Where Are You Really From... You Sound Like A White Girl...

[Bilal Mahmud المكافح المخلص]

Where are you really from...

 You know, I paid taxes, and I gave back to my community, and I did all of the things that were asked of me. And I still had these experiences, as I mentioned in the book, of eating at a fancy restaurant with my white colleagues, going to the bathroom and, on the way back, a table of white people asking me to bring them water because they thought I was the server. Or one of my very first meetings, meeting a client when I worked at Goldman Sachs and him asking me to bring him coffee because he thought I was the assistant. So there are places in this country and there are people in this country who will always see people like me and think that we belong someplace else, that we are foreign. And that's one of the biggest cases and things that I point to in the book. I was born in Mexico. You know, I do have another home, but there are many Latinos who have never been immigrants to this country. And yet, no matter how many generations we have been here, the question of where are you from..

Full article:  Julissa Arce rejects assimilation in 'You Sound Like a White Girl' ...

[Bilal Mahmud المكافح المخلص]

ARCE: And it also means about, you know, speaking up when in other times I would have just smiled and kept quiet, and in that smile would have been the anxiety running through my body, the fury that was brewing in my heart. There's an example I give in the book of being on a Zoom call during lockdown...

HU: Yeah.

ARCE: ...In what was supposed to be a panel celebrating diverse women. And there were white women on the panel. And one of them made a comment about Michelangelo and Raphael and all of these artists that we know by first name and how Europe was having the Renaissance while America had not even been discovered.

HU: (Laughter).

ARCE: And I sat in my chair thinking, what do I do? I don't want to be that person, you know, who makes it awkward, who makes this uncomfortable because this is a celebration. But then I thought, if I don't speak up, she's going to continue to think that America was waiting to be discovered, as though we needed white people to come save us. And everybody who's in the audience - and there was over 1,000 people logged into the Zoom - is going to come away with that thought. So I spoke up. And by the way, at the end of speaking up, I was shaking. I was shaking, and I was sweating. And I was very uncomfortable because that's not something that I had been used to doing before.

Julissa Arce rejects assimilation in 'You Sound Like a White Girl' ...

[Bilal Mahmud المكافح المخلص]

Having said that, I also think that, you know, we have to recognize all the ways in which, like, Latino culture and Black culture and Asian culture, like, all of these other cultures, like, they are American cultures, too, you know? Like, so my biggest hope is that none of us - you know, none of us get to dictate how other people are American.

Julissa Arce rejects assimilation in 'You Sound Like a White Girl' ...