I’m Coming Out

… as a Person of Color

My hair is black, my eyes are brown and my skin…

brown?, red?, hispanic/latin?

Like I said in “Who Am I?”, my decision to start a website was after I read Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. That is why I will post quotes from the book and ideas that she mentioned there. I am not trying to copy her. I just want to share my experience and I know there are a lot of people like me and I would love to hear their stories.

While eagerly reading every page I started to develop a new passion, a new appreciation of a concept that I have never took the time to analyze: Race.

Race is defined as a group of people identified as distinct from other groups because of supposed physical or genetic traits shared by the group. A group of people united or classified together on the basis of common history, nationality, or geographic distribution.

In my country we are all the same. Argentina was colonized in the 16th century by Spain, and later there was also a big Italian immigration. They were white, so I never had the idea of considering myself as someone non-white. I thought there were only two races: the antagonism between black&white was the only thing I could think about.

“Race is not biology; race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it’s about how you look. […] In America, you don’t get to decide what race you are. It is decided for you”.

Americanah

Of course I knew about the “latin” race, but it wasn’t until I moved here last year that I knew what it really meant. I am from South America, so the first thing I had to learn was that I could not call myself “white”. People looked at me oddly if I did. Someone told me once that my color was grey, another said that I was brown and that Jesus must have looked like me. At first I felt embarrassed by my accent, I felt bad, sad, uncomfortable, out-of-place, -Why is it so important to know my race/color? Why do they want to point out a difference between me and them? Is there something wrong with me? I asked myself constantly. I was in a new country, I wanted to fit in, to be one of them. But that never happened. Later I realized that Americans have been dealing with race issues for decades and for them it is not a simple thing that you can take for granted. I had to know what my race was and I had to embrace it.

When the OMB, which is responsible for maintaining the nation’s racial-classification system, set up its first government-wide racial classification system in 1977, just four major races (American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian/Pacific Islander, Black, and White) were included and two ethnicities (Hispanic and non-Hispanic) . So if Hispanic is not a race, which one should I check? (this is going to be my next post).

They called me “exotic” and I thought -Am I an animal?, Do they think that maybe I am stupid because of my accent so they need to make me feel “cool”? I didn’t like that it was so easy for them to tell that I was not American just by looking at me. I didn’t want to be different. I tried to improve my accent, but I could never achieve it. I guess that I was not trying really hard. Deep inside I knew something was wrong. I tried to look like them. -I know I’m not different- I kept telling myself. Until I started reading Americanah. Oh, thanks to my awesome husband Riley who gave it to me!

I stopped thinking there was something wrong with me. I stopped hating my accent. I stopped saying thank you when someone told me “You look white if you don’t talk”. I stopped pretending. And finally I felt great. I was finally me, a proud Juani, from Argentina, a latin man with an accent, a person of color.

“Some guy said to Professor Hunk -Why must we always talk about race anyway? Can’t we just be human beings?- And Professor Hunk replied -that is exactly what white privilege is, that you can say that. Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier-.”

Americanah