Nez, I'm diggin every word of this series, every ripple of thought and feeling, every flutter of light across the fluctuating scenery. Keep sending out them beautiful waves, 'mano, and I'll keep riding them.

gracias, mi amigo. para todas, muchas gracias.

So much to read. I have to run through KO's compare and contrast section now. And am anticipating part 7. May I just comment here that plenty of people with low melanin count would feel out of place in a crowd that was mostly white too. Like me for instance.
Also this reminds me of folks who come here to a Spanish speaking country {all colors of folks come here} and always say to me, when the sudden shock of hearing me speak Boricua accented Spanish to residents sets in, "Oh if I could only communicate with the people here like you do, I need to learn Spanish!"
I tell them that they may learn Spanish eventually, but speaking a language is NOT the same as communicating.
I think we mean nuance here, Nez. I like your recent focus on Nuance. I understand that. There is more tied up in nuance than there is in melanin. Just my 2 Cents worth. My solipsistic little worldview.

you know, i also seem to flex naturally toward concepts/words like "more" and "less." but really...melanin, nuance, power, language, communicating...its all woven together, isn't it? out here it is, at least. on this strange orbiting moon called Now, My Life in the USA. nearly indistinguishable for moments... i do agree that "nuance" is an important focus. or at least style of approach. but everything when it is time, its not always time for nuance (jeje, nuance of anti-nuance). lately it comes up because in my process, in so much of this identity thing, that's where i'm at. it's like an editing process, almost. first i latch up on big truths, big ideas, simple theories. after a while, after you soak in what you need to for where you're at, those blocks aren't enough. you need to carve them with your style. you yearn to refine and individualize your thoughts, ideas on really big things. you need to take another pass. look for details that contextualize these ideas in your own life. you know, man. i'm learning as i go. and i'm writing as i learn. that was my intent originally. "if a person is honest with their story, everyone can learn from it, everyone can become better for it" and if we all do this as honestly as we can, we are bound to find that within that nuance, that careful focus, that honesty, we are, too, all woven together. or at least that therein lies our own truth and strength. sometimes that has to come first.

gracias para todas tus palabras.

Just wanted to say that I am a white guy in a brown society. Through the Looking Glass. As a result, in the mirror image, I can see exactly what you are talking about most of the time because I am living the flip side.
My ideas, outlook and commentary are summarily dismissed here where I am since I am the "other" and whatever I have to contribute is suspect, so I now {for the last ten years} have abandoned any expectation that being "invisible" may soon change.
There's about 400,000 words I can add to elaborate the experience. But slowly and surely I can read them here on your great blog, so I will let you be my Cervantes Saavedra of societal identity and I assure you, I am enjoying the adventure. I can empathize.
Who knows where we will end up? Can one really enter the mirror?
I had become profoundly alienated from the US experience by the late sixties and am equally alienated from my little society here, not because of who the US citizens are or who the islanders are, but because I am really very very different.
And having failed to "fit in" in two very different societies I have arrived at the place where I realize that it is OK to be on my own wavelength and it no longer bothers me. But that took over 50 years.

yes...being in-between and of none is hard. i feel you on that. maybe when i am 50 there will be no more pain in that. i have a little while still.

and de acuerdo it is hard to communicate in terms of social context when your social context is not the same as the other person. (to sound ridiculously obvious for a moment!)

thanks for all your words.

In the cotidiana I like to talk about plants. Most people here can communicate well on that level, including me. It's down to earth!

nice pics!

RC,

difference is one thing. difference plus power is another. i meet a lot of whites who go to mexico and explain that they "finally understand what is it to be a mexican in the U.S... no one speaks your language, people make fun of you, you are the outsider" yatta, yatta, yatta. the difference is that if they lock a white american up in a detention facility in mexico, the U.S. finds out and has the power to do something. and, hey, mexico lives under constant threat of the u.s. military and corporations. if the u.s. locks a mexican in a detention facility in the u.s. what happens? big difference. if a u.s tourist kills a mexican it is framed much differently than if a mexican tourist kills a white american. oh, wait, there are no mexican "tourists," that word is reserved only for those that have a certain degree of perceived financial power.

