Disentangling Myself from White Supremacy as a Half White, Afro-Brazilian Girl By Celina E

I am half white and half Afro-Brazilian. Being mixed-race, I’ve always felt an outsized pressure to prove that I am a ‘natural member’ of whatever setting I’m part of. As a kid it would sort itself in the public eye, depending on which parent I was in the presence of. With my mother, I would typically be grouped with whichever group of color predominated the setting (which in LA tends to be Mexican or some other Central American ethnicity, but sometimes it is Black), and with my father, I traversed the spectrum to become a really tan, beachy white kid. Being mostly alone these days, I often truly have no idea how I come off, or “what” I come off as. When I’m in the presence of others, there is always a part of my brain that is diverted towards examining their perceptions of me. And when I’m by myself, that same part of my brain continues to pick apart my identity in reference to the world of symbols that sustain in my mind. I study sociology, and in that realm of thought, this impression of the world that lives in your brain is called “the generalized other.” The concept was coined by George Herbert Mead. I think mixed people become acquainted with the generalized other from a very young age. One learns quickly that the world is a place rife with shorthand labels and packaged judgments when one never seems to satisfy any of them. 

Even as I write, I tend to analyze the words that exit from my fingertips. If I fear sounding too white, my mother’s voice might enter my head as if on cue, reprimanding me for sounding “like an American kid” (in her household, this is an insult). But my Portuguese is half-baked, and there is no Brazilian-American diasporic culture in Los Angeles-- or California for that matter-- to fall back on. So, I’ll often try to ignore my self-consciousness and trudge on. However, when you are part-white, that self-consciousness should not always be ignored. Because, despite being uncomfortable, it can act as a necessary reflection, leading to an understanding of your own entrenched white supremacy. I feel like it does not get said enough that those of us who are only mixed with white can still uphold white supremacy, even when we intend to do the opposite, and often without realizing it’s detriments. What follows is a glimpse into the beginning of my own necessary reflection. 

I went to a small charter elementary school in Altadena, California. My family had just made the third move of my short lifetime, to a nice, modest home in an enclave of North Pasadena, repeatedly pressing snooze on the creeping reminder that we couldn’t quite afford it. My mother had been cleaning houses since arriving in the U.S., and was looking to start her own business in the near future. At school, I seemed to be regarded as one of the white kids, and although I knew there was more to my ethnic identity, I didn’t know how to express or communicate that. So instead, I would make the subconscious choice every day to parade as another blonde-haired, fair-skinned item on the roster list. My last name, “Einem”-- inherited from my paternal lineage-- helped with this. 

Mixed folk are masters of code-switching, and we often have a list of roles appropriate for different circumstances that are more nuanced and particular than we may even be aware of. When I went to school, I called upon that aforementioned ‘really tan, beachy white kid’ that I knew could be. I resigned to the simplicity of becoming her, instead of me, because that seemed to be what people preferred. Except the thing about ‘really tan beachy white kid’ is that her skin baked quicker and deeper beneath the sun and endured longer before reddening, and her blonde tendrils were ripening into a peppered brown, reaching out in subtle waves like the black-and-white sidewalks of Niterói. 

I was also unmistakably a working-class immigrant’s child. My peers were not old enough to notice, but I did. My lunchbox typically contained a leftover sandwich instead of the $5 pizza slice purchased around me with abandon (a steep price considering the year was 2007), and my shoes were payless sneakers instead of the new sketchers. And no, I could not be a girl scout, because my mom didn’t have time for parent involvement, but I would love to meet everyone tomorrow and hear how it went. I would look at my white friends, in all their fair-skinned, resourced grandeur, and see a prototype to which I wanted to aspire. I saw economic prosperity where I saw whiteness, and my young mind, not yet understanding the relationship the former had to the latter, would conflate the two. I held both a contempt for and an envy of whiteness- the former a strange catalyst for the latter. And somewhere deep down, I knew that my being white-passing made this longing actionable. In the presence of whiteness as the status quo, I let the other ingredients of my racial and ethnic identity become muted. At the time, I didn’t realize the way in which discounting my Afro-Brazilian identity also discounted the inherent value of my Black and Brown friends, peers, and loved ones. 

