Looking for thoughts from folks of color on this...
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Looking for thoughts from folks of color on this...
Is a blonde, white-skinned child of two multiracial latinx people still a person of color? Does the label even matter?
To some extent, this is a thing I've had to navigate myself, as a white PR person (and my answer has thus far been that I'm just a white person with proximity to people of color by virtue of culture/community/etc).
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also, I wish we had better terms for skin color that weren't so... charged.
"fair" is literally etymologically "beautiful/attractive/morally good", and thus tying white skin to a value judgment like that.
"white" is incredibly charged itself, and I don't think is a term that makes sense out of the context of white supremacy. It's not so much a neutral descriptor of a shade of skin, but a label of belonging to a dominant ethnic group.
"light-skinned" is... the next thing I would go to, but that's a term from communities of people of color, and especially the Black community, that means a very specific thing as well and is charged in its own way.
So what's out there that can be used to distance the way we might refer to a child's skin color from the inherent racism of terms that exist? Or perhaps that's a futile exercise because skin color is going to be political/charged no matter what and it's better to just say "white" and acknowledge someone's implicit privilege of being treated as belonging to a certain group?
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@zkat my general feeling is that people are allowed to inhabit multiple ethnic and racial identities. It does make their lives more complicated in terms of how they participate. But I don't think it's a "you have to pick one" type of deal.
What I think is important is recognizing that being able to pass for white confers Whiteness upon you in most social interactions. Regardless of your personal heritage. That is the thing to acknowledge and be mindful of.
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@polotek yeah I think that latter part is absolutely where I ended up landing in, but I also noticed that by virtue of my ethnic identity, I hold a lot of proximity to folks of color and I guess... I see a lot of the world through those eyes, by being so directly privy to their experiences and perspectives in a way that a lot of white folks wouldn't really have access to having? And I'm absolutely ethnically Puerto Rican and I see that as distinct from "white" in the sense of "European American".
Setting aside the additional complexity of whiteness within the Puerto Rican racial experience/discourse.
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@zkat this is something I don't have a ton of personal experience with. The way I might say it is "cultures that were predominantly non-white from an ethnic perspective, but heavily colonized and influenced by white Western culture?"
Some people don't like to hear this. But honestly it's nice being 100% African American stretching back a few generations. There's little ambiguity about what place I inhabit. I'm glad you're exploring this for yourself though.
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Chrisshy Keygenreplied to Kat Marchán 🐈 last edited by
@zkat pale? I think I've seen that in places where people discuss makeup a lot. Idk about any baggage the term might have.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Kat Marchán 🐈 last edited by [email protected]
@zkat "Melanin deficient."