I don't even know, people

[palominocorn]

It's generally acceptable for trans people (and, sometimes, for cis people if they're in a super-progressive space) to talk about how their body's gendered features are all wrong.

But I'm pretty sure that if I went to most of these spaces and started to talk about how my body is, well, too white, that I want to look like my brown grandfather (even if he was a complete waste of oxygen), I'd get crucified.

I'd say that this is part of my complex relationship to race in general and whiteness specifically, but... I've felt this way since before I knew he was brown.

I don't know if it's okay for me to feel this way. Or maybe it's okay for me to feel this way but not okay for me to act on it. Doing anything to make my skin darker feels like I would be appropriating brownness and pretending to be more marginalized than I really am.

Comments

[zenolalia]

Eh, I feel this way sometimes. Most of my family is very visibly "brown." I have the lightest skin and hair of anyone I'm related to, to the extent that sometimes when I was a kid people would make jokes that I had been adopted or kidnapped. I'm also not the only person I know to feel this way.

But I definitely know that even though it's a fairly common feeling, it's also something that even quite progressive spaces don't know how to handle or talk about, Inevitably, people call it fetishization. Even when it's "fetishizing" what is, literally, my own race.

It's one of the ways that, IMO, racial politics needs to advance its discussions, and can model those advancements on the way gender politics has so rapidly advanced in the last decade or so.

[palominocorn]

[clinks glass in solidarity] It would be really great to have some spaces to talk about this where people don't automatically assume you're an eeeeeevil racist out to appropriate racialized experiences.

In my case, a big part of the problem is that I don't even know what race the bastard was! All I have is some black and white, 50-year-old photos and a butchered surname; the only person who knows more is staunchly insisting that WE ARE A WHITE FAMILY, NO GROSS COLORED COOTIES HERE. (I love my grandma because she was one of the few people who were consistently nice to me in my childhood, but she's... let's say politically difficult.) Was he Middle Eastern? Jewish? Central Asian? Transcaucasian? I am, in a very real sense, a mixed race person with only one race.

Another thing that's hard to explain to people is that I look like an abled white guy, while being none of these things. It gives me certain advantages, but it's also a very special form of hell.