Episode 13: Outward Identity and Real Happiness

Synopsis

Coincident to the start of Black History Month, today I want to focus on the need to be specific about our identity premise, how it relates to happiness, and how accessing our personal power and remaining in integrity actually require that.

Show Notes

In November I came across a video on Instagram by a creator, writer, and activist as I see her named Priscila Garcia Jacquier.  I felt like it changed my life when I watched it.  It’s a 6 minute video of her speaking to her community, and addressing a specific way that we can avoid being specific about our identities, and why it matters.  

Priscila’s instagram is for everyone, and she also speaks frequently to the Latina/Latino community about things like race.  Though I’m not Latina by any means, this particular video which was published Oct 19, 2020 rocked my world, and I think will do the same for you today.

I want to share what I heard with full credit and major acknowledgement to Priscila, and how I interpreted it for me; I’ll walk through where I am with this, and how I’m using this information going forward.  I think it speaks for itself, but especially if you are white like me (among other identifiers), I will also speak to how I found it related to us as white-skinned people, and what I believe it has to do Happiness with a big H.  In general and at large.  

A little context.  

I’m not going to educate today on some of the statistics about the correlation and causation between race and safety, race and incarceration rates, race and police brutality, race and access to resources, race and generational wealth, and on and on and on.  I am initiating this conversation from the premise that we have a common awareness of at least some of these facts, and that it is really vital to the evolution of our society that we openly address and resolve these issues however possible - not someday, but with expediency.  

If you’re interested but less educated than you’d like to be, start by listening to the direct experience of black lives, and doing the labor of educating yourself in manageable and sustainable ways.  If it’s not uncomfortable, you’re not doing it right.  

So what is this video I speak of?  Because we have a shared understanding that anti-blackness is a thing, white supremacy is still alive and well, racism is structural not just personal like a bias, privilege is something that we all have in certain ways - but some more than others, and that being of light skin has more associated privileges isolated as a characteristic than being black in America, you might understand the conversation Priscila was generous enough to share with the world through her Instagram:

A question she gets more than almost any other:

Latinx person asks her how to identify:  am I white, or white passing?

Now if you look even skin deep into Priscila’s content, you will soon see that she’s careful to point out that she is not an expert on this topic, but she has deep lived wisdom to share with us.  I believe if you listen all the way through you’ll find a lot of value in this episode regardless of the color of your skin.

Priscila breaks down right out of the gate:

If we continue to center whiteness in our identity premises, we will help perpetuate the problem.  What does this mean?

What I understand her to say, which I can also take responsibility for and relate to - is that sometimes when we see a part of our socio-, economic-, or ethnic-group doing something horrible --- I’ll use wealth as an example that I think it highly relatable --- the reflex is to say, “But I’m not one of THOSE rich people.”

As soon as we hear it in another light, it’s a tale as old as time.  

As the oldest sister among 5 little girls, when I was old enough to be the “big girl” and be treated a little more according to my age and peer group, if a couple little sisters were being rowdy in a public place, I might flush red, clam up, and hope to goodness that the people around me could distinguish me from the group of children, which were my siblings.  Embarrassment.  Shame.  A desire to separate myself.

But the problem is the context:  

When having a white body means you’re statistically more likely to survive being pulled over for a traffic violation, or more likely to get the loan for your house, than a person with dark skin in this country when every other characteristic about the two of you is the same, it’s important to HOLD the power of that privilege.  

Priscila also guides the viewer to center black life in your identity premise.  “Center blackness.  Always center blackness.” 

She told a story which I found very powerful from her first person viewpoint, and you must know to understand it that she is a rather light skinned French Columbian American immigrant:

That if she’s in the car, with a black friend, and they get pulled over by a police officer, until he reads her last name on her drivers license, she is white.

She says, in that moment I am not passing for white.  I am white.  And it behooves us both that I know that.  So this is where people really start to misunderstand.  And they’re like, pero p.

You just want me to be happy checking a white box and calling it a day.  You probably grew up rich so you don’t know what you’re talking about because you’re erasing my ancestry and [fill in the blank - my poverty, where I grew up, all the trauma I experienced, the fact that I was bullied, that my parents abandoned me, whatever other challenges you’ve experienced], and you’re perpeturaing supremacy.

But this is a skin color experience.

We live in a society where black people are killed SOLELY for being black. 

The black of their skin.  That’s not up for debate here.  And so it’s a privilege that I think I get to build whatever narrative I want about my own white skin.

