i feel that the reason why, in a world where white supremacy is running rampant, white/white-passing/light skinned Latinx folks get upset about being called “white” because it directly aligns them with “The Bad Guy”, i.e. white supremacy

but in doing so, we’re also denying the fact that we benefit from our proximity to whiteness.

in order to fight against anti-Blackness (both IN and OUT of the Latinx community), it’s crucial for white Latinx folks to face their complicity and participation in white supremacy

being white and Latinx is uncomfortable because it can feel like you’re being excluded from your community, but i think the bigger issues is folks don’t want to be associated with The Bad Guy —

with the idea that somewhere, at sometime, our lineage intersected with colonization, genocide, enslavement and exploitation of BIPOCs

our relationships to our communities are important and complex, but denying these histories and how we benefit from them hurts the most vulnerable people in our community

my own relationship to my Latinx identity is complicated — all of my grandparents are immigrants, and while i have cuban and mexican grandparents, i also have colonizer grandparents.

we can also experience discrimination

i have the added complication of being trans and consequently rejected by a large part of my Latinx family because of it.

i experience homopbohia and transphobia, but that's not the same as racial discrimination

i also have a name i was not born with. looking the way i do and having the name Aiden Thomas means i reap benefits of white supremacy.

this isn’t to say white Latinx folks don’t experience racism — sometimes we’re read as Latinx which can lead to discrimination, or more contextual things like our nationality on paper

i’m not uniformly read as white, that changes based on where I am, who i’m with, what i’m wearing, and even the time of year. but that still doesn’t change the fact i benefit from racial privilege

racial privilege has to be acknowledged in ourselves in order to work against racial injustices. this isn’t to say we don’t experience other types injustices, but transphobia and homophobia doesn’t negate the fact that i have racial privilege

racism/colorism is rampant in the Latinx community. if we deny our proximity to whiteness and how we benefit from it, we are contributing to the problem.

instead of denying our whiteness, its our responsibility to dismantle and act against white supremacy as folks who benefit from it.

we should be using our whiteness — our voices, faces, names — to speak out and speak up against injustices and racism. and doing that is an ongoing process of listening, educating and acting.

this is something I’m still working on and will ALWAYS be working on. instead of rejecting our whiteness, we need step back, listen and understand what that means.

i want to do better, myself, and i’m committed to it. anti-racism is, and should be, a lifetime of unlearning

it's uncomfortable to acknowledge and sit with, but we need to.

that’s why it’s important to actively work on bettering ourselves and serving our communities. that’s why reading books like STAMPED, and not just snapping pics of it on our shelves for ig, is important.

this whole thing feels INCREDIBLY ineloquent but did my best