#white-passing

As a child entering primary school, I struggled figuring out what it meant to be Canadian. It was a somewhat amorphous word, and besides standing up for the anthem every morning and seeing the red and white flag wave in the school parking lot, I really didn’t know what qualified as Canadian. But as I was exposed to different people and different ideas throughout my childhood, I figured out quickly that the primary criteria one needed to fill to be Canadian was this: whiteness.

The Construct of Whiteness

Now, when I say ‘white’, I’m not talking about Caucasians. It’s important we understand that whiteness is a highly politicized construct that doesn’t apply to all people who have light skin. There are plenty of Caucasians — say, people from the near and middle east — whose skin tones vary greatly, but who for all intents and purposes, are not white.

This is because the concept of whiteness is not necessarily one of skin colour (although it can be), but rather, a concept of power. For example, although in North America we may consider Polish and Ukrainian immigrants to be ‘white’, they are heavily racialized in Britain and other Western European countries. South-eastern European immigrants from Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Albania are considered undesirable in Switzerland compared to immigrants from Western and Northern European countries.

A Macedonian acquaintance with a master’s degree in electrical engineering, whose husband was living and working in Switzerland, was not granted residency until she acquired a non-Macedonian passport. Her family had some roots in non-Balkan countries, so she was able to leverage this, and after two long years living away from her husband, she was finally granted entry into Switzerland.

My point here is that whiteness is relative and often used to establish power dynamics. If you are the child of immigrants, as I and at least a third of my classmates were, you weren’t really Canadian, but something in between. It was like being the adopted child in a well-to-do family that constantly reminded you that your birth parents weren’t respectable enough to keep you. The more obviously different your parents were — perhaps through their appearance, dress, or way of speaking — the more you were coded as foreign, and by extension of that, privileged to be in Canada.

The Trauma of Migration

My parents left their country of birth in the 1980s, when my father anticipated its collapse in the years to come. I was born once they’d already settled into Canadian society, but from the moment I had enough self-awareness to read social cues, I knew we were different.

My mom wasn’t like the other moms. When my classmates got picked up from school, I saw women with straight, shoulder-length hair — usually blonde or light brown, sometimes with highlights. They wore fashionable clothing, clutched fancy purses with manicured nails, and masked their imperfections with flawless makeup.

But my mom didn’t care about fashion. She wore the same sets of clothing day in and day out and carried a giant, ratty old leather bag wherever she went. She had untamed, curly black hair and olive skin, spoke English with a harsh accent, rarely painted her nails, and hardly ever wore makeup.

Now, you might wonder what hair dye, makeup, and fashion have to do with whiteness. Generally, there isn’t much of a relationship; anyone can choose to look and dress a certain way.

However, when you’re born to parents who left a politically tumultuous homeland, you very quickly realize they suffer from a kind of survivor’s guilt. They carry shame for having abandoned their own parents and siblings for what they believed would be a better life. They don’t believe they deserve to have nice things, or that they can afford them (even when they can).

Every moment is haunted by the potential of loss. Tomorrow could be the day they lose everything, so nothing of excess is ever worth wasting precious resources on.

Simply put, many immigrants are traumatized by the very act of migration.

Often, immigrants struggle with economic and social disadvantage. Many immigrant families simply don’t have the luxury to look nice, and so for the immigrant child, even superficial things like clothing, nail polish, makeup, and hair dye on certain bodies can become important signifiers of not just class, but also whiteness.

My mother was too stressed and overworked, alienated and depressed to care about fashion. She didn’t have any friends and felt uncomfortable with white women — partly for cultural reasons, and partly because of her accent. In fact, she was so self-conscious about her accent, she didn’t speak a word of English to me until I went to kindergarten. She didn’t want me to learn English from her because she was afraid I’d learn her accent, so she instead waited until I could learn ‘proper’ English from my teachers and classmates.

Her goal was to make sure that I was assimilated and that I fit in at all costs, and this desire was directly informed by her own feelings of alienation in Canadian society. Whatever differences I observed between her and the other moms must have been amplified ten-fold for her.

But I learned that my mom wasn’t the only one who was different. I was different too, and I struggled relating to other kids. I wasn’t exposed to the same media and culture that they were. I didn’t wear the same clothes, eat the same food, and I didn’t tell the same jokes, anecdotes or stories. It became very clear that I was a foreigner, even though I was living only a few kilometers from the hospital I’d been born in.

