after all, speciation only occurs when some catastrophe forces a single species apart for long enough that it evolves into two. No species is born from joy, rainbows, and dreams. And no culture either. This pain is not a bug of being human; it’s a feature designed to allow us to survive catastrophe after catastrophe after catastrophe. We often forget how comfortably we live now, even the poorest of us, compared to the average hunter-gatherer in prehistoric times.
If you are one of us, your path isn’t reclamation. It’s construction. Your claim isn’t a legacy of blood; it’s one of intentionality.
How to Build a Culture Out of a Shitty History
Here’s a proscription for building a new culture from the ashes of a history that was lost or stolen:
The Foundation: Moral Clarity. Your inheritance is not folklore or language; it is the honesty to see your family’s complex history for what it is. It is the self-awareness to own the painful truths—the profiteering, the complacency, the bigotry—and build your pride on the commitment to do better. My own family history includes the harboring of Nazis and the taking of cartel money; it is a story with full of villains and devoid of heroes. I am proud to build my culture out of the ashes of that corruption, because my people got their comeuppance. That is a happy ending.
You’re Not Rootless; You’re Multi-Rooted. You do not have to choose one pond. Your roots can dig into many, many different ponds of flavors, colors, and smells without number. Your culture can be the best ideas from Western and Eastern philosophy, Mediterranean cuisine, a cosmopolitan view of human unity, and an unshakeable commitment to justice. (That one’s mine, and some of you already share it, you just don’t realize you’ve always belonged with me. 💙) And your roots are not static like a tree’s. You, lucky little jumping bean that you are, don’t have cell walls. And that means you can shake your ass, raise your arms, and identify as you please now, another way tomorrow, and another way still the next day. We have labels to help us understand ourselves, not to bind our lived experience into a happy little Jack in the Box. That just results in you living your life waiting to be sprung out into the world and proven for the fraud you have to be to fit so well.
Your Culture Is Shared Consciousness. Your community lies with others who share this lived experience. Find them. Find us. We’re everywhere, all over the world! Find other TCKs, the other assimilated, the other bridges. Find the people who also feel that “disconnection” that is the often the price of moral clarity. Find those who have a profound cultural hunger, whose first (or just whose present) community doesn’t scratch all their deeper cultural needs. (For example, I kinda like having my Latine people, my LGBTQ+ people, my Geek people... Intersectionality is many things, and it is absolutely an excuse to make found family.) This connecting forges a stronger bond than any ancient bloodline. (And you know it’s true cuz a lot of ancient bloodlines aren’t doing so good after a couple decades of “keeping the bloodline pure.” 😬)
Community is found in the quiet, consistent connection with just one or two other people that you love and that love you. Look for those individuals and start building a new, shared culture with them right where you are. This isn’t a lesser path. It’s the work of architects, not heirs. And architects are way cooler than heirs. Architects are celebrated for the masterworks they build. Heirs are “notable” for the accomplishments of everyone else.
The Work of Solidarity
This isn’t an “out” from accountability. This is real accountability, and you know it because accountability is a sign of emotional maturity and tends to result in growth, not more suffering.
When you find (or build) your culture, you stop being a “white ally”—not really a thing, sorry to give you the bad news 😿—and you start being a person. A German, an Irish, a Scottish, a Polish, a Breton, a Danish, a Dutch, an Italian, a Greek, a Portuguese, a Finnish, a Belarusian, an American, a Belizian, a Creole, a Slovak, a Croatian, an Euskaldunak, a Sami, a Romani, a Frisian person, a person with a people... who is allied with POC against the shared enemy that is the construct of “whiteness” itself: a construct that serves only to purify everything it touches of life, meaning, and reason.
That’s the solidarity, I think. That’s the work. And it’s doable!
We, the people who benefit from white privilege, need to make a better world for POC now. We, POC, are owed that. (See what I did there? 😉) I could definitely name, like, five populations that should come ahead of any of mine, but we do that with you, not against you, not over you, and—without turning White Replacement Theory into a vicious reality and making white supremacists somehow both really happy and really sad at the same time—it’s literally impossible without you.
So we make it work. Somehow. Fuck purity tests. This is about humanity. And we fucking suck sometimes. Acting like we’re all beautiful and perfect little precious flower petals is clearly fucking us up. Learning to live with the discomfort of a shitty history is part of growing up, and everyone has to grow up some time.
I assure you, every POC has contended with what it’s like to have a shitty history. Some of us contend with a shitty present. We know it’s possible to do. I believe in you, and if this essay is helpful, then fuck, yes, please! 💙
This Is About So Much More Than Race
There are other bigotries. So many bigotries. We are nothing if not creative. The ancient Greeks had up to seven different words for love. And we are just as good at diversifying the quality of our hate. But don’t worry. We’ll fight them all. We have the energy, the motivation, and the fucking done-with-this-shittedness to make it happen.
We’re not gonna get ‘em all, but the point can’t be to get rid of evil. In a universe where you have to eat to live and babies can die of nothing at all? Nah. That’s impossible. The point is to corral it like an angry moose and point it towards the dark metal box that it just keeps getting out of every so often. And to minimize that frequency as much as humanly possible.
I suppose this is an introductory essay, in a sense. Let’s call it a class on allyship: “Allyship 306: Growing Beyond the Identity of Oppressor.”
One Last Caveat That It Would Be Very, Very Bad to Fail to Understand
If you’re a person who benefits from white privilege, and you wanna use this framework, I am thrilled that it spoke to you. Please, never, ever, ever use it like a weapon against BIPOC. I swear to every god humanity has ever invented I’ll come find you and rip my entire essay out of your brain because you won’t have deserved it.
If a BIPOC ever calls you “white” because they are correctly identifying the privilege that you hold and that they do not, you most certainly do not get to “correct” them by saying, “Actually, I’m German.”
If you do that, you have failed all of us, you’ve failed yourself, you’ve failed your people, and you’ve missed the entire point of everything we’ve been discussing here.
Many of your ancestors stole your culture from you by joining hands with white supremacists in a bid to survive. You absolutely should be working to find culture again, or to build your own if nature and the whims of evil people designed to keep one from you. But the right to correct us? To tell us that our lived experience is wrong?
That was never yours.
This framework is about your work, not a pass to exercise power over ours. When discussing race and racism with BIPOC, silence and compassion will remain the best strategy of the racially privileged for a long time to come.
It does not. Many culture-shorn people of European descent don’t understand this because of their lack of experience either hating or being hated. Hate isn’t about the hated. Hate is about the belligerent. This is why it’s dehumanizing; it’s a situation in which one is viciously harmed and also in which one’s true identity is completely ignored. This is why Sikhs were attacked following September 11, 2001, across the United States. It doesn’t matter that they weren’t Muslims. It never mattered. It only mattered that they were available (i.e. visible, distinct, and vulnerable).