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This post was written by Margaret Martinez, Ph.D., on behalf of the Atlanta Behavioral Health Advocates.
The year 2020 is one that will surely go down in the history books. A global pandemic, renewed media attention on racism and racial violence, and a highly contentious election mark our collective experience. For me, there are other milestones, including the birth of my first child and the start of a new job. To these, I add one more: 2020 will henceforth be known as the year I finally, after more than 30 years in my skin, confronted my own White privilege.
I grew up White Hispanic, but really just White, in “the People’s Republic” of Ann Arbor, Michigan, a town so nicknamed for its overwhelmingly liberal politics. I am the daughter of an Irish Catholic mother and a White Cuban immigrant. As a child and for most of my adult life, I paid way more attention to the fact that I am Hispanic than the fact that I am White. My father would regale us with stories of his childhood in Cuba nightly, and I remember listening with rapt attention as he described this world so foreign from the one I knew.
Being Hispanic was a source of great personal pride, a distinguishing characteristic that set me apart from my friends. In fifth grade, my family’s personal connection to Christopher Columbus (my ancestor was a lookout on Columbus’s ship La Niña and, per Columbus’ diary, the first person to view land) was featured as an extra credit question on a social studies test. I clearly remember the pride that I felt at having my family history celebrated in this public manner. In this way, my ethnicity was something akin to a superpower or hidden talent. It was something that made me special, that marked me as an individual.
Of course, I am beginning to realize that this ability to view myself as an individual is, as Robin DiAngelo asserts, indicative of the very privilege I enjoy. In truth, mine is a double dose of privilege: I can be ethnic when it suits me and White when it does not. Until very recently, I was too wedded to my identity as a “minority” to see this clearly. What I am coming to realize is that being Hispanic may be my superpower, but it is also my shield. With it, I can exempt myself from further discussion of racism and excuse myself from having to confront the injustice all around me.
My ethnicity allows me access to resources intended to promote equity for the marginalized, denigrated, and mistreated members of our society, meager reparations for pain I have never really had to endure. The more closely I identify as a “person of color” (a term I use very loosely, given my olive skin), the more I can rest assured that I cannot possibly be part of the problem. In this way, my identity as a “woman of color” is, ironically, the most poignant expression of my White fragility. Every time I use this shield improperly—when I play my ethnicity “card” but not my “race card”—I am, as Ibram Kendi asserts, a racist.
I have carried all this unspoken racism and unacknowledged privilege with me: through high school in a liberal but still very White private school; as a college student in an equally liberal but still mostly White Ivy League university; during my years living in the largely White Upper West Side of the hugely diverse New York City; while a graduate student (and a Diversity Fellow at that, although I am ashamed to admit it) at a predominantly White private university in a majority-minority city; while a trainee at Grady, serving almost exclusively Black patients; as the director of a small psychiatric hospital where the providers were almost exclusively White and the direct care staff almost exclusively Black; and now working with (mostly Black) Veterans whose histories include both combat and racial trauma.
There were countless missed opportunities to push myself out of my comfort zone and many people along the way who would have supported me in this endeavor. Until this point, however, I have opted to manage these tensions within myself by mostly avoiding them. I did not have the resources to deal with the dialectics at play: I am Hispanic, and I am White; I have privilege, and others do not; I want to confront my privilege, and I am unsure of how to do so; I am unintentionally racist, and I can strive to be antiracist.
These tensions still exist, as does the fear that comes with acknowledging them. It is the fear of looking in the mirror and not liking what I see, the fear that my ignorance might be revealed and myself judged as a result of it. But I am no longer willing to wait until I am unafraid to do this work, because now the work is not just for me alone.
On March 29, 2020—at the beginning of a global pandemic that would claim the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom were Black or brown, while countless other Black and brown people would die at the hands of police officers—I became the mother to Catherine Mary, my beautiful baby girl. Her eyes were blue when she was born, and although now they are turning my shade of brown-green, her skin is fairer than mine, and her hair is blond like her daddy’s. Her name is 100 percent Anglo, but I am determined that her attitude will not be.
By birthright, she will be farther removed from experiences of prejudice and oppression and bigotry than I am, the “color” in her blood diluted to a mere quarter. She could easily walk through life with minimal discomfort, oblivious to the pillar of privilege that supports her every step. And no matter how many hipster board books I buy her, this is exactly what will happen unless I embark on this terrifying and courageous journey.
So here I am. I am practicing opposite action to my fear and my shame and proclaiming my racism publicly, for it is only with acceptance that we can achieve change. Will you join me in making 2020 a year to remember, not only for the unprecedented circumstances in which we find ourselves, but for unprecedented change within yourself?