A Chimera Trying to be a Chameleon

When I was seven years old, I had my first play-date with a white classmate — let’s call her Karen. Karen’s family was some nth generation Canadian, with a clear family tree of every ancestor from the past few centuries. Karen had stunning, pale blue eyes and strawberry blonde locks that I desperately yearned for. During summer, I’d spend hours in the sun hoping that my dark hair would lighten.

“Am I turning blonde yet?” I’d excitedly ask my mother after spending a day in Karen’s yard.

Yet all that accomplished was sunburns for Karen and brown skin for me.

“Oh my God, you look like a Sri Lankan!” Karen’s mother and aunt laughed when they saw me.

At the time, I didn’t know that Sri Lankan was an ethnicity. I didn’t know what the comment meant or why it felt bad, but I had the impression that there was something funny or embarrassing about how dark my skin had turned seemingly overnight. There shouldn’t be anything embarrassing about looking like a certain ethnicity, but the tone with which I’d been told made me feel like I was somehow wrong.

Although I always knew my ethnicity, I didn’t learn about my muddled racial heritage until much later. I know that I am mixed race, but I’ll never know the extent of it, because imperial legacy does a wonderful job of erasing records and lineages.

While most people of Western European descent have the luxury of knowing where their ancestors are from — which great-grandparent was German, French, or British — people whose ancestors hail from Africa, the Middle East, or the Balkans can only speculate based on limited records and oral history.

Where there is empire, there is a deep loss for the children who are born after that empire crumbles. We want to know our roots. We want to know what our heritage is and where we belong. All I know is that I have diverse roots that have molded me into someone who is sometimes coded as white, and sometimes as something else.

The Universal Woman is White

These were my first encounters with soft racism, but even as they happened, I learned that there was far worse. I didn’t think what was happening to me was racism. As a kid, I assumed racism could only happen to black people, because everyone in my predominantly white neighbourhood seemed to have opinions about black people.

I remember overhearing Karen’s mother say that she would never want her son to date a black woman.

“They’re aggressive,” she argued, “and their butts look weird.”

“Really?” Karen’s aunt replied. “I think they have gorgeous bodies — such nice curves.”

In this brief exchange I had been exposed to two immensely toxic ideas:

First, that what mattered in a woman before all else was how well she conformed to white standards of beauty; and second, that black women are either dangerous and to be avoided, or exotic objects to be fetishized.

Of course, I didn’t have the language I do now to describe these ideas, but it would be a lie to say I didn’t understand them. Even as a third grader, I knew implicitly what these statements meant, and they affected how I understood myself as a girl and an immigrant, and how I understood other women of colour.

It entrenched in me an unconscious drive to be as white as possible. Until I was in my late teens, I kept dying my hair blonde, dieting, and begging my mother to let me wear coloured contacts. I wasn’t intentionally trying to whitewash myself, but I had internalized the standards of white beauty to such a degree that I genuinely believed I would look better with Keira Knightley’s frame, blonde hair, and green eyes.

And yet through it all, whenever someone asked me if I was white, I’d balefully reply that I was, in fact, beige.

***

I mentioned in an earlier piece, A Critique Privilege, Oppression, and Other Such Loaded Concepts, that calling myself ‘beige’ became my way of creating a space for myself. I knew from an early age that ‘white’ didn’t fit. But I also didn’t identify with any of the more established minorities in my neighbourhood. Rather, I occupied an ambiguous space where my race became subject to debate depending on my context.

I was blessed with a like and reblog from @trashlord-201 so that's all the motivation I need to continue my petty bitching.

I am very openly Aboriginal Australian. I'm white-passing though so I get a lot of 'oh... are you really'. But people normally drop it after that.

But not Samantha.

After she 'learned the truth' (she would say this like i kept a terrible secret), every day of high school with her was a series of:

So you're actually Aboriginal?

You're just saying that to get attention

So you're a (Australian N-Word)

*pointing at a magpie* Hey look, it's your brother/sister (Aboriginals with ANY Caucasian lineage were referred to as 'magpies' (black and white) while my parents were growing up)

You're only saying that so the school pays you (I was/am the youngest student to be granted the specific scholarship for Aboriginal youth (at 12) that paid for all my medical bills and school supplies/uniform/excursions throughout high school)

Well I can't be racist, I'm friends with a (Australian N-Word)

But saying all this horrible shit was never enough for Samantha, no no no.