but, i do like what you are saying about whites not being comfortable at the YK as well. I think that whites who wake up to white supremacy can be very uncomfortable around whites who have not. (I think some of Prof.Cero's posts explain this phenomenon well) also, since people can never be 'white enough' a lot of whites feel the pressure to strive toward whiteness as well. Maybe this is why a lot of the good white racial theorist are white jews? they know what it is like not to be fully included in whiteness and feel out of place at white functions since white became almost synonymous white Christian/Catholic/Aryan features. Nez, I am curious what you think about this since your "other half" is white Jewish.

sure, luisa. what i think about what? sorry, you mentioned a few things.

the whiteness and jewishness part.

jeje...you've been wanting to ask me something like this for a while, i think.

for me, i dont really think you can have a "white half." "white" is really nothing but an idea. and the idea doesnt include being mexican, in my reality. it's too fragmenting to think of myself that way. that's why i put "half white" in quotes. meaning "how others would frame it." in my own self-image, "white" is dispelled by the blessed kiss (or "taint," if you'd believe some) of Mexican blood. I know some choose otherwise. but for me, trying to make "half-white" into "white" proved psychologically ego-dystonic, and disturbing over time. As does even considering a "half" of myself as "white." (of course it can all depend on the person, environment, etc. my son, 25% mex passes for white without a second thought and looks it and has never thought of himself otherwise. very handsome boy, too. but his skin is pink, not olive-tan, and his features are different, too. my daughter (oldest), though, often looks part indian, even at only 25%. so it can depend...and the self image follows, i suppose.)

you are not quite right about my ethnic makeup. while i am 50% mexican, my mother's side is not entirely from Jewish origins (oddly, nor entirely "white" i am told, as my g'ma's aunt it seems was a dark, dark romanian gypsy type woman who scared the hell out of her! but you know...many people's bg have such woodpiles and more relevantly, that half of my family is light-skinned as can be at this point.)

so as far as my identification goes, i dont really identify tooo much with being "jewish" or even "25% jewish." i love potato pancakes (latkes), and I used to envy Jewish families for their strong culture (I envied a lot of culture-strong families when younger) but i dont, never have felt "jewish." who knows, maybe one day such a feeling will overcome me. but i was not given even early years/times of jewish culture, as i was with chicano cultura. nobody could tell me it was something i should think of as a "race" or ethnicity, or of it was a religion—even when i pressed them (because i was curious, after hearing this or that about the word, people always told me the same thing "weeeelllll...it's not really either....its kinda both" etc)...and that was that, really.

while that 25% of "Jewishness" may have affected my features (so "Jewish" is racial?) along with being Mexican, it didn't make me brown at all, my eyes, my course hair, my skin tint all came from Mexico...which is the thing that stuck out to me through time. this was much more present, marked me deeper. yeah...what stuck out to me was my name that nobody could say, the idea of being "Mexican," (religiously, we were neither Christian nor Jewish, so I didn't bump into any overt or memorable anti-jewishness in my formative years) and the way me and my one brother looked different than everyone else in our family. that is what i identified, and when i tried to hide those things, it was the "mexicanness" i was trying to hide. thus my focus now!

as far as why good white racial theorists are jewish...i have no idea. what you say makes sense, though. i also do not know what it is like to feel jewish but not "white enough" as a white jewish person.

and do christians and catholics really have certain features?

(did i get at what you wanted to hear?)

Just for the record, Luisa, and no disrespect intended, I have been in a penitentiary in August of 1982 and Sam could have cared less. Also, I have never been to Mexico so I am not sure what it is like there.
There is a photo of my leaving the court in the newspaper El Vocero to prove my story, and I have the release papers too.
I'll also note that my fellow Boriqua prisoners in Bayamon Regional were great human beings almost all locked up for very petty drug busts and awaiting petty trials for a long time. Some were awaiting trial for pot possession for 14 months already. There were no guards inside that prison after you got past the lice removal showers. The Neta gang prisoners ran the entire prison. Like all of them in the incredibly overcrowded pretrial area, I couldn't make bail.
At night, space was so tight that you would have to rotate like a chicken on a spit if you turned over because you had one space for sleeping on the mat covered floor and no inches to spare. Honestly. I was in a holding pen with 150 other prisoners. There were many of these pens.
This is turning into a "Once upon a time.." so I will cut it short. So much to say about third world prison life. I hope the Feds arrest me next time. Much better conditions in those prisons, even air conditioning I hear.
As a US hippie in a Latin court system {Napoleonic Law} and prison, I assure you, power was not on my side.
And, finally, as to striving toward whiteness, I am not so sure that is a white preoccupation.
Believe me, I consider myself quite white enough and I have the UV induced deformations to prove it.
Now things may be exactly as you say in Mexico, but I don't know.
As to Mexicans in ICE sponsored incarceration in the US, this is a crime, as are many US Federal policies perpetrated upon citizens and non-citizens in many areas of US life.
Where I live {for the last 28 years} I am not laughed at and I speak as a native would, but not perfectly as I am unschooled. But I am still "other".
I really don't think Nez is laughed at and he is a Master of the English language, but he has definitely been treated as "other" very seriously and many times. He blogs about it.
This is a human failing and not only existing the US. "Otherness" disturbs people in many places in the world.
It's funny that in prison I was much less "other" than I was while "free".

