Wannabe White Girl, Pt 1

“You’re pretty much white to me.”

When my friend Carolynn* said this to me while applying her mascara, I thought to myself, Yes! Finally! I made it! I’m considered white! But the next thought: why doesn’t it feel right? Why is my stomach in knots?

It was Spring 1993 and I was wrapping up my sophomore year at a small, mostly white, conservative liberal arts college located in the Northeast. It was a Saturday night and we were at the sorority house (Just admitting that I was in a sorority makes me cringe even now, despite the fact that this specific one called itself a women’s fraternity, which is a topic for another conversation.), getting ready to head out to some frat parties. 

Now, this small college was heavy on Greek life. Most members of the fraternities and sororities were white. Which makes sense since 90% of the student population was white. If you weren’t part of Greek life, you had no social life to speak of. So, as student of color, what in the heck would I do on the weekends? I couldn’t imagine what it might have been like if I wasn’t in a sorority.

In my immature and naïve mind, there were two categories of students of color on campus: the Black students and the international students. 

I wanted to hang with the Black students but because I wasn’t Black, I thought I couldn’t. I felt that I didn’t belong there, even though I felt pulled to be with them. They always looked like they were having so much fun and doing important, meaningful work in their community space in the student center. I was so sure their social lives were full of dance parties that were much more fun that the ones I went to at the frat houses. But also? What would my immigrant Filipino parents think about me hanging out with Black people?

The international students? I wanted nothing to do with them. Most of them were from Asia (namely China) and they embodied every stereotype I refused to be: science, math, and computer science nerds who got excited about video games and coding. (This, during the days when the internet was still a baby, when email was relatively new, and online chatting happened on something called IRC: internet relay chat.) I felt repulsed by them. (As I write this, the adult me feels embarrassed admitting this, but it speaks to the level of racial self-hate I had.)

That left me with the other 90% of the student population: the white folks.

“You’re pretty much white to me.”

Carolynn and I started to walk over to Chi Phi with some of the other girls from the house. Everyone buzzing with a little pre-party alcohol, chittering away about some boy or another, fussing with their hair. I just crossed my arms, bracing against the chilly spring air, wishing I had brought my coat.

“The brothers are making the pledges do something special for us tonight,” someone said.

I didn’t care. I was still thinking about what Carolynn said.

“You’re pretty much white to me.”

Not only did I join a sorority, I also rowed crew. (Whitest sport ever!) Well, just for one semester. Then I hopped into the coxswain’s seat and captained a boat (which, incidentally, was made up of 3 Asian guys and 1 white guy, in which we named ourselves The Asian Sensation… and Dave. Haha!). I dated a white guy. I wore Birkenstocks and tie dyes with flannel shirts tied around my waist. I listened to grunge; Nirvana and Pearl Jam were my favorites. If you looked at my mix tapes (yes, I made mix tapes despite the fact that they were starting to fade out in favor of burned CDs and the birth of Napster), you’d see songs like “Brown-Eyed Girl” and “Come on, Eileen” and the soundtrack to Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs”. I loved the Indigo Girls. And Tori Amos articulated the stirrings of my heart for which I had no words. I swore my allegiance to Irish literature (my dad would joke that our last name was O’Brien because no one could ever pronounce it correctly. “Hobayan” sounds like “O’Brien”… which, coincidentally –or not—was the name of aforementioned white guy, Brian, who, incidentally, was Irish. Talk about manifesting the reality that you believe in! Good Lord!). And yeah, Yeats was my man.

God, could I get any whiter??

And yet.

There were still small insistences of my non-white identity. En Vogue and Janet and Salt N Pepa made it onto some mix tapes. My Doc Martens showed up in class every once in a while. And that ONE lit class, Black Writers, taught by the amazing Bryan Washington, shifted things for me just a bit. A tilt off-kilter from my white track. Predictably, there were a TON of Black students in that class. And I felt cool. 

To be in their presence? So cool.

Isn’t that weird?

“You’re pretty much white to me.”

When Carolynn said this to me, it was the beginning of me falling wholly into whiteness. Or at least wannabe whiteness.

It didn’t feel good in my body. 

And yet… 

This is what I wanted, right? This is what I’ve worked so hard to accomplish. I didn’t learn until much later in life that this statement was an erasure of me, of who I was and still am: a brown girl with immigrant parents.

It was from that moment on that everything I did was in service to uphold this imagined status of whiteness. We create our identities based on what we see outside of ourselves. The external world reflects back to us what we want to see. All I saw was whiteness. I was surrounded by it. And so, I thought I was white. Even though, deep inside, I knew this was a lie. And that I was harming myself in the process.

The following year, an international student showed up on campus. Metta. She was from the Philippines. You’d think this was a good thing.

When I first met her, I thought, Cool! Someone who I can relate to. But then it became quickly clear that she was very much different from me. She was a FOB (fresh off the boat) who didn’t fully understand the American ways and I found her embarrassing. Growing up, I learned (from my parents, family friends – Filipinos themselves!) that FOBs were embarrassments, people to be made fun of. Never mind that my own parents were FOBs. The logic was that they’ve been here long enough to know how to act “right”. 

So, I found myself creating distance from her.

And dove deeper into my quest for maintaining my perceived white status. A quest that began in seventh grade when my family moved from a Filipino neighborhood to a predominantly white town.

And yet…

During the independent studies I engaged with my beloved mentor, Lee Upton, I wrote poems about my Filipino identity. I wrote about my childhood. About the time my uncle tried to make my nose look more narrow, less flat and wide. About my favorite foods my lola would make for me. I still held on to my Filipino self. Just in private. Between me and Lee.

It wasn’t until much later, in 2000, that the pursuit of this lie began to unravel when a writer of color kicked me off the cliff into political consciousness. But that’s another story.

“You’re pretty much white to me.”

Oh, the insidiousness of white supremacy. How stealthy. How invisibly traumatic.

(*Not her real name)