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Yeah, thank you! I am so sick of people (I thought this was just confined to the Midwest) thinking the George Lopez look is the default setting for Hispanic features. I hope and pray the little girl is found as well. I hate to hear about children who have been forcibly taken.
For years I have actively avoided discussing race/family with people I don't know well, though people frequently inqure about my background. Responses such as"but you don't look Mexican" or "but you don't speak spanish!" or "totally doesn't count because you don't live with your dad and his family and aren't part of the culture" piss me off. Worse are people who accuse me of lying to get out of my responsibility as a white person or slough off my white privilege. This is not my intention, and I fully except the privileges I am conveyed by "reading" as white in many circumstances.
For a long time I thought that it was my job to educate people about the different racial and ethnic groups that live in Latin America/the Carribean, but I'm just tired of it. I'm tired of being accused of ugly things, and tired of having to explain myself and feel awkward. I'm tired of defending my right to say that I am hispanic or part hispanic without being called a liar, racist, or cultural appropriator. Sometimes I want to talk about my dad, he was a cool guy who died young and whose absence had a huge impact on my life. But now I avoid the subject. Worse then being accused of racism/cultural appropriation/white guilt sloughing are the people who ask me (when I say that my father is deceased) if he was a drug dealer, or in if he did coke (a primary export of his home country). Its racist, its rude, and its insensitive to the fact that I'm opening up about a close death. They never asked me if he liked coffee, which is something that his country exports a large quantity of.
There are a lot of places around the world where people have beige-olive skin, brown-black hair and brown-black eyes. I've faced overt racism from people who assume that I'm Native American, Middle Eastern, or Jewish. I don't get questions about my immigration status or whether or not my family speaks Spanish at home, but have had some awkward encounters at the airport, and was once chased several blocks by a drunk anti-semite who wanted to know why my bank stole his money. I was 14.
Jeez, sorry I wrote you a novel. My status as someone of indeterminate hispanic-ness is something I've been wrestling with recently, both because of the roll of perception of race in who gets privilege (how people see you matters more then who you really are in terms of privilege), and an increased awareness of who gets to talk about their heritage and how. Like, nobody questions my boyfriend's authenticity or motives when he talks about being Norwegian, and nobody calls people out when they say that they are Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, French, German, Dutch, Belgian, Polish, Ukranian...and and and and and. People with little or no connection to their one or two token Irish ancestors from the famine get super into their national identity, but get weirded out when I talk about South America. I'm trying to find a way to bring this up constrictively, but haven't quite figured out how.