Halfway through Year 11 (second last year, most of my classmates are 17) she starts wearing headbands to school. But not just any headbands; 'native American' headbands (she bought them online and they were so costume-y it hurt) and she starts claiming to be native American.

If someone asked me what country my bloodline is from (Wiradjuri) she'd butt in saying she was from the 'super secret forgotten tribe of native americans'.

As taught to me by one of my Elders, there are three 'totems' a person can have; their country's/peoples' totem (mine is the goana), their personal totem which they will see in times of need (mine is the emu) and one where the animal picks you, you will see them everywhere you go (mine, as far as I can tell, is the magpie). I was explaining this to my Islamic friend who was taking Aboriginal Studies (a class that mainly teaches history) and got confused when the teacher made a passing acknowledgment of totems when SAMANTHA pushes me out of the conversation and starts talking about how her 'spirit animal' is the white wolf and how it's 'super rare and special'.

The German exchange student (who I was close friends with before her boyfriend decided I 'was a threat' to their 'relationship'(he's homophobic)) asked me if I had a taken name because she saw an old Wild West movie where a native American had a taken name and she was wondering if there was a similar tradition in australia. To my knowledge, there aren't any taken names but elders in a mob (clan/tribe/etc) are usually called 'auntie' and 'uncle' regardless of relation. This interaction went completely uninterrupt-SIKE!!! Samantha started talking about how her 'tribe' basically go camping and 'discover their true names' and that hers was 'wind walker' or something.

Everyone knows about Samantha and her bullshit but they still ask me questions about my heritage because of the shit she says.

"But why didn't you ever stand up to her???"

My best friend did once. Samantha's mother tried to hit her with her car the next day.

The time I did, her mother started following me around town to the point where I had a severe panic attack (to the point where i stopped being able to breathe in) and had to hide in the back room of a shop and have the shop owner call my mum. I was terrified to leave my house for a month.

~~MY (THEY/THEIR/THEM) NONBINARY TRANS STORY~~

I am still evolving in my understanding of my gender identity. My story is not one of dysphoria, or a deep and certain understanding that I wasn’t who people said I was. My story is more along the lines of things just feeling off. And not really knowing things didn’t feel right because that uncomfortability was all I knew. Then suddenly I was introduced to the idea that I could be nonbinary and things just felt right and I finally understood what it was to be entirely in my body, what it was to be happy, to be thankful. I liken it to drinking salt water your whole life. If there is enough salt water for you to drink, you won’t die. Your thirst will never be quenched, and you won’t realize that your never ending thirst isn’t actually a necessary part of your life. You might not even realize that other people actually are satisfied and fulfilled after drinking water, because you don’t realize your saltwater is inherently different than their freshwater. Until one day something happens and you drink freshwater for the first time. And your whole world shifts. You are not unendingly thirsty anymore. You feel satisfied. You understand what it is to relax, to rest, to be comfortable. You never knew you needed fresh water. You didn’t know that you had only been getting salt water. You realize that other people had been feeling this satisfaction, this comfortability all along, that is why their lives seemed to fit them better. That is my story. The story of finally learning I needed freshwater.

OTHER IMPORTANT THINGS

white/white-passing trans folx: can we please do better for our trans people of color, especially dark black trans women? Let's not fetishize them by focusing on how attractive they are to us. Let's not only show the posts where they are murdered. They are human beings just like us and do not exist in the world for our pleasure or guilt. Let's respect their agency.

able bodied trans folx: let us do better for our fellow disabled trabs folx. They are fucking valid and rarely if ever get representation. Let's do better by not using them as inspiration porn. They are existing outside society's narrow ideas of how people's bodies and minds should be. They aren't needing our pity or our comparisons. They need a platform from which to tell their stories. Let's support their platform.

TLDR: trans folx please represent other trans folx who have different areas of marginalization than you. Trans representation and visibility is abysmal enough. Let's continue to recognize the intersections and places in which we have privilege. The fight for trans rights are for ALL trans people.

* I definitely didn't mention all areas of marginalization, I mentioned the two that I am most aware of my privilege in. Please feel free to add on or correct any mistakes I have made.