{"id":55424,"date":"2017-12-22T19:42:57","date_gmt":"2017-12-22T19:42:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=55424"},"modified":"2017-12-22T19:42:57","modified_gmt":"2017-12-22T19:42:57","slug":"uncovering-the-privilege-of-being-a-white-passing-person-of-colour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=55424","title":{"rendered":"uncovering the “privilege” of being a white passing person of colour"},"content":{"rendered":"

uncovering the “privilege” of being a white passing person of colour<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

i-D<\/a>
\nVICE<\/a>
\n2016-02-02<\/p>\n

Niloufar Haidari<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nPhotography Khashayar Elyassi<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

Why we shouldn’t let white people police who gets to be “white”.<\/em><\/p>\n

I am a ‘white-passing’<\/a> person of colour; a white-passing British-Iranian woman of colour to be exact. I am in no way ignorant as to the privilege this gives me in a still very much racialised world in which the after-effects of colonialism and imperialism are all too evident and dark skin is seen as anything from unattractive to a reason to kill. I am aware that in a culture in which fair skin is still valued higher than those of brown people whether in the fashion industry, on the internet or just at family gatherings, I am lucky. I am white-passing, and I have white-passing privilege. In short, this means that I am not necessarily immediately recognisable as a ‘brown person’, an ‘other’. Make-up companies cater to my concealer and lipstick needs, ‘flesh-coloured’ plasters and crayons are roughly the right shade. Due to the fact that I have spent my whole life living in the UK<\/a>, I suffer from Vitamin D deficiency<\/a> and am therefore more likely to be mistaken for Italian\/Spanish rather than Middle Eastern for 9 months of the year. I would like to make it very clear that I am in no way trying to claim I suffer the same kind of discrimination based on skin that black or dark-skinned Asian women do; I don’t even suffer the same kind of discrimination as other Iranian women who are darker than I do.<\/p>\n

But I do suffer discrimination. I am white-passing, not white. And interestingly, it often seems to be white people rather than other people of colour who are darker than me who are quick to announce my non-eligibility for discrimination and to tell me I’m white. I have experienced a long and varied history of this from both white friends and anonymous white strangers on the internet…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why we shouldn’t let white people police who gets to be “white”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,6462,10],"tags":[23162,27869,22209],"class_list":["post-55424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-passing-2","category-uk","tag-i-d","tag-niloufar-haidari","tag-vice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55424"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55425,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55424\/revisions\/55425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}