I don’t want you to just check a white box and be happy with it.  I want you to get HYPER SPECIFIC about your identity premise and to remain extremely and brutally honest about your actual lived experience. 

Identiies are like tools.  It’s not a fun project that we embark on as white people to make ourselves feel better.  Look, I’m a white, settler, French Columbia American immigrant cisgender woman with indigenous ancestry, who grew up upper middle class but is no longer.  That’s what, like 20 words?

20 words that honor my ancestry, my past my history, and most importantly tell me exactly how I need to move through my life responsibly.

In those 20 words, I know who I have displaced, who I have colonized, where my areas of oppression might be, and what privileges I hold,  my id is my biggest tool.  Its clarity informs my actions.  And actions are really what I’m talking about here.

If clear ID premise inform actions, imagine, just think for a moment, what kind of actions are dictated by something as ambiguous as white passing?  White passing is not an identify.  White passing is a commitment to ambiguity.  It tells me nothing about who you are, where you come from what you stand for, and what you are about...  

I want to be very thoughtful about who I’m communicating to right now, and what I’m attempting to communicate.  Because it is an incredibly complex, difficult, and many times painful experience to be of mixed race and/or immigrant, which is who Priscila is directly speaking to, and it is an experience I know NOTHING ABOUT.  For that reason, I do not have permission to speak to or even about it.  I believe it’s my place in this situation to LISTEN.

What I’m culling from her words is another cross section of the gift that she gives us.  One that is universally relatable.  And I do so with the greatest respect.

Everyone has a path.  Everyone has trauma.  Everyone has pain.  That fact does not make yours insignificant.  It does not diminish your struggle to honor another’s.

There are realities happening which invite us to BOTH acknowledge our own suffering, our own oppressing, our own pain, AND the systemic pain which is keeping many down - 

Something else I took from Priscila’s content:

When we don’t know who we are, we are divorced from our power.

When people with a certain identity characteristic - let’s take wealth again for instance - benefit from a system which subjugates, harms, oppresses, even kills others who do not have that identifier, it’s individual chosen abuse upon systemic abuse to ask others to look beyond the differences.  

By contrast, when we understand our entire identity premise just as Priscilla said - and do so with excruciating specificity and commitment to accuracy and honesty, we can claim the ways we are oppressed and need support, and can also more easily forgive ourselves for the ways we’ve held ourselves to the standards of a person who was more advantaged or in other ways advantaged.  And we can also own the ways we benefit and take responsibility for the ways we benefit from systems that indiscriminately always favor one group over another - dependent on the system and circumstance.

The image I get, is that being specific about our identity can show us the prisons we are locked inside, as well as the keyring we have on our belt which open other people’s cell doors.  

This is what it means to be in our personal power.  This is also what is required to be happy.

For far too long, I was seeing a smaller pattern, while this bigger pattern seemed obscure to me.  

I could see people ridden with guilt about the privilege they hold, and I was so convinced that non-judgment was the key to freedom in that scenario.  

Non-judgment, and acceptance is only one bookend.  

Compassion literally means to feel the suffering of another, with them.

How do YOU feel the suffering created by systems of oppression?  It cannot simply be by accepting yourself - it involves being emboldened to action by the passion you feel when you connect with the pain and tribulations of others - without centering yourself.  Taking responsibility for where you have contributed to their suffering, and picking up a shovel or a hammer, to create a different world for them, and for you.

Happiness where there is not justice is a lie.  

Your happiness, my happiness, depends upon freeing others - whether you knew it or not - and upon your actions being in integrity, or in congruence with your values.  

Said another way, your actions show you what your values are.  Do you like the progress report you are receiving?  

These are important, and big topics, but they are also very very close, near, and dear topics to each of us as individuals.  

What does this conversation bring up for you?

What connections do you make when identity is unpacked and explained like this?

I wanted to focus today’s show this way because I think that all too often we see the outer problems as separate from the inner ones.  And there is an intersectionality here that is extremely important to acknowledge.  

I stand with black lives, and hope that you will contact me through the website if this episode made a difference for you.

Episode inspired by and including heavy quoting of Priscila Garcia Jacquier 

IG:  https://www.instagram.com/priscilagarciajacquier/

Home site:  https://www.priscilagarciajacquier.com/

YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfT-YAiVd7gps3Ts1rzKLsA

The specific episode that I reference:  https://www.instagram.com/tv/CGiP7tMj3m-/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link 

Another article I really enjoyed recently:  written by Divya Kumar

https://www.embracerace.org/resources/dear-brown-girl-proximity-to-whiteness-does-not-make-you-white