I’ve reached an age that sometimes moves people to give me their seats on public transportation and I accept. So recently, on a crowded F train to Manhattan, when a European-looking teenager motioned for me to take his seat, I hustled over and slid right in.
Then I realized, to my horror, that in calling me, he had bypassed this middle-aged black woman standing in front of him. I looked up at her apologetically and she stared daggers of hatred right back into my eyes. All of my guilt instantly vanished. It wasn’t my fault! She could blame the kid, if she needed to assign blame. What could I have done? It had been a long day, I wanted to get off my feet,
and she looked younger and sturdier. She could handle it. Fuck her.
Would she have reacted differently had she known I was a fellow minority? ¿Quién sabe? All she saw is that I have light skin, hair and eyes. I call it ”protective coloring”.
I’ve already experienced strangers favoring me over darker folks who perhaps had been waiting their turn longer. That always shocks me; I find it appalling that such injustice could be a routine part of so many lives in this country.
But though I sympathize, I’m only human: I always take the advantage being offered. Not many people of any color are willing to renounce a gift, however small, in order to stand on principle. Life is too hard.
Besides, light skin sometimes works against you. Darker Hispanics may resent me on sight or stare as though I'm a circus freak if they hear me speaking Spanish. Once, when a Black man tried to mug me
on a subway stairs landing off Bryant Park, I remembered another light-skinned friend’s advice: “If you’re ever mugged, speak Spanish.” So I did. And the guy put away his knife, shook my hand, said: “Sorry, I thought you was a White girl’, and walked away.
Whites are astonished whenever I tell this story; Blacks just laugh.
Me, I’m only the storyteller. I don’t even know what race to claim because in this country, the concept of race varies according to location and who you’re talking to. In Miami, I’m White; in New York, Maybe not so much. To Blacks and Browns, I’m White, and to Whites, I’m Hispanic (euphemism for “definitely NOT White as we Whites understand Whiteness”). So I constantly find myself having to adjust my racial identity to the situation at hand. I don’t care; I know who I am. And I suspect most US Latinos do a similar dance when it’s for public consumption.
Fortunately, our own take on race is much less complicated. Hispanics believe that you are what the mirror tells you, no matter what the rest of your family looks like. Blacks get offended when you try to explain this; Whites think you’re being presumptuous.
It almost seems as though people here refuse to understand that when your notions of race are formed in another culture, you tend to process things differently. That can be a bonus for your mental health. I, for example, have no sense of historical moral debt, no legacy of race-related guilt, and, above all, no feeling that I owe anybody else absolutely anything because my skin happens to be lighter than theirs.
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