For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts: A Love Letter to Women of Color

by Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez

America was like this abusive girlfriend: she said she was here to provide opportunities across the board, but on the ground and in my life, everything felt harder to accomplish. When I failed at becoming the American Dream, I was blamed for not working hard enough. America never was America to me, because America was never the America she said she was.

When I say that I am Brown, I am referring to a slew of experiences that marked me, kept my head low, made me apologize, convinced me to wear colored contacts—you name it. When I say that I am Brown, I am standing in the pain and disowning it.

White supremacy is global, and whether you acknowledge it or not, it exists. This book will not attempt to convince you of the existence of global white supremacy. It is a given. Pretending it does not exist does nothing but promote white supremacy.

Voluntourism is violent. Voluntourism disguises itself as a good deed to hide that it is an exploitative act of voyeurism. Voluntourists seem to forget history or strategically ignore it. Either way, we cannot reward ignorance, even if it comes dressed in the semblance of goodness.

If white people are truly looking to permanently free people, to permanently help people, then only real and tangible actions toward liberation can be effective. The path forward requires society to stop rewarding these voluntourists with scholarships, likes on social media, and admiration for their supposed life-changing experiences.

White women can have long, dark, straight hair and still be considered desirable. If it is on the face and body of an undesirable other, a BIPOC—in those cases long, dark, straight hair becomes undesirable. Colorism dictates that some things are not inherently bad unless they are attached to darker bodies.

There is this fixation today with being more than just white. As if waves of European immigrants who were reviled as nonwhite—the Irish, the Italians, the Polish—hadn’t yearned over generations to become just white. As if their ancestors did not work tirelessly to contribute to the national identity of whiteness by erasing their cultures and differences.

Racial impostor syndrome comes from fears that you will be discovered as a fraud. But the racial dynamics are complex, because you are made to believe that you don’t belong—whether you succeed or fail.

I had been taught, and had believed in, things like perfectionism and meritocracy—teachings that made me believe there was only one right way to do things, and that hard work paid off.

My impostor syndrome came from internalizing white-supremacist models of meritocracy and perfectionism.

Ooooof. I felt this in my bones.

Racism and classism are why it is easy to accept some children and easy to overlook others. Gatekeeping taught these adults which traits were indicative of success, and they perpetuated them onto us.

Resegregating schools between AP students and regular students was a way to separate by class and race. This system benefits white, wealthy parents because their kids are isolated in a bubble of privilege, and it benefits schools because they get more funding.

Remember that there are systems in place that stay in place because we are so busy doubting ourselves. Remember that we need to make demands and take back our humanity.

“You’re taking things too seriously.” “It’s not always about race.” “Not all white people…” “Not my experience…” “I have a Latina friend.” “Are you sure that is what happened?” This is white peoples’ coded language for: “You’re being too aggressive,” or “You’re being too Brown,” or “You’re making me uncomfortable about my racism.” Instead of addressing their own issues, they will vilify you.

Some of us switch to survive in white spaces, and some even attempt to thrive in the depths of that switched persona.

When I accepted their preferred version of me, I felt like I was in a constant state of bodily displacement. It was always a show, a performance for them. I felt like a clown.

Being a woman of color, a Brown Latina, means that when I am around white people, they tend to just default to seeing me as a stereotype: the fiery Latina.

Survival often depends on understanding how we are seen by white people and then adjusting the parts that they misunderstand as scary and aggressive. To that, I call bullshit.

But you see, this entire side of the world belonged to our ancestors before yours even arrived, so although we can speak your forced languages, we will speak them however we please. You’re on stolen land anyway.

As a society we revere daddy’s girls. Daddy’s girls are the cherished girls of society, in the opposite way that mama’s boys are ridiculed. Those extreme reactions are both products of toxic masculinity. Within heteronormativity, to align yourself with your male parental figure as a girl is a gift, and to align yourself with the female parental figure as a boy is a weakness.

I realize now that white fragility means that it is not just that white people’s feelings must constantly be considered (when our feelings never are). In order to avoid a white person’s meltdown and cries of victimization, the only solution is to accommodate their entitlement to always be centered.

I patiently explained to her the situation, and in so many words she told me that I was being homophobic—this white student was also queer. And because she was queer, she felt that her whiteness was invisible, or should have been. She leaned into her queerness and said nothing of her whiteness. I did not continue the conversation with her, because talking to white people about entitlement and how much space they take up is hard, but talking to a queer white person is harder. She thought her whiteness was canceled out by her queerness. Somehow she couldn’t be an oppressor, because queer people were oppressed.

What happened over the next few days is where white fragility thrives. When white people get called racist because they are being racist, they figure out a way to shift the blame. This is peak white fragility, to be so fragile that they forget the actual harm they caused and focus on their own hurt feelings. No attention is paid to address my pain or heal the relationship. White fragility means that someway and somehow you, the BIPOC, are the aggressor and the insensitive one.