Three Words that White-Latinx/e Need to Say "No" To and Stop Gentrifying

Being a white-Latinx/e doesn’t mean you won’t experience xenophobia

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Have you noticed white-Latine evading their whiteness? Perhaps you’ve heard one of the following statements:

“Pero, like, you don’t know me!”

“You don’t know what I’ve been through!”

“You don’t know my life!”

“I am not white! I am white-passing!” which is interchangeable with “I am not white. I am pale/light-skin.”

“I will not sit here and be told that I am sitting in a position of white privilege!”

Those are some of the super-charged rebuttals I've heard white-Latine make when our racial identity is questioned and challenged. Other retorts are so scathing they slice the skin open and cause scar tissue from the vitriolic words of so-called “white-passing” Latinos. If you look and listen closely, though, you’ll note that the remarks above are steeped in pain and the refusal to reckon with racial privilege because of discriminatory xenophobic experiences.

As a white-Latino, I have a deep understanding of the pain that comes with being “othered.” An Anglo-white man spat on me once. The weight of humiliation that poured over my neck and down my back crushed me. Though I can't prove it, I am positive that vindictive action was rooted in xenophobic hate. However, my most explicit example of othering was when an Anglo-white woman exclaimed, “Joey is not white. He’s Mexican.” I have a plethora of other experiences I can tap into; however, my lifetime of othering has taught me two things of many things: 1. I allowed being othered to obscure my racial identity and white privilege, and 2. I flip-flopped between aligning with whiteness and identifying as “POC” when it was advantageous to do so.

Being othered was painful, and being overtly labeled as white from time to time caused so much internal confusion because I couldn’t hold my nuanced identity beyond binary thinking. When I first grappled with my whiteness back in 2020, I thought, "how can I be white if I am Mexican/Latino?" The fact is you can be white and Latine simultaneously, just like you can be Black and Latine as well. The difference between being white-Latine and Black-Latine is that Black-Latine can't escape anti-Black racism and xenophobia. White-Latine may experience xenophobia; however, our whiteness grants us white privilege, which is rooted in anti-Blackness.

Therefore, there are specific terms and concepts that white-Latine are currently adopting that appear to be oxymorons. Here are three words that white-Latine need to stop gentrifying:

For more on this piece please visit medium.com/@joeypierre