Embracing all my intersecting identities has meant everything to me. I was finally able to talk openly about things I had been told to keep silent about, like my Nicaraguan roots. Discovering and embracing the complexities within myself meant that I no longer had to hide. That is why intersectionality matters.
Now, realizing the ways that my intersections affected romantic relationships was a slow process for me, but it was a necessary one. For me, dating someone outside my gender, race, and economic background meant addressing those very things that made us different instead of pretending those intersections did not exist.
When I began dating the man who would become my second husband, I knew that stepping up to that relationship meant transparency about our differences. He is a white man. I am a Brown woman. We had to be able to openly address the power dynamics between a person our society overvalues and a person our society does not value at all. And naming my powerlessness was powerful. Naming the ways his intersecting identities are privileged above mine is my way of attempting to address the differences in order to create a symbiotic relationship.
To do this, I wrote him a letter. It was initially intended to be kept between him and me. But now you are all welcome to dive into our relationship and the foundation that had to be laid:
Gringuito,
I am going to need to be frank about what it means to date a Brown girl from Chico Pelón in Managua, Nicaragua. Because since I arrived to the United States, you white boys have been attempting to recolonize my already colonized body, and I have generally avoided falling in love with someone who cannot fathom how to accept all this brown sugar. I generally avoided dating white boys, for one obvious reason: I am a white boy’s nightmare. I know my history, and I know how much white privilege and white supremacy has impacted my life, directly. So I do not submit to any man, and I do not submit to white men.
I will not teach you Spanish. People get paid for that type of labor, lots of money. People get degrees and have taken out student loans to become translators. This is undervalued work. And I want you to understand, though you will never really understand, what it feels like to be an outsider. I want you to see and feel, even if just for a minute, what my Spanish-speaking mami and papi experience in this country. I want you to have to watch shows like Plaza Sésamo to begin to gain entrance into these spaces that will be foreign to you. I want you to need to ask me what people really mean.
I will not tell my friends to take it easy on you. Because, you see, my family will embrace you with open arms and “like” you almost too immediately. There are reasons for that—deep, colonized-folk reasons—so it will be my friends who will vet you. My friends will not be interested in you as a ticket to proximity to whiteness. I want them to ask you the real questions. I want them to ask you if you have a “thing” for Latinas, and no matter what you say they will give you a nondescript “Hmm.”
I want them to ask you how much of your attraction is a fetish for my cultura, and what you think about capitalism as a white man. I want to watch you squirm and see your true colors seep out through your pores. I want to know where you stand on solid issues. I want to know how much heat you can take, because I am going to need your support when I meet your friends and family.
Your friends will call me “caliente” and ask me if I love spicy food, as if all cuisine from Latin America is spicy. And they will even venture to request that I speak some Spanish to them. All this will be a product of yours and their whiteness and privilege, but I will not sink. But I expect you to swim just as furiously when my friends come for your head (figuratively), because your friends and family, intentionally or not, will come for my heart and I will handle it.
I will expect you to say my name, in my accent. I was born Priscila Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez. One L because two makes a Y sound in Spanish. Your very American name will be said properly in all your spaces, and even my own spaces, and my name will be consistently butchered. So, I expect you to at least hold my name, my entire name, with the same protection and care that has always been given to you due to the color of your skin.
People in my community are going to love the color of your eyes, your baby-blue eyes. It might even inflate your ego; it probably already has. Please remember what it has cost people to value light features and lightness in general; there are skin-lightening industries and even a whole industry of colored contacts that thrives off the self-hatred of BIPOC. My communities have been told our entire lives that white features are superior to our own darker ones, with wider noses, flatter faces, etc. Your whiteness is going to be coveted, but that comes from my subjugation and the subjugation of my people.
I may jokingly call you an “honorary” Nicaraguan; it is a joke. It is my simplified way of acknowledging that you, as a white man dating a pinolera-born goddess, will have access to things within my culture that you cannot get while visiting on a mission trip or vacationing. Please do not repeat this light-hearted sentiment to your friends, nor to any other Latinxs you encounter. You do not get to speak for me, because the struggle of being Nica is unique and is a lived experience. Being Nicaragüense is my birthright, much like having the ability to never fear being killed by a cop on a simple traffic citation is yours.
My Brownness is special, and I will talk about my Brownness and my food and my culture with pride. I have learned to do that despite the socializing I received in this country. The United States required the total erasure of my background in order for me to gain access to anything in this country. My self-love is countercultural in a society that wants me to assimilate. My pride is political.
Above anything else, learn to sit in the discomfort of being on the highest rung of a pigmentocracy, a privilege you did not earn but were born with. And then learn to protect me and the way I have chosen to reject this mentality every day, though I need no protecting.
These are just a few things that you will encounter if you insist on dating a Brown girl from Chico Pelón in Managua, Nicaragua.