yes, i think when you are a "criminal" you sink to the bottom of your "race." and when you are a "criminal" in a land where you are the foreigner, i'd imagine you sink lower than someone of your race in their land, even if you are white in a non-white land. of course that is all speckalashun to me. except the criminal part. i know how that stigma feels.and jail, too. tho not in some midnight express fashion like RC, hash runner extraordinaire.

Nez, my maternal grandmother was Lithuanian and her potato pancakes were like some other-worldly inspiration. I dream of them even now. All hail to latkes!
In modern life {where I am now I guess} the only comparable delight is the shredded platano mash boiled in banana leaf that we call a pastel. But latkes are still out ahead. La comida de la abuela is another psychic aspect of human entrainment!
As to her appearance and religion, she was Russian Orthodox, didn't speak English and in fact was brown. Or maybe she was just tanned as hell from being in the garden all the time. Her color and religion never made any impression on me and we sure could not talk about philosophy, but if there ever is a time machine invented I am going directly back to her coal fired kitchen. I could sell expensive tickets to that destination I assure you.
Latkes! Sausages! Lekvar Cake! Rhubarb Pie! Dill Pickles! All made from scratch with most of the ingredients from the backyard. And hundreds of other highly addictive substances. Life has been missing something since then.

Just want to echo what others have said that I am loving this series. I get excited every time I see a new installment! So much to chew on and think about, an I'm grateful that you are sharing your experience in this way.

RC i just wanna say you have me drooling, bro! cut that shit out!

Oh, I think that Midnight Express guy {was that a movie about Turkish Prison?} really hit the negative jackpot. My government paid vacation was not so bad, just definitely powerless and hot as hell in August in concrete. Again, my fellow inmates were model citizens. It was hard for me to think of them as criminals at all. And in that prison {Bayamon} they had high quality recreational drugs too!
If only the food had been edible. The priest {only non-inmate inside} asked me if there was anything I wanted to tell him. Maybe he expected me to say I was gay, but I told him I was a vegetarian diabetic and all the items I might try to eat were full of sugar and fat. He told me not to worry and to just eat a lot of rice and beans. The beans were made with lard. The coffee had the milk and sugar already in it, I'm allergic to both. So the real punishment there was the food. I came out 6 foot tall and weighing 125.

jenifer, muchas gracias, hermana.

Yeah Nez, like I said, if I go to that Museo del Barrio thing in November I am inhaling some serious comida while up there. One day we shall have to get together and worship some latkes, compay.

sounds like a plan, stan.

Has there been some kind of big pie chart fiasco that I missed? Because I made a couple of pie charts myself recently in a little post about measuring white-male-supremacism including a pie chart displaying graphically for the reader's convenience the percentage of U.S. presidents who were white and male vs. not and so but I'm starting to feel self-conscious about pie charts as a medium without even knowing why.

jeje...not you, man. just alluding to recent clashes between some who said 'The white male viewvpoint and presence is overrepresented in blogswampmia' and someone else who said "show me data!" or something to that effect. but...really its more about a certain tired response...a way of demanding that lived experience and feelings subjugate themselves to more Enlightened and socially-approved systems of validation and measurement. some people say "this is what i have lived, felt, seen, thought in my path," and others say "data shows that there is no injustice where you claim one."

something like that. but not your pies, no. thanks for cracking me up.

lol. Good, because it's blackberry season here and jam and pie are just on my mind a lot.

I love hearing about the journey stuff, man. I don't know where mine goes, but it gives me hope, for all of us, but also for me personally, that other folks have traveled so far in the right direction.

