“Where are you from?” “No, where are you really from?”
If I had a penny for every time I’ve been asked that question after introducing myself I’d be able to pay my college tuition and loans in cash. I have resorted to answering the question before it even comes up: “I’m from Binghamton, NY but originally from Cuba.”
As a Cuban immigrant who moved to the United States at the age of six and someone who passes for white, I always thought that the difference between myself and others was just my cultural background, my ethnicity. It was not until I got to college that I heard the term "person of color" or realized that I fall into this category and that the interactions that I have had with people throughout my life have been influenced by the way we see race in addition to and probably more significantly than differences in culture.
Back in my younger years, as I advanced through the American school system, I had to fill out forms and check race and ethnicity boxes. Sometimes the words were used together, interchangeably, and so I confidently checked Hispanic/Latino, but when they were not, I was not sure what to check. On some forms Hispanic and White were mutually exclusive but on others Hispanic/Latino was under “ethnicity” and “white” was under “race." If Hispanic is not a race then what am I? I thought of people's race as what color they were: black, brown, tan, cream, pink, white. In my town, there were people of all colors. I look white, my color is white. So is that my race? And are Hispanic and non-Hispanic the only two ethnicities? As far as I understood ethnicity, there were people of many different ethnicities around me. This was all very confusing.
When I got to Colgate I learned about this term “people of color” that refers to anyone who is not white. "I guess that’s what I am," I thought. But this term did not resolve any of the confusion around what exactly race and ethnicity are and how they play out in the United States and how I fall into the system. It seems problematic to me that this term POC encompasses the most diverse group of people that I can imagine and the majority of people around the world. People who are considered white make up a pretty small percentage of the total amount of people in the world. Really, this term “POC” only serves to perpetuate white supremacy and the white privilege inherent in the society we are a part of in the United States. It lumps together people from infinite backgrounds and colors and languages and nationalities, just like the label Hispanic/Latino does. There are more than a dozen Latin American countries that are all very different. Even the term “Hispanic,” though most people consider it to mean “of Spanish decent” and the predecessor to “Latin American” which seems less oppressive, was created by lighter-skinned Latin Americans who wanted to create a racial group that distanced them a little bit from their darker counterparts.
I, as a light-skinned Latina, though our society would like to label me as a POC, have had very different experiences than my Latino/Latina counterparts with darker complexions. I’ve also had a different experience as a person from the Caribbean, a person from Cuba specifically, a woman, a person who has lived in upstate New York for the majority of their life. Labelling me as a person of color and lumping every “person of color” together benefits no one. It does not take into account our characters, our cultures, or any other identity and reduces us to the “inferior” label of non-white.
These labels of race affect people's lives in serious and sometimes unknown ways. One of the first things people notice about another person when they first see them is their race. People's race affect their everyday lives in the United States, regardless of whether they notice it or not and regardless of what race they are. Studies have shown that even checking all of those confusing boxes affects the way people perform on tests, for example, the SATs. Checking those boxes brings all of the stereotypes and expectations and internalized oppression or superiority that are related to those labels into people's subconscious, whether for better or worse. This is all in spite of the fact that race and ethnicity are both social constructs.
It is human nature to categorize things in order to better understand them."Race" is one such artificial system of classification of people by skin color, face structure and hair texture. Ethnicity is defined as the cultural and/or linguistic background within these race categories. However, most people do not know these definitions. Most people also do not know the difference between the two -- resulting in the various conflicting labels and boxes on the different forms that people fill out throughout their lives. Most importantly, many people do not know that these categories are created by people and have no biological basis. In fact, these categories did not even exist until the 17th century when Europeans assigned the colors “white” and “black” (and all of their already established connotations) to people around the world. Even just a superficial analysis of the definitions themselves reveal how little sense they make when you start to ask what are the races that exist, and the ethnicities, and why we describe some as "white" and others as "pacific islander" when one category is a broad "skin color" and the other is a geographical location. These labels matter and significantly affect the way our society functions, regardless of who you are or where you fall on the spectrum. The good news is that our brains are malleable and if we acknowledge our unconscious biases and our internalized oppression and superiority and consciously try to deconstruct it and actively fight against it, we can change the way we think about and treat other people.