Sincerely Mine and Never Yours
Before learning about intersectionality, I had never had a conversation like this with a romantic partner. For much of the time when I was dating, I had never thought of bringing up the intersections of race, gender, and class. When I dated other Latinos with the same economic background as myself, gender was really the only issue that had to be addressed. But once the dating pool became increasingly white in Tennessee and I started dating white men, whose entire existence benefitted from the subjugation of people like me, I soon had to learn to have that conversation exhaustively, with intersectionality in mind. White people taught me about my otherness, and then I challenged them with it—because white people will still claim colorblindness to avoid admitting their own privileges.
So, if I was going to step into a relationship with someone whose intersections were so vastly different from my own, I understood there was some work to be done on his end to ensure that I was actually safe. My letter to my now-husband was a valuable moment for us.
My intersections come with me wherever I go, whether I am ready for them or not. And in white spaces those intersections feel heavy and they feel burdensome. It takes work to understand that whiteness is not universal, and it takes work to center yourself by decentering the status quo. Intersectionality legitimized the layers of oppression I had felt: racism, classism, sexism.
Without intersectionality, I would have few tools to combat the dominant narratives and norms. I would have been left to make sense of my dehumanization all on my own. If you accept that whiteness is the norm, then being a BIPOC means that, no matter where you go, there is already something wrong with you. If you cannot articulate all the ways society has erased you, you begin to think your voice is being ignored because you did something wrong. BIPOC often find ourselves invalidating our own experiences and memories. Even social interactions feel fraught with our discomfort. A great and simple example of this is my lack of pop-culture knowledge, due to my conservative, Christian, immigrant
, working-class upbringing. People often will be aghast that I do not know any actors by their names, with the exception of Nicolas Cage. I do not know most cult classics and only recently watched the Star Wars movies, at which point I felt like I finally understood decades of references. The same can be said about music, specifically classic rock. And my response to my lack of knowledge in the past has been one of shame and self-blame. Yet with intersectionality, I have been able to reframe those experiences. Instead of feeling that displacement internally and silently, I now can name it and become an active participant. Something as simple as knowing what people are even talking about can make you feel connected or not, present or othered.
Due to my intersections, I experienced a particular kind of dehumanization in my graduate program every Halloween.
Every single year of my four-year graduate program, a student would ask me if they could dress up as me for Halloween. After the first year, you would think that I would have become accustomed to the question or been better prepared. But somehow, I was always caught off guard when asked this ridiculously dehumanizing question: “Can I wear you as a costume?”
In my self-estimation, I thought I read as fashionable and glamorous in my phenomenally curated closet of homemade clothes, secondhand items, and some fast-fashion, affordable, trendy pieces. I valued my ability to look like a million bucks while wearing secondhand clothing, but I soon realized that this is not a skill that is celebrated outside my community. How I was read in my mostly Latinx community was not how I was read in white spaces. Because I am racialized as Brown and Brown is coded as inferior and less than, and because whiteness functions to regulate anything that is outside itself, I had a harsh reality to contend with when I began attending my PWI.
The first year, the girl who asked me if she could dress like me for Halloween was a “friend.” That is what I call white people who disguise themselves as friendly, but really they are just disarming you and waiting for the moment when they can ask what they have been wanting to ask since they first met you. Her name was Julie, and we were at a party sometime right before Halloween. Our department had an infamous annual Halloween party that was hosted by our program’s Student Government Association. Most people dressed up for this event.
I remember that she came up to me and said, “Can I be you for Halloween?” I think she saw the confusion and slight anger in my eyes. She began to clarify and say that she just thought that she could never wear what I wore, and some other remarks that were meant to sound like compliments but were not. She then pulled out her phone and said that one year she had dressed up as a reality TV star, and that was the “look” she was going for this year. She insisted on digging herself into a nice little hole the size of her entire body.
She said she wanted to wear a cheetah-print dress and a fur jacket. That was her perception of me, and when I saw the blurry picture of her wearing her previous DIY Halloween outfit, I only read one thing: cheap. I was immediately ashamed. But she never brought it up again, and I dropped that entire conversation and tried to pretend it never happened. I ended up not attending said Halloween party, to avoid the weirdness of attempting to have fun around white people who seemed to enjoy making me feel shame.
When I was in the moment, I did not know what was happening, and took the blow in stride. I tried to pretend my pride was not robbed from me, and I tried to pretend that the things that were said were not said. Realizing I read as cheap was never something I could take in in one sitting. It would take me a while to peel back all the layers of this racism onion.
Still, I attempted to become close to Julie, possibly to prove to her that I wasn’t what she had initially perceived me to be, which was a mistake. You cannot force someone to see your humanity after they have already decided you are inferior. I realize now that when she had asked me if she could dress like me for Halloween, she was making a coded statement about my otherness. She, a white woman from an upper-middle-class background, embodied intersections that were prioritized over mine. My intersecting identities must have been fascinating to her at best, a costume at worst.