This ache for ethnic and racial intelligibility caused me to wrangle my hair into two braids on either side of my head before I went to sleep, every single night. Running it repeatedly beneath the brush like an over-ironed shirt, I would spend evenings in front of the mirror, tirelessly persuading my buoyant, bushy locks to point downwards, in the direction of the ground, where theirs seemed to go with silken ease. The things I tried so hard to make my body do and conform to seemed so effortless to them. I’d look at my face and try to forget the starkness of my bone structure and the pout of my lips. I’d spray my hair limp with water and imagine a life in which the straightness and length persisted even when it was dry. Like their hair did. And for about 14 years, I consistently obeyed the voice of that elusive subject- “them.” I knew I envied my white peers, but I did not realize that that envy had birthed a destructive subconscious gatekeeper called “them.” I simply believed that beneath the frizz, the withheld smile, and soil-brown eyes, there was a white girl. Plain, simple, pure. 

Then, when I turned 14, I finally got the haircut; by this, I mean a haircut from someone who actually works with multi-textured hair. Immediately, people’s perceptions of me shifted in a way that made clear to me that my mixed-ness was, in fact, intelligible to other people- and not only that, but also worth celebrating. In the years following, I began to welcome the possibility that there were many ways to be and to present myself that did not require me to pretend to be whiter. I stopped brushing my hair and let my curls and waves reach out in their spirals. I started to dress in ways that made me feel comfortable instead of necessarily feminine (Eurocentrism had long caused me to compensate for feeling like I wasn’t womanly enough). 

I no longer look into the faces of my white friends like they are mirrors. Now, when I look at my textured skin, I see the imprints of my ancestors who lived and labored beneath the sun. The same imprints that adorned the dark chocolate complexion of my vovô, Toribio Abreu Dos Santos, as he got up every dawn to tend the family farm well into his nineties. I also see the slant of my Norwegian nose and understand that it has helped to keep me safe at night because a stranger might see a European girl. Every day, the love I give to my African and Iberian features is a small sum of personal reparations that will reflect outwards in the way I treat the communities of color surrounding me; the people that truly make the world go round. I try not to spend my time vying for acceptance from the groups I am a part of, because the truth is that mixed people are only outcasts if we let ourselves believe that we are. We are boundary-crossers who contain multitudes, and we may be marginal members of our ethnic groups, but we are members nonetheless. So as I affirm myself as an Afro-Brazilian, I also make sure never to forget that my whiteness did, does, and will make my life easier and safer in ways I will never fully understand. And as I work to gain an understanding of these things, it is also my duty to fight for the ease, safety, and prosperity of Black lives. It is everyone’s duty. 

For a good deal of my life, I was fed the falsehood that white people were the world’s archetype, and tried to change myself accordingly. Today I realize how terrifying and dangerous that falsehood was, and likely still is; for young Black and Brown girls, white-passing girls, and everyone else. Today, I have the privilege to watch as the skeletal structure of white America begins to buckle above it’s shaking foundation, and perhaps best of all, I get to help my BIPOC friends and white allies knock it over. I am filled with gratitude for Black folks who manage to sustain a kind of supernatural joy, determination, and hope in the face of this unsettling period that, very hopefully, will end in a complete upheaval of the oppressive systems that created white superiority in all of its forms. 

I intend for this piece to be as much a personal reflection on the way in which my psyche has been entangled in white supremacy as it is a catalyst for reflection in other people who are, or have the ability to pass as, white. It is only a fraction of the kind of thinking that I plan to continue for the rest of my life. If you relate to my story in any way, there’s a good chance you have some reflecting to do. So, I urge you to get to writing... Or, I should say, unwriting.