It’s not just Brown and White

Note: I originally wrote this piece for a zine I wrote, Reflection: an uncommon identity analysis, spring 2008.

I was the product of transracial donor insemination. I was a child of color raised with white parents, a white brother, a white town, and a white school. As you can imagine, this formula has led to places where race could have been dealt with better in my childhood. I’ve always had a hard time articulating the complexity of how I feel that. Having lesbian parents creates a sense of being put under a microscope, and you’ve got to put your best face forward.

Since I was old enough to communicate, I understood that some people were on the lookout for any evidence that my family was a bad family. At times I felt as if the weight of queer parenting nationwide rested on my shoulders. I didn’t want to talk publicly about anything that would reflect poorly on my family, especially anything related to how our family was formed. Writing this piece has been hard.

I have often heard queer people comment on the lack of intergenerational connection in queer communities, and sometimes voice jealousy over how people of color are raised with family support networks to deal with racism already in place. The opposite has been true for me. I have been learning strategies for dealing with homophobia since I was two or three, but I only started learning how to deal with racism when I was 16. When I spend time in communities of color, where everyone has a lifetime of experience to draw upon, I can’t help but feel like an outsider.

In some cases, it doesn’t make a big difference. We speak a common anti-oppression language. It doesn’t mater if we had very different experiences growing up. However, that’s not always the case.

Just about a year ago I went to a local queers of color group. The next day they called me and asked me not to return. They were in the process of shifting from a public group to a private group of friends who hung out together. However, in the same breath I was also told that some of the members of the group were uncomfortable with the fact that I was raised by white parents, and they worried I would bring white privilege into their safe space.

Now, I’m not naïve enough to deny the role white privilege has had in my life, but I was the only one who’s privilege was being questioned. I inherited privilege from my white parents and I may be light enough to pass as white sometimes, but as a very queer trans woman who never expects to pass as straight I immediately began to wonder how they managed to never question the straight privilege that many of them brought from being raised by straight parents and/or being able to pass as straight.

My experience with privilege is… complicated. There is plenty that I have, and plenty that I don’t have. In my adult life I found the racial consciousness that was hidden from me as a child. But this instance is just one reminder that the way I came to a racial consciousness will always mark me as different.

My white grandfather was estranged from the family as far back as I can remember. A couple years ago he made an attempt to reconnect with the family. His peace offering was a set of beaded bracelets which he gave to each of us. My mom repeated his story, telling me that he got them from an indigenous tribe in Mexico that had very limited contact with the outside world.

He also bragged that other people were taking them to Madison Ave, New York and selling them for $300 a piece. He may have gotten them cheap, but we were expected to value the very expensive gift.

Part of the value was in the exotification of the item. Falling in with the narrative of the “rare” and “wild” artifact made by a lost people, little attention was paid to the attempts of such people to survive in a global capitalist society. And while western capitalism might consider the interaction as a fair trade and smart business, it’s not hard to see an alternative sense of morality that would interpret it as a theft.

That’s part of why I still wear the bracelets. They are a symbol of the complicated relationship that I have with my family, and it is a metaphor for my life. I have nothing but love for my parents, yet taking into consideration the legacy of Native American boarding schools, centuries of coerced assimilation, and cultural genocide, the way I was raised was a theft, too.

In activist spaces I hear discussions about preserving culture and fighting assimilation and I don’t know how to participate because my cultural heritage has already been erased. I’m not sure how to reclaim it, or even what to reclaim. Just like the bracelets, I have been colonized.