#do you go to usamericans and tell them they're a white country?

[manaosdeuwu]

they come and preach to us about 'argentina is white' 'argentina is racist' and don't look at their own history & present. we know better than anyone about how strong racism is here!! those affected by it live through it every day, you can easily see it in your day to day life and we learn about most of the genocides at school. we have the biggest jewish community in Latin America, a big muslim community, many people of different native tribes, afroargentines, etc. all of this data is easy to find with a quick research. you're not fucking helping by reproducing white supremacists discourse. who do you think benefits from the 'white argentina' idea?

[rockatanskette]

Living in the USAmerican South is sad, but not (only) for the reasons you think. I had a meeting last week with a faculty member at a university with one of the only fully-funded creative writing MFAs in the country. A fully funded Master in Fine Arts program is funded entirely by the university: tuition, living expenses, with a stipend. They pay you to go to school there, in a country that charges upward of $120 grand for a three-year MFA. 600 people a year apply for the fewer than a dozen spots in this program.

When I asked what I could do to make myself stand out, he said, "The fact that you already live here may help." Because when people get accepted to this golden-ticket program, the politics of the South forces them elsewhere. And that breaks my fucking heart.

To be clear, I use the word "forces" incredibly intentionally. I fully understand how hostile Southern legislation and politics is to basically anyone who isn't a wealthy Christian cishet White man. I've lived here almost all my life as a queer Jewish person who can get pregnant—I've experienced a measure of that hostility firsthand.

But I've also experienced love and respect and compassion and community that goes undocumented because it's so damn ordinary. It's everywhere.

I think the community is the part that kills me, because minority groups in the South only get talked about on a national scale when we're the victims of crimes, which does a great disservice to the magnitude and depth of community in the South; the queer communities, the Black communities, the Jewish communities, the Muslim communities, the Latine and Indigenous and Desi and the list keeps on going. These demographics aren't outliers just because White supremacists say they are—they're the fucking fabric of the South. 56 percent of the Black population of the United States lives in the South; almost half the population of the state of Texas is Latine or Hispanic; Southern cities make up half the ten largest US populations of Indian-Americans, Pakistani-Americans, Irani-Americans, and honestly I could keep going. Do I even have to talk about Jews in Florida? I swear half of them go to my babushka's synagogue. Queer populations are historically harder to get a clear census of, but you bet your ass we're here too.

And, many of us are here on purpose, which is the part where I start turning my heartbreak into anger. Because do you know how fucking painful it is when you're venting about the evilest people on the planet making it basically illegal to live in the place you call home and your cousin from Jersey tells you to just move, already? I don't want to move. All my shit is here: my mountains and my swamps and my barbecue and my temple and the first girl I ever kissed and my favorite lesbian bar and my trans best friend and rodeos and biscuits and bourbon and blues and the random Yee Yee boy who followed me out of a bar in the rain at midnight the other night to tell a visibly queer me that I was driving with my trunk open and offered to close it so I didn't have to get out of my car. Which was terrifying until it became incredibly sweet.

Some of the best people I know live in the South. We are so much more and so much stronger than tokens and victims and if you think the South is populated entirely—or even mostly—by conservative White hicks, you're buying into a fascist racist queerphobic lie fueled by gerrymandering and the for-profit prison system. There are plenty of queer and liberal and leftist hicks of color down here, too, and we don't need the rest of the country siding with the Nazis in charge. Tell them to get out.

The faculty member I spoke to is an award-winning writer who has been compared to Langston Hughes, Etheridge Knight, and Gwendolyn Brooks. He grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood in the North, then attended school in New England and the Pacific Northwest. He wasn't born in the South, but he lives here now.

I laughed when he said that living in the South might give me an advantage; partly at the irony, but partly because, "I'm not leaving the South until they make me. I learned that when I tried living in England for a year and spent the whole time wishing the US had free healthcare and trains. I love this place. I want to make it better."

He smiled a smile I've seen echoed in the faces of so many people who live their lives seeing raw beauty in a place dismissed as ugly and unsalvageable. It's tinged with sadness but born of joy.

"Yeah. I know exactly what you mean."

[fandomshatepeopleofcolor]

I'm also learning a lot from your explanations about Latinx and race, I hope you don't mind if I ask question too. When it comes to whether Latinx characters are white, mixed or POC, how can you tell if it's not explicitly stated? There are white passing Latinx so I would imagine that having light skin or light eyes doesn't automatically make them white (PoC can have blue or green eyes AFAIK even if it's lesson common). So if it's explicit that they're Latinx but race isn't stated, then what?

I don’t mind the questions, that’s what the blog is for!! 

I answered similar questions a while ago here and here. You really can’t, but overall you have to take two things into account: 

1. US and Eurocentric media makes it so that latinx = person of color

2. The majority of latinxs are actually people of color.

Meaning that whenever you see a latinx character you always cast them with a latinx actor/model/whatever. Even if it is explicitly stated that they are white latinx, do not make them european/usamerican/canadian/australian/whatever. 

If you’re not sure, assume that they are people of color but white-passing or light skinned. The author, ,if they were not latinx, probably wrote them as people of color anyway, because of this misconception I’ve been talking about.

The other side of the argument, which I used to ascribe to but now changed my mind because *sigh* white people, is that you shouldn’t assume the race of a latinx person because of race dynamics in latin america (which are not universal: they won’t be the same in chile, bolivia, brazil or panamá): slapping a label in someone who doesn’t maybe want it is not right.

Again, the solution to this, to both things, is to always have latinxs be played by latinxs from their own countries. Peruvians played by peruvians, argentinians played by argentinians, colombians played by colombians. If race is specified, better! but if it isn’t, well… go wild, I guess, as long as you do it with other latinxs.

Mod A.