Off-White Privilege
This story is going to offend you. I’ll tell you that right off the bat. Skin colour is not something you can choose at birth and altering it is a painful and costly process. I was born with Caucasian or white coloured skin to two biological parents with the same predetermined pigmentation. I have medium hair that is brown and round brown eyes. I have average looks an average weight. The only distinctive features on my body art tattoos and a thick hideous scar stretching diagonally across my left eyebrow and forehead. This deformation has been a part of me since I was two years old period the other scars are bigger and uglier, but you cannot see them under my hair. I shaved my head once when I was 14 just to see how people would react, it was not pleasant. This lesson taught me that as long as I keep my ugliness hidden, nobody would see me as different. But I am different. There is something in my genetic code that separates me from over 98% of the world’s population. It is something that cannot be changed by surgery or physically perceptive by anyone, ever. I am talking about my race. I was born a hybrid product of two nearly forgotten indigenous nomadic tribes from the Eurasian continent. The mirror tells me that I’m white my passport tells me I’m Caucasian and my genetics choose to ignore the question entirely. My birthplace was somewhere in the former USSR, it is unclear at exactly which location or time I was born at because my parents were military researchers and I have never seen any legitimate documents supporting my legal identity. The only thing I’m sure about of myself is my race. This is due mainly to a meticulous and well kept archive of family history kept by my mother’s relatives, passed on from generation to generation of the Last of Us. You see, the perestroika and Bolsheviks exterminated almost my entire clan and the gulags or the war claimed the rest period the survivors were forced to flee oppression under false names and passports. Whole villages were left to decay. This is my village, located a 14 hour drive from the nearest inhabited area, absent from any map, niever mentioned in any newspaper. Once alive with the science and smells of hardworking simple folk of the mountains, this little hamlet lies rotting and forgotten somewhere on the edge of the world. We immigrated to Canada in 1998 under questionable documents and settled in Toronto. I went to public school, learned English and even made some friends. Fitting in was easier because I am white. The deeply concerning truth is that I feel that my skin colour really did offer me more privilege in society than others, and I accepted it. Being an invisible minority protected me from blatant outright racism and discrimination. I grew up fully aware of my race and heartbreaking heritage, and it was only when I got married that I started to realize how deeply racism discrimination based on skin colour is embedded even in modern progressive society. My husband is half Belgian and half African tall and handsome, always smiling. It was thanks to him that my eyes open to reality. She told me stomach churning stories about his experiences and open up a world of truth for me. After long deliberation we decided that ending racism does not start with T shirts or armed riots. It starts with our mixed race, curly haired, green eyed children inviting everyone to their birthday parties.