Brown (a poem)

They say to me,

“You’re not really brown, you know.”

Or,  “I thought you were White.” and

“Oh, well you don’t look

(insert: Latino, Spanish, Jewish, Arab, Middle-Eastern, BROWN.)

I know what my skin looks like:

café au lait, with too much lait

Brown isn’t a skin colour,

Brown is an experience

Brown is being told

To speak English

Brown is being called a terrorist on the train

When someone confuses your yarmulke with a kufi

Brown is people mispronouncing your name

Every fucking day

Brown is being afraid security is gonna be called

 When you’re browsing the aisles

Brown is being told to go back to where you came from,

When your apartment is just a block away

Brown is being assaulted in public,

With everybody watching

Brown is being scared of walking alone at night,

Of airports, the police, your own neighbours

Brown is being told

Your experience doesn’t matter

Brown is an experience.

I am brown.

Decolonization

I’m reflecting on last night, where again I have found myself the only non-White person at a party. Something in me urges to write about this experience, I’m trying to be nonplussed about it, but it’s hard. It’s always hard.  I realized today that I’m sick of letting myself be co-opted for whiteboyworld’s entertainment. I know I live in Portland, where it’s 85% Caucasian, but I’m still breathing, still a part of that other percentage that all the White activists ignore when they rail about classism.

Back to the party…I remember when me and two other of my companions sneak our way back up the stairs on a mission masquerading as a smoke break to really clear our heads. Some of the partygoers leak out after us and strike a conversation in the driveway. We all introduce ourselves. Predictably there is an audible silence after me and the quintessential nicewhitegirl says how she likes my name, how it’s a cool name. Oh yay, the tokenism has begun. At least they didn’t ask me where I was from. I just smile awkwardly and that’s the last time I speak directly to anyone I don’t previously know at this shindig. I realize it’s time to go when some newcomers have a side conversation about what’s the PC term for a Native American while one of them is wearing some Urban Outfitters shit with a “Navajo” design fluttering above her tiny midriff.

I can’t stand this world. I feel like more analogously Caucasian faces and thought-patterns are slowly blotting me out.  I’m tired of being the only coloured person at the party, the only Latino in the “Hispanic” food section of Fred Meyers, the only guy on my block who rocks a skullcap. I’m not a token, I’m not going to be colonized for someone else’s mental well being because they have a friend that is queer/of colour/Jewish etc. I’m not going to teach you a pithy lesson from my homeland; I’m not going to teach you Spanish.

Yes, I am going to be offended by your racist good intentions. I’m going to talk back; I’m going to correct your perceptions. I’m going to make you mad, I’m going to dismantle your co-options, and I’m going to throw your world for a loop. I’m not going to sit here and let you blot me out for this anti-septic, White, bourgeois vision of what you think your community should be. Fuck that noise.

I’m decolonizing that shit.

Gay is NOT the "New Black"

Although the hubbub has died down around the catchphrase that so-called GLBTQ activists coined, “Gay is the new Black”, I feel like now I can coherently address the issues around it from my perspective as a queer-identified person of colour. 

The problem with this phrase, other than the obvious denigration of the Black experience, centres on choice. No, not the choice that the rabid Christian right is always squawking about…I am not talking about the choice to be GLBTQ, because as any educated person would know…it’s biological. I am talking about the choice to come out and identify oneself in the public sphere as GLBTQ.  This is key.

People of colour do not choose to identify as people of colour, we don’t “come out of the closet” so to speak about being Black, Latino, Asian etc. It is easily identifiable by our skin, our hair or our speech patterns among other things. It is written upon us for all to see. This is the difference between being a person of colour and being GLBTQ. Arguably you cannot “see” GLBTQ.

Identity politics aside, being identified as person of colour is not a choice. (White) GLBTQ people have a choice and the privilege to come out and be identified as GLBTQ. Those of us who are not White, and regardless of our sexuality, do not have that privilege. Therein lies the difference and should point out the issue in claiming that “gay is the new Black.” Black is still Black and the last time I checked, the civil rights struggle for racial equality was far from over.

Slam this (My Bliss)

Who the fuck am I?

I don’t know who I am anymore, this pale ugly stranger

Beady eyes inflamed with a fire nothing can quench

My thirst is eternal like the g-ddamn sun that

Doesn’t boil my fallow skin to beautiful brown like

Days past with seagulls, pelicans and tropical terns flying LOW the planes, the planes are getting closer everyday driving me mad like a horsefly ramming itself against unyielding greasy glass SHATTERING all over the wall after I throw the bottle in a fit of childish yet adult frenzy, FRIENDS where are you other than slipping away and I can’t remember how your voice sounds anymore its been so long yet only as if it were yesterday why haven’t you called I changed my number make a fucking effort because I am worth a damn

DAMN.

I am worth a damn so why do I leave them to rape me everyday?

I am losing my face speaking without accents not speaking in tongues you can understand, you sientes lo que digo? my people where are my people you are NOT my people who the fuck are my people? My people wouldn’t rape me, hate me, snub me, and cut me down to size WHAT the hell is this hi how are you HOW can I transfer your CALL my mother to explain but I can’t speak she don’t get it anymore ANYWAY my throat is caught in they dicks as they…      

Again and again and again.

Again when, when will I be beautiful inside? He reminds me to live instead of die.

I’ve been dying since I turned fifteen, turning green and rotting away from the soul but this boy he gave me my goal to be alive to stay afloat because g-d knows its easier to choke.

So choke on this.            

Choke on my bliss.

Damn.

I am worth a damn.

Yes,

M’am.

How can I help you today?

Racism-induced Exhaustion

I wasn't sure how long the men had been on the train, to be honest. I don't usually pay attention when I am on my way home from work. At some point I had started a short conversation with the two Brazilians nearby mostly because I never get to speak Portuguese in Portland.


Later on I was talking on my phone to a friend, in Spanish, relating to her my day and the neatness of running into Portuguese-speakers on the commute home. As the train pulled into the last stop, my stop, I put my phone away and as I approached the exit heard the loud end of a conversation about how "we should just close the borders and then tell them all to shut up."


My knee-jerk reaction was rage, of course. Those men weren't looking directly at me when they said it...but you know that feeling you get when everyone is talking about you but they're not actually acknowledging your presence nearby? They probably didn't think I even understood English...and I'm not even Mexican. At all. The shocking part was their appearance...they all seemed rather innocuous...for older White men. People are ugly when they think you're not paying attention or that you don't understand what they're saying.


So when my friends or acquaintances (mostly the White ones) whine at me about how they don't understand why these horrible racist things happen to me or around me and that  I "must be hanging out in the wrong areas" or with the "wrong people," I smile now, thinly. I don't have anything to say anymore. I'm too damn tired of experiencing it,  pointing it out, and "discussing" it.

 I just want to know who the hell you're all hanging out with.