The following year, a man asked me that same question. My memory is a little blurry, but I do remember we were standing outside our graduate school building and he mentioned his desire to dress like me for Halloween. He said it as if it was the funniest joke he could have made, but I was not in on the joke. Today he is a doctoral candidate at an elite institution.
Those first two times, I was caught by surprise and I did not know how to react. The following year, I attempted to get ahead of these racist interactions, and I held a panel about Halloween in our campus building. The panel was about how to avoid being insensitive, and twenty or so people came (out of a more than two-hundred-student graduate program). The event mostly seemed to piss off the white students. They couldn’t believe that a panel of their peers of color would dare tell them how to behave humanely during our Halloween party. But then I remembered that intersectionality was taught to me in an elective class and barely mentioned in the mandatory classes. And of course, the elective classes that prioritized nonwhite people were over-attended by BIPOC and under-attended by the white people in our program.
For me, though, when I think about intersectionality, I also need to think about my privileged identities. I am a cis person and grew up with a Judeo-Christian understanding of the world that made my ethnic and racial differences feel less threatening to white people at times. My Christianity made me palatable to white people in ways that, if I was not Christian, I would not have been. Furthermore, I think that to some of my peers my Brownness felt less threatening than Blackness might have. Dr. Myra Mendible talks about Brownness being scripted as an in-between identity, a “mediating color” between Black and white.
As I was experiencing anti-immigrant rhetoric and blatant stereotyping in Nashville, it felt strange to think about where I had advantages. But there was one particular incident that made me realize that my intersections with race had placed me at a more advantageous position than my Black peers and even professors.
In academia, there is this rhetoric around not engaging in what they call “oppression Olympics.” With this language, the experiences of all BIPOC are flattened and put on an even playing field. I did not interrogate this thinking much then, but have since learned to push back on this desire to avoid the topic of global anti-Blackness.
I remember when I took my first class with a Black female faculty member at Vanderbilt. This class was titled Feminist, Womanist, and Mujerista Theo-Ethics. This professor is a leading womanist scholar and one of the best lecturers I have ever had the privilege of calling my instructor. Her courses were crucial in my own radicalization, and I enrolled in as many of them as I could until I graduated. I remember clearly how she paved a way for me to find the words I needed to survive academia. I remember that, when we hit the mujerista track of this course, the professor opened the class for discussion on where we stood in terms of Latinidad.
I will never forget the questions the professor posed to the entire class; they were designed to confront the students with their ignorance of the experiences of Latinx people. Dr. Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas asked my peers to raise their hands if they had ever been friends with someone who was Latinx, if they knew Latinx people, if they had friends who were friends with Latinx people, and other questions to interrogate the students’ lack of proximity and familiarity with Latinxs. No hands were raised during this entire line of questions, except for my own.
In seeing this, I finally understood why I had felt so misunderstood this entire time, and I was finally able to figure out that how I moved within this white space was going to be seen and analyzed and assumed to be representative. My example could possibly be used by ignorant white people against other Latinx people, due to my white peers’ lack of exposure to people like me.
Understanding just how completely we live in a segregated society meant that I finally had the information I needed to take some weight off myself f
or constantly feeling misunderstood. I had always been an outsider in jokes, social gatherings, and academic spaces, but I finally understood that this was not because something was wrong with me. It was them, my white peers, who had zero clue about how to deal with me. All they had were stereotypes; that was the only reference they had to figure me out.
I remember when I received an email from a white woman in this class; it was sent to mostly white students, but I was included. This email talked about wanting to discuss ways to deal with what this student and others in this email perceived as aggression from our professor. I remember being taken aback, because I had never picked up on any aggression. Quite the contrary, in that class I had felt embraced and welcomed. It was the first class where my experiences were not a secondary thought. Rather, they were constantly being centered in the texts we were reading and the papers we were writing. That email was sent by someone who had attempted to align herself with me through her familiarity with the Spanish language. She was, for all intents and purposes, a well-meaning white woman. But good intentions mean nothing if your actions are not good.
What I did next was a decision that I stand by: I told our professor about this email. Because I understood the intersections that she embodied, as taught to me by her. For me this was a significant moment, because up until this point I was no snitch. Because of my experiences with men and my very dogmatic church context, I thought of most authority figures as unsafe. This moment made me realize that while there are power dynamics between student and teacher, pastor and congregant, parents and children—race, gender, sexuality, class, and a slew of isms add complications to this entire framework and made me investigate my previous allegiances. I also had been noticing that, while I was treated in certain ways due to racist stereotypes of Latinx and Brown people, my Black peers and professors faced something else. I knew that there was a racism problem at my institution, and all institutions, and that white students were driving the ship while the white faculty and staff mostly kept their heads down.
For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts Page 15
