Sex, COVID-19, and Racism: Part 4
I was a bit of an academic child prodigy.
I could identify words when I was three, and I began reading by age four.
I couldn’t speak clearly, but my parents learned that they could figure out what I was trying to communicate by asking me to spell things. That started around the age of four as well.
For first grade, seen left, my parents had me tested for our town’s gifted and talented program, which I made, and at least through fifth grade, I was one of the highest performers in my school.
The gifted and talented schools of Garland, the Dallas suburb where I grew up, were all placed in lower socioeconomic (read: black and brown) communities. In elementary school, we were split up into three pods of students—two pods with students in the gifted/talented program, and one pod with students who lived in the neighborhood (read: black and brown).
There were White kids and Asian kids and Black kids in the gifted and talented classes.
The kids that looked like me were in the other class. The regular class.
I’m ethnic Hispanic.
(I’m actually ethnic Basque, which is its own confusing story that I’ll write about in a separate blog post.)
In the recent weeks, our national discourse has highlighted the growing economic, health, and social inequalities between White and Black communities, something we’ll discuss more on this blog in the coming weeks.
The city of Dallas has done significant damage to African American communities—Dallas Magazine wrote a brilliant piece recently about the role of the KKK in the early 1920s. Today, the discrimination toward African Americans in Dallas seems to hit southern and eastern Dallas suburbs—Lancaster, Cedar Hill, South Oak Cliff. The murder of Botham Jean two summers ago happened in Dallas.
And don’t get me wrong, Garland has its issues with racism toward Black folks as well. The poorest performing high school in Garland in the early 2000s, Lakeview, also had the largest percentage of Black students. However, only 14% of Garland residents are African American; 43% of residents are Hispanic.
The discrimination toward Hispanic folks in Garland (and everywhere else in Texas) is equally as terrifying. SB4, gives police officers, city council members, and other local governing bodies the expectation that they will assist in reporting immigrants without legal papers to federal authorities, in the name of “public safety”. Police officers can ask Latinos about their nationality if said officer has “probable cause” to believe the person in question committed a crime. African Americans can speak to the process of racial profiling all too well—however, in the case of Latinos in Texas, officials who disrupt this process can get fined and lose their job for not cooperating with federal immigration.
The “build the wall” tropes from the current presidential administration are nothing new; Hispanic bodies were targeted in Texas long before ICE became our country’s attempt to replicate the Gestapo. I remember hearing comments from White folks in my church and other social settings complaining that Hispanic folks weren’t learning English quick enough. The folks who looked like me were told that their role in society was to clean up the spaces of White people, to frontline their addictions to fast food and cheap entertainment, to serve as a systemic “help”.
Latinos were the kids to watch out for in dangerous alleys. Latinos were the kids who got expelled. Latinos were the kids who were responsible for all of the drugs.
As my identity entrenched around being the smart kid, the high performer, the most morally righteous (more of a late middle-school/high school phase for me), I did whatever I could to distance myself from the Latino kids—my ethnicity.
I had some built-in help.
For starters, my last name is Gibson. I was adopted at seven months by a White family.
There were times when I’d let my ethnic identity out, but really only when it suited me. My birthday, for instance, is Cinco de Mayo, so I’d allow myself to be Latino that day and celebrate with my lifelong favorite genre of food: Mexican food.
But my entire childhood was about convincing other people that I belonged in a community that wasn’t designed for people who looked like me. My entire community was White. My friends. My teachers. (My first teacher of color was my sophomore year in college.) My church. The few neighborhood kids that I played with. Everyone that I’ve ever dated.
COVID-19 and racism intersect for me because my entire life, I’ve been wearing a mask. A white one.
Please don’t interpret the next part of the entry as discouraging folks to wear masks during COVID-19. It seems that the most effective way of limiting the spread of the virus is to wear masks. The next part is wrestling with some of the paradoxes of mask wearing.
Schrodinger’s Effect, the process where everyone has to present as if they have COVID-19 in the name of public health, regardless of whether they have it or not, serves me well when it comes to race:
The mask of whiteness that I’m wearing communicates to others that I am safe. That I’m well-spoken and smart and have the potential to be an incredible leader. That, despite my darker complexion, I’m not a terrorist, or a murderer, or a threat to your daughters and girlfriends.
The problem is, the longer that you wear a mask, as we learn in Spiderman 3, the more the mask becomes a part of you, and the harder it becomes to take off.
The goal of any institution in power is to stay in power. White folks have stayed in power in our country through a variety of ways—violence and physical subjugation, weaponization of victimhood, conniving political moves, silencing and avoiding conversations from folks who are different.
While I’ve done whatever I can to not be violent and physically oppressive, I did learn to be quite avoidant and politically deft, able to prevent others from really getting me to own what I think. I worked my butt off professionally to maintain the social status that my Masters degree told me was my right. I maintained the markers that symbolized my status; a ten-year marriage, leadership positions in the church, a growing number of professional accomplishments and certifications.
However, the mask of whiteness ultimately meant that I lost myself in a sea of fear and an endless pressure to meet (what I perceived were) the expectations of the other people and systems.
My participation in church leadership was performative. I was the worship leader in my 30s because I felt obligated to be (read: my own anxiety), not because I was invested in practices of spiritual disciplines and community building within the church. While my firing from my church was a case study in how not to handle vision and ministerial restructuring, the secret that I was holding was that I didn’t believe in 90% of what was espousing from the pulpit. I was doing harm to myself and my church.
My ex-wife and I separated at the beginning of last year, and the more distance I gained from that relationship, the more I recognized that for the majority of my marriage, I sacrificed my voice in this weird conglomeration of rigid masculinity, avoidance, and trying to be the nice guy, and routinely got taken advantage of as a result of it.
When the mask got stripped away, when the social structures and friendships that supported me for years began to dissipate, when I began to actively challenge some of the messages that had formed and protected me for my entire life…that’s when I found myself.
Racism is ultimately about the fear of differences, and the ensuing abusive practices that promote conformity and punish those who strive from it. Moving away from the mask of Whiteness meant giving myself permission to be different, and celebrating the outcome, despite the grief and loss that coincides.
Have I taken the mask off entirely? No. Like the mask designed to protect me from COVID-19, I put my mask of Whiteness on whenever I go outside, whenever I do sessions with clients, whenever I want to impress people or crave for others to like me. Craving safety is written into my DNA, regardless of how it impacts the authenticity with myself and others in my life.
But I have gotten to breathe. Much more than that, in fact. I’ve learned a lot about myself in the last two years. I’ve done activities that I like doing, such as rock climbing and kayaking. I’ve begun building a community of people who are on a journey that aligns with my values of asking curious questions, growing through challenging rigid systems, and engaging authentically and compassionately, Julia being chief among them.
It hasn’t been easy. I’ve gotten sick along the way. I’ve had a handful of panic attacks. I’ve lost relationships.