The Destructive Power of Stereotypes and Privilege
To be honest I don’t remember the first time I experienced racism but I do remember when I discovered race. I remember from a young age I had always been different. I remember in kindergarten we did this activity once where we had to get into groups by hair color. The blonde hair group made up most of the class and my black hair group only had three kids in it. It was me, a Chinese boy and a boy from Pakistan. That’s when I first noticed the difference in race. Although I have experienced multiple times in my life I do have a privilege to it and that is my parents are white. I am from Guatemala, but I grew up in an entirely white family. My parents adopted me when I was five months old from Guatemala and they’re all I ever have known. In all our family pictures I am the short dark hair brown eyed girl surrounded by my six feet tall blonde cousins and that’s normal for me, but it is not normal for others to see.
Growing up sometimes I would have an identity crisis and that has a lot to do with the racial stereotypes that surrounded me. I wasn’t white enough to fit in with my white world but I didn't act Guatemalan enough to be a Latina. White people asked me where I was from and commented on how good my English was and then hispanic people tried to speak Spanish and were soon disappointed to realize I knew nothing. I would feel embarrassed and guilty. I would think to myself, “how do I not know spanish? I am as Spanish as it gets but I can’t even communicate. They must think I’m a failure.” I felt like I couldn’t relate to my latin community because I couldn’t even form sentences properly but I was too brown for the white community I lived in.
On the other hand, my white community questioned my citizenship. Every time I applied for college I had to prove my citizenship. The first time it happened I thought maybe it was the school’s mistake but then it happened with every college I applied to despite my valid passport, social security card and birth certificates. And this didn’t just start in college. All through middle school and high school people asked me, “ What was it like crossing the boarder? Do you have your green card? Do you think you’re going to get deported?”. You would think that being brown excludes you from becoming a citizen by the way people questioned me sometimes.
Despite these challenges, I quickly found that explaining myself got me out of most situations. In my broken spanish I’d explain, “ mis padres… Como se dice? “adopted me” de Guatemala cuando soy una baby.” Then they got it. That’s why this Guatemalan acts like a gringa she’s adopted with a white family. Or when I found my citizenship in question, a quick solution was to explain my parents are white, I grew up in Delaware… they adopted me. And that’s when they got it too. Of course I was a citizen if my parents were white. This was my white privilege that although I was not white I still had because of my parents.
Well, guess what? Its 2020, and privilege is stupid. Privilege is something we should all have. No one should be scared to go on a run or scared that they are going to be arrested every time they see a cop. No one should be attacked with racial sterotypes anymore. Every race faces these stereotypes and it is time to end. If you’re black you’re a threat. If you’re hispanic you’re illegal. If you’re asian you caused the coronavirus. Well its time to stop, it’s time to grow up and stop with these assumptions about each other because they are rarely true.
