Well, it's something I'm obviously particularly attuned to, with my own history. I've never tried to pass, wasn't raised to pass, but I know from long experience that people will try to pass me anyway -- and some of them will get shirty when corrected, like they are entitled to have the final say on how I identify myself, or like there's something downright offensive and threatening about a person who is physically able to pass for white willingly refusing to do so. And I think this sort of fixation on phenotype is behind a lot of the well-meaning ignorant sorts who think "colorblindness" is the solution to racism; they forget that even when people may look more or less similar, there are still differences of culture, language, religion, familial and national history...
And yeah, this is one of the many factors that keeps me from wanting to go to things like book cons. I look passable enough that I don't have to fear being subjected to the "POC petting zoo" treatment -- but knowing that I can blend into the crowd doesn't do anything to alleviate my own sense of discomfort and not belonging in an overwhelmingly white space. Looking passable means that the folks who might have enough of a vestigial sense of shame or decorum will think it's probably safe to express racist or clueless sentiments around me that they might be ashamed to let slip in front of someone they thought wasn't white. Panels and speeches are going to be mostly white presenters presuming they're speaking to a mostly white crowd, assuming common national myths, cultural metaphors, that I don't share. And if I correct people on their assumptions that there are no Indians in the room, I know that the reactions this produces will follow a lot of very tired scripts that I've heard a million times before, and have less and less heart and patience to deal with each passing year.
And that's one of the less obvious things that I miss about Hawai'i, actually. People were just as likely to pass me there, too, and in a state with a non-white majority that comes with a whole extra layer of othering and assumptions about being an outsider -- but with local folks, there wasn't the resistance to having their assumptions corrected that I've seen time and time here on the mainland. It's the state with the highest percentage in the country of mixed marriages and residents identifying as multiracial, so people there are well aware from their own friends and families that people can have very diverse combinations of names, phenotypes, and cultural identifications; and when most of the folks you're talking to aren't white, you don't seem to run into the sort who take it as a personal affront that you "could" identify as white but don't want to...
Re: This is epically cool.
And yeah, this is one of the many factors that keeps me from wanting to go to things like book cons. I look passable enough that I don't have to fear being subjected to the "POC petting zoo" treatment -- but knowing that I can blend into the crowd doesn't do anything to alleviate my own sense of discomfort and not belonging in an overwhelmingly white space. Looking passable means that the folks who might have enough of a vestigial sense of shame or decorum will think it's probably safe to express racist or clueless sentiments around me that they might be ashamed to let slip in front of someone they thought wasn't white. Panels and speeches are going to be mostly white presenters presuming they're speaking to a mostly white crowd, assuming common national myths, cultural metaphors, that I don't share. And if I correct people on their assumptions that there are no Indians in the room, I know that the reactions this produces will follow a lot of very tired scripts that I've heard a million times before, and have less and less heart and patience to deal with each passing year.
And that's one of the less obvious things that I miss about Hawai'i, actually. People were just as likely to pass me there, too, and in a state with a non-white majority that comes with a whole extra layer of othering and assumptions about being an outsider -- but with local folks, there wasn't the resistance to having their assumptions corrected that I've seen time and time here on the mainland. It's the state with the highest percentage in the country of mixed marriages and residents identifying as multiracial, so people there are well aware from their own friends and families that people can have very diverse combinations of names, phenotypes, and cultural identifications; and when most of the folks you're talking to aren't white, you don't seem to run into the sort who take it as a personal affront that you "could" identify as white but don't want to...