I know that I have privilege. Although I did not always have the best financial situation and could not afford all the things my friends had, or had to get things from dollar stores and thrift shops in order to afford to keep our house, there are many things that I was blessed with that many people don’t have. I have two parents who love me, and enough to eat and warm clothes to wear, and my parents made sacrifices for me to keep dancing.
My peers here at school, though, come from so many different socioeconomic backgrounds and from different cultures and ethnicities.
My friend and I come from very similar yet different places. He’s from Virginia; I’m from Maryland, but he’s Black and I’m Hispanic. Both of us, however, have been raised similarly, in predominantly white neighborhoods with considerable amounts of privilege. At college, though, the realization and understanding of the ways other people live, their life experiences, and their ways of acting or speaking, have opened our eyes and minds.
This has left both of us with some sort of identity confusion. Both of us, in some sense, "act white," if that means anything, and while we both identify with our heritage, none of us know how to be at peace with our cultural identity and our personal aesthetic. We don’t know if taking advantage of the wealth of knowledge our education has given us will prevent us from creating meaningful relationships with those whose struggle has been greater than ours. The question lies in how to accurately represent ourselves to the world.
Do we need to allow our exteriors to match our interior? Or is that counterproductive? And how do people who are "white-washed" really need to act or present themselves to the world?
Am I too white to be Hispanic if I feel too Hispanic to be white?
My friend changes the way he acts to feel accepted by our Black, male classmates, but does he have to? They all think he shouldn’t, but why does he even feel that need?
On the outside people may look the same, but our life experiences cause us to be very different people. Pretending not to have had those life experiences is detrimental to having honest relationships with people, or to opening clear passages of communication. Nobody wants to be the person who doesn’t understand "struggle," but as long as you acknowledge that struggle does exist, and that people have privilege, people from all walks of life should be able to accept those of different walks of life, different identities, and become equals.
What even is race, or racial identity? Or cultural identity? Does the way I dress make people think of me as white even though I don’t do it on purpose, or that I just like to dress that way?
Why is race and cultural identification so important? It blends into the background for me. I don’t see race. I don’t see people for how they present themselves to the world. I see them for who they are, how they act towards me, and for who they tell me they are or want to be.
Why can't people treat others with the same decency?
