People of the Global Majority with White Skin
I want to appreciate Barbara Love’s article, ”Light-Skinned People of the Global Majority,” in the July 2018 Present Time, and share some of my journey.
I am of mixed heritage on both sides of my family. The people on my mother’s paternal side were Spanish and Italian Jews who, as a result of the Inquisition, ended up living in the Caribbean. On her mother’s side were Eastern European Jews from Belarus who came to the United States. My mother had olive skin, dark hair, and big, dark eyes.
On my father’s paternal side were Spanish Catholics who settled in Peru in the 1500s, and were involved in colonizing the Indigenous people. The people on his mother’s side were Scottish. I’m not sure when they came to the United States. They were poor farmers who were likely part of the U.S. expansion into the Midwest, and I surmise they played a role in oppressing the Native peoples.
I was part of the early work in RC on ending racism, and I worked on racism as a white person for many years. After doing a lot of that, I started having access to distress that makes me put myself last and keeps me small. In groups of the Global Majority, most specifically Jews of the Global Majority and Latino/a groups, I have been able to work on that internalized oppression.
I go to Global Majority Jewish groups or Latino/a groups, but I don’t go to general Global Majority groups unless I am specifically invited or it’s a group for working on racism targeting Black people. I wait to be invited because I don’t want my racism to be hard on anyone, and if I’m invited people must think I have something useful to bring to the group. Also, without an invitation I’d be so worried about what I was doing in the group that my need for reassurance would leak out all over the place and function as racism. Following this guideline has made sense to me for my own discharge, re-emergence, and relationships.
It’s worth noting that the more I have met in groups of the Global Majority, the more I’ve had room to learn about the oppressive roles my family has played. It has also allowed me to get closer to my family.
I am actually writing this from Peru, where I’ve spent a week with my father and his extended family. I ended up talking to my father about being of mixed heritage. He talked about how at different points in his life he had tried to be “white” or “Peruvian” and that neither had really worked. He has come to find a place in the middle, with all that entails. (My father is extremely fair skinned, with dark hair and dark eyes.)
The opportunity to work in both white and People of the Global Majority groups is what made it possible to discharge enough to take this trip and to have this conversation with my father.
As more people all over the world mix, I think it becomes more important to understand and make room for white-skinned People of the Global Majority. The way people associate how we look with where we are from is part of racism. (There are fair-skinned, blue-eyed Indigenous groups in Peru.)
Brooklyn, New York, USA
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