I wish that I wasn't white. Nowadays, I would get so much shit for saying that.
I've thought about it a lot and I feel that it's because as a family, and as Americans, we don't really have any traditions. We have no flavor, no essence, no spices. We're white bread with corporate-made butter on top.
And I have some family traditions, things that are unique to us B folk, but really we don't have that many. It's not that I don't value them, but they're just so . . . flimsy? I'm not quite sure how to describe it.
As a kid, I feel that a lot of it was because all of the non-white people I saw, especially Asians, were no beautiful, graceful, interesting, worldly, cultured — full people. Sure, in movies, especially when I was younger, they were often rendered as stereotypes, but I didn't know that or notice that as a kid.
Non-white women are so beautiful. I am not.
People would say it's because I'm fetishing non-whites because I am a white in the “dominant culture”. Yet it feels like non-whites living in the “dominant culture” who are even doing well economically, professionally, and socially can get away with saying and doing more just because they are not white.
If I say I wish I were non-white, that's because I'm (supposedly) ignoring my privelege and ignoring the hardships of non-white peoples in the Western world and fetishizing oppressed peoples.
But I don't think that it's. I've never liked my appearance. I'm overall good-looking, but not the way I want to be.
I wish that I had the beauty and adventures and rich, varied lives of the non-white women of my childhood films and childish ideations, the gorgeous women I know see in TV and movies and ads in every day life. I wish that my life was different, of course, but I wish I grew up in a culture that didn't raise me to be plain old vanilla toast.
And of course that's subjective. Someone living in, let's say, a small village in Bali is wishing that there life was more interesting and varied.
But through traditions and myths and legends and a lineage that they can probably trace back many generations, they have something that their identities can take root from and then thrive upon, or rebel from.
I am boring. I was a white woman with parents who loved me and a reasonably good life by American standards of the 1990s, excellent standards compared to many others in the world. I've had nothing interesting happen to me, nothing that I can base my identity upon, nothing that I can tie my identity too.
With the current state of politics, I can't try to “adopt” another culture without being alleged to have appropriated it and “put on” whatever ethnicity or nationality I wanted to adopt.
But it's not because I want to be seen as “other” (well, maybe it's a little bit of that), but mainly because I just want somewhere where I belong and can have principles to guide me. But then again, I'm someone who's claustrophobic in terms of being told what to do and where and why and when and how.
Tis a puzzlement, to quote “The King and I.”
But the point is still this: I wish that I were a non-white woman. I wish that I had sensual facial features and long thick hair. I wish that My skin wasn't pale but kind of tan but also ruddy, that it was a nice nut or cappuccino color. I wish that I cared myself with more grace and was from a culture where people encouraged you to always dress to the nines regardless of how much money you had or what level of modesty was expected of you. I wish that I had nice dramatic clothes and jewelry and something interesting happen to me.
That's all for now.
16/02/2019.
Back again. I haven't been sleeping well for around two weeks now. I wake up multiple times in the middle of the night and I can tell that my brain is trying to solve problems in my head, mostly related to my job search. But it also puts me in scary situations and tries to get me out. Needless to say, I'm not enjoying it.