My pale skin

My dark hair and eyebrows

Reflected in orange, plastic pill bottles.

Who am I?

I am my mother.

I am her suppressed sadness and her disregarded loneliness.

I am her smile and sweet perfume in the cold air as she came through the front door at night before I ran to her.

I am my father.

I am his love of poetry and black coffee and strong whisky.

I am his anxiety, the pain of his childhood. I carry him with me within my eyes.

They are my blood, my bones,

Hands, ribcage and pounding heart.

My pain. My greatest inspiration.  

But I am not them.

In the introduction to his essay ‘Dangerous Boarder Crossings’ Guillermo Gomez-Pena makes reference to a metaphorical ‘needle’ that goes through a persons heart and creates the ‘biggest wound of all –the one produced by not entirely belonging anywhere.’ This exploration of the concept of identity struck me on an incredible personal level as my own ‘identity’ has portrayed itself to me as a murky, clouded concept as I was born in London, England and grew up with a British accent, yet England was never, and remains to not be home to either of my parents. My mother is from Ireland and my father was raised in New York. She is Catholic, he is Jewish. As I begin to grow into my adult body I find myself drifting from place to place without a real concept of my own culture, my own religion or my own home as I have no real concept of belonging.

            That is a concept of Gomez-Pena’s essay that I can relate to, however, as a white person living in a first world country I do not know, nor completely understand the depth of experience of my friends and family (particularly those of colour) who have immigrated to this country. Although I myself immigrated to this country from England, my race gives me the privilege to exist more in the realm of Peggy McIntosh’s exploration of white privilege.

‘1492 performances in which I’ve cut my hair and sliced my wrists’ -Gomez-Pena writes- ‘to accommodate your whims.’ When I came to this country I did not need to modify myself in order to be accepted into American culture, I did not have to leave behind my own culture in order to survive. I found his description of his experience at airport security to be striking, as he described being informed that he had an ‘archetypal suspicious look; a cross between a boarder bandit and a generic Latino outlaw’. This is where I open my own ‘white privilege backpack’ and take out my ability to pass through airport security, or go to the bank or the grocery store without concern for the loss of my freedom. And of course as anticipated by McIntosh, I wish to understand how to use my privilege in order to aid my friends and family who carry around a very different 'backpack' to my own.

It was incredibly fascinating reading the voices of these two writers next to each other they both seemed to compliment the other by writing about two incredibly different experiences of racial identity in America. McIntosh writes that whites are taught not to acknowledge their white privilege in the same way that men are taught not to acknowledge their male privilege. She creates an incredibly valid examination of her identity as a white female whereas Gomez-Pena’s writing highlights the other end of the spectrum as a person of color and an immigrant. The two writer's experiences almost completely juxtapose each other and together they exploit the seemingly unresolved racial profiling in our country.

My question moving forward is: how do we find the middle ground of this racial spectrum? Where can these two extremes meet in order for process to be made within our society?