When you're white or white passing, you see that happen to the faces of your racially marginalized friends all the time. But you've probably been conditioned and programmed to ignore it, and they've been conditioned not to let you see the real face to begin with.

White supremacy isn't putting on KKK robes and going to a lynching.

White supremacy is thinking it's a reasonable boundary to tell the little brown kids there's not enough food for them, to their faces, while you feed the little white kids.

And I get it, I really do: it hurts to realize you're part of that. It stings. That's how it felt for me when I was sitting inside with that gringo lunch on my plate knowing that people who'd never let me go hungry weren't allowed in. I felt like a bad person.

And that's the thing. I didn't just FEEL like a bad person. I WAS a bad person. It didn't matter if I meant to be or not. It didn't matter if I was just going with the flow.

It also didn't matter, truly, how I felt about it -- because it wasn't even ABOUT me.

That was just one of thousands of such experiences, you know? And every single one, I had choices, choices someone who was Black or brown did not. And yes, those choices have consequences. I watched my gringo peers make those choices too, some easily, some less so.

And in the long run, very very VERY FEW of those gringo peers would make the choices that meant having to acknowledge that just going with the flow when you didn't mean to be a bad person still made you a bad person.

Nobody wants to look at themselves and see a villain.

So... white supremacy tells you that you aren't. It's that simple. And it's that alluring. And with time and practice you get better at not seeing the harm you're -- WE'RE -- doing, even when we don't mean any harm.

But we have choices. We always have choices.

And when the choices we make are to go along to get along, to turn a blind eye, to go inside and eat the gringo lunch and forget about Martha taking her siblings away in shame, when we say "Can't we just get back to talking about knitting? I don't come here for racial stuff,"

then we are, in fact, white supremacists. We are literally practicing white supremacy.

There are a million structures and systems aimed at making it so we don't make the other choices. It's hard to break out of them. It's all kinds of weird bonus difficulty for women, and...

...that's why it matters so much what we decide, every time we're making these choices.

But I want you to know it's worth it. And it will be more worth it, over generations.

Fuck that gringo lunch.

And here's the good news: the past ~45 years here in Peru have brought a lot of progress and there's definitely hope for the future.

Which means there can be where YOU are, too.

You just have to make the decent choices. And you know what they are. You really do.

I'm fortunate that decades later, Martha agreed to work with me and we do so every day, as chosen family, and we're surviving this pandemonium together and, yeah, usually we make way more food so there's always enough to go around even if there are surprise guests.

One more thing: the number of such incidents Martha encountered are so large as to make any single one insignificant in the larger trend.

It's not that there has to be one incident so shocking that it can't be tolerated and now nobody does and then it's all fixed.

Instead...

...it's all about never being that mom who has enough food for all the white kids but not the brown ones; about being a white kid who rejects the exclusionary lunch; about not learning how to turn a blind eye to the people who don't have the choices you do.

Also, that gringa mom? If she were around to read this she'd probably say she felt personally attacked by this thread and then cry about it so that everyone would have to comfort her and forget she literally refused to feed children in front of her.