The More Things Remain the Same
Lidia Perez
By Lidia Perez
Last week, I was sitting in a car with my boyfriend and his friend outside of my parents' house. We had gotten back from bowling and were just chatting, minding our business. A man with a baseball cap started walking past the car, but while he was still in front of it, he oddly pointed at my boyfriend, Tay, and his friend, Amhir, through the windshield. Then he walked past and stopped. Tay stuck his head out the window. “Hey man, are you ok?” he asked. They had an awkwardly polite back and forth until they wished each other goodnight. However, it was clear that the man didn’t mean his goodbye when he stayed where he was standing and made a phone call.
Noticing that this man wasn’t taking kindly to two Black men sitting in a nice neighborhood, I thought I could get out of the car and make him leave. Now, I’m Hispanic, sure, but usually pale enough for people to believe I’m white if I want them to. That turned out to not be the case here.
He asked what I was doing there, and when I told him that that was my parents’ house he was guarding so heroically, he didn’t believe me.
“Why would you live here?” he said more than once, clearly an assertion more than a question. Amhir and Tay got out of the car, and just kept telling him to walk away, our voices rising angrily in tandem out of his frustration that we could possibly belong there and ours that we for some reason couldn’t. He had taken off his jacket, hung it on my fence, and crossed his arms, squaring up. Luckily, as I was standing at my neighbors doorstep and he was walking menacingly towards me, my neighbors opened the door and let my friends and me in.
I couldn’t stop shaking afterwards, not with fear, but with rage. What kind of right did this guy think he had, protecting my neighbors from a girl they’d known since she was fourteen years old? And was just my appearance enough to make him think I didn’t belong there? Like I said, I’m pale, especially during early April in Wisconsin. Sure I’m more or less olive toned and have black curly hair, but I’ve been called white passing if not just plain white a considerable portion of my life. Now, not everyone has thought that, but I can’t help but think that someone like me being profiled has to do with the rise of fascism that’s become so apparent nation-wide and globally.
Hate is an exclusionary thing. Because it begs to be fed, as people become more hateful and factionist, they want more people excluded from their faction so they have more people to hate. This has been apparent at many points in history.
One very notable example would be the Nazi’s tightening of racial purity leading up to and during the Holocaust. Hitler outlined a superior, pure white race in his book Mein Kampf, one that excluded even European Jews. Although antisemitism had existed before this, Hitler was able to distinctly define Jews as a separate Race.
In middle school, my class had the privilege of hearing a holocaust survivor speak at a synagogue. One thing I remember him noting was that Jewish people were not a separate race from white, but the Nazi’s made it so. Other Europeans were excluded from the pure white race as well, for example Slavic people. The fact that all race is a social construct, no matter how far back in history the social construct began, makes this possible.
Another example would be the one drop rule. The principles of the one drop rule in the United States, defining a Black American as anyone with a single proven “drop” of African blood in them, began as early as the 1600s. However, legislation enforcing this rule began to spike during the Jim Crow era. While racism heightened during the 1920s, as occurred during World War II, as is occurring now, racial integrity laws began being passed. These ensured that anyone who had even a small percentage of African Ancestry would remain segregated from white society. Once again, individuals who could at other points in time be considered white or pass for white were excluded in favor of white purity.
With this being said, it’s entirely possible that a Trump-era white passing is different from a Biden or Obama-era white passing. Or, perhaps, I’ve never really been as white as white people have let on. As antisemitism and anti-Black racism even against very light skinned Black Americans had always existed before they became explicitly state-sanctioned, maybe now some white Americans are just emboldened enough by the state to let me know that I am not one of them and scare me with it.
It isn’t working. I am not scared but furious at this new era’s effort to make me feel out of place. If I don’t belong, what does that say about the safety of Tay and Amhir, about everyone who worried about this before? I don’t want to spend all my time contemplating where I fall on the racial hierarchy (which I’ve already spent a considerable portion of my life doing). However, If I’ve learned anything from the history I’ve just described, I feel that now, I must be more vigilant and look out for my friends and peers more than ever. That man in the baseball cap who refused to believe I could live in a nice neighborhood only reminded me of that.
Lidia Perez is a sophomore at UW-Milwaukee majoring in English.