The Memoir of a White-Passing ActivistPosted in Articles, Autobiography, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2016-08-18 00:46Z by Steven |
The Memoir of a White-Passing Activist
Odyssey
2016-08-16
My experiences with being mixed race and trying to use my white privilege to help liberate myself and others.
“Oh, you’re mixed? Wow, I would never have guessed. Now it all makes sense.”
Yes, this is something that has been said to me multiple times, and something that I will probably continue to hear for the rest of my life. But the part that bothers me is not the fact that people don’t recognize my indigenous blood upon first glance, but rather that the fact that in the eyes of some people, fighting to gain equal rights for everyone only “makes sense” if I am not a full-blooded white person (which, by the way, is pretty much impossible to come by these days anyway, for all of you white supremacists out there). People say this as if they know that the system benefits white people, and cannot conceive why I, a fellow white person, would ever want to change that. But that in itself is a huge part of the problem. Nothing about racial injustice “makes sense”, least of all the hesitation to fight against it…
Read the entire article here.