Racial Profiling

Even in San Diego, I cannot escape the implicit expectation that I should act or talk like a hispanic. I remember Hershey, PA like it was yesterday. I attended a nearly pure caucasian high school. I thought those days were over when people were telling me how white washed I am. Nope. 

Here I am in a multicultural city with more people stating the same thing. The way I learned to speak is influenced by my environment. I grew up in an educated town with a white family. Not... my... fault. This is how I speak and I am proud to speak proper English. It annoyed me yesterday when this girl told me, "You sound too white." Well, you sound too ghetto. 

First of all, I resent this idea that people speak too white. That implies that anyone with brown skin who speaks properly is automatically tainted by light skin color. "Speaking too white" is stated as if it is an undesirable trait. How long ago was the civil war? I thought we were past this. Apparently, we now implicitly stereotype people's behavior and their speech by their ethnicity. Hundreds of years later with equal rights, women's rights, and blended culture being an active part of our lives now, there still remains an expectation that we should all be influenced by our ancestral roots. 

I realize people are going to think what they want and say stupid things all the time. I cannot change that. "You can only change yourself," says a famous philosopher I do not know. However, the problem here is not that I am unaware of myself. The problem is that people expect me to be different, and sometimes want me to be different. Perhaps, I should be used to this considering my family dynamic growing up. They always wanted me to be something I wasn't, and it isn't any different these days with some people. I don't feel at this point in my life that it is worth fighting ignorance, but that doesn't mean I cannot express my frustration with these kind of comments. It is annoying, not hurtful, rather frustrating to hear. At 26 years old, it has been ten years of hearing these comments from random or not so random people so of course I am going to huff, puff, and roll my eyes. I think I am justified in venting out my frustration with ignorant people. Otherwise, it bottles up and then I blow up on the next person to say that. Blogging about it here releases that negative pent up energy and allows me to ignore it in a healthy way.

On a positive note, it is these experiences that open my mind up to the way people develop. If I hear a white boy sounding black, I never assume he is acting. Just outside of my hometown is the city of Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania where just about half the people you see are black. The white girls that attend the schools with many blacks speak and dress differently from the white girls I went to school with in a small town. I have never once told a white girl that she sounds too black. If her friends are black and her community is black, that doesn't mean she is sounding like a black girl. It means that we are all influenced by the subculture in our environments. What we are exposed to is what we likely become. Education does not mean white, and ghetto does not mean black. Therefore, sounding like a white or black girl are stereotypes. They are unfair claims to the person we are categorizing. The perception that ghetto, hip hop, and ebonics are reserved for blacks, brown colored people probably speak Spanish, and white people are educated and proper are outdated. Turn off the TV and read something informative. 

I am a Brazilian girl who moved here when I was three years old and grew up in a disgustingly wealthy caucasian, small town. Of course, I am going to speak proper English. If you went to school in the United States from kindergarten to twelfth grade like me, you should speak well too. It doesn't matter if you are black, indian, white, asian or hispanic. If I sound too white because I speak and write well, I am not going to apologize for paying attention in class and reading books. Speaking and writing well are valuable skills. I am proud to have them, not sorry for it one bit.