RC,

I think my comment came from your statement: "Just wanted to say that I am a white guy in a brown society. Through the Looking Glass. As a result, in the mirror image, I can see exactly what you are talking about most of the time because I am living the flip side." White privilege does not stop when whites are in the ghetto or in the Barrio or in Peru or Africa just because they feel out of place. International and local policies (structural racism) define white privilege not interpersonal relationships (they are nevertheless a part/symptom of it). If I came off as rude, I am sorry.

Nez,

Wanting to ask you this question for some time? I want to ask you lots of stuff but we can play plato and the other guy some other time. :P

"while that 25% of "Jewishness" may have affected my features (so "Jewish" is racial?) along with being Mexican, it didn't make me brown at all, my eyes, my course hair, my skin tint all came from Mexico...which is the thing that stuck out to me through time. this was much more present, marked me deeper. yeah...what stuck out to me was my name that nobody could say, the idea of being "Mexican,""

Is Jewish racial? There are Sephardic Jews, Palestinian Jews, Ethiopean Jews, Ashcanzi (european) Jews. Judism is a religion. My father is blond and blue eyed. He was told he didn't "look" jewish because he didn't have dark features. Like you, I got my dark eyes and hair from the global south as well. This does not mean that Jewish is not racial. Races are made up. Race is a social construction. Back in the days of Social Darwinism and Eugenics, the Nazis sure defined Jewishness as racial. So did the U.S. Gov't, so did Harvard (they had a quota on how many jews were allowed to attend). Much like Irishness, White Jews were included in whiteness. (or course not everyone feels this way--there are still Nazis and, hey, I doubt Bush considers Jews all that white).

Race is tricky and messy because it is so absurd--this idea of thinking people are less because of skin color, accent, culture, religious practice. Because race does not exist in nature it changes and is hard to classify. Sort of like the idea that "Mexican" is a race. Is "American" a race??? Mexico is a country. Some Mexican people are considered "white" in Mexico and then they come to the U.S. and realize that they are not considered white to Americans. They are "mexican" not just by nationalism but by "race." Race is relative. An American Indian guy told me once that I was really only 25% none white because my "mexican side" is a mix as well. Anyways, the answer is I don't know. It is hard to tell what the "truth" should be in imaginary ideas.

yes, true enough. i dont have "truth." just what i've lived and thought and felt.

I'm not big on the conventions either. I went to one back in June and there wasn't anything I couldn't have gotten online. But then I'm a serious introvert.

The whiteness of conventions ... just go to a SF one, there were maybe three people of color at the one I went to.

Race is tricky and messy because it is so absurd--this idea of thinking people are less because of skin color, accent, culture, religious practice.

well, luisa...i just meant that i am truly interested in physical traits that are assigned to "race." like asian eyes, indian eyes, african american hair, etc. it fascinates me, that's why i asked there. i wasn't really bringing any "less than" into it. or not meaning to. that's not the idea of "race" to me, that's more like "racism."

yeah, pat. i had the chance to go, and partly paid, and it felt like a great opportunity to...see what happened. how i felt. what it was like. i'm still laying it down, as you can see.

I think your comments and questions are great Luisa, never rude. I think that having been raised in Brooklyn in the fifties it is in fact I who am often rather brusque. But I shall offer to agree to disagree with you that white privilege travels everywhere in style and is always operative. I think that is certainly not so, and in fact, I am willing to bet on my very own pie chart that in most places in the world, this world of population 7 billion people, the overwhelming number of whom have brown eyes and are not "white" by any socio-cultural definition and who exist in a post- Franz Fanon reality, that: white privilege just ain't what it used to be!
And that is what is really at the bottom of a lot of the fear mongering in the US right now.
Anecdotally? My daughter's maternal grandfather committed suicide in France {1961} after the family had been expelled during the Algerian Revolution. The family was in Algiers so long they were Algerian, but white. No one is debating that they were colonizers, but they certainly lost their privilege. They were foreigners in France and the old man could not adjust.
White people are in the minority in the world and always have been. The power has already shifted away from them.
In fact, if you are into the color thing seriously, yellow people have the numbers.

golden! (damn lack of smiley gravatar)

I had a great time at the club today Nez, Luisa and everyone, thanks for the company. It's late in the Antilles. Hasta Luego, me voy. I'll check in late tomorrow to see what I missed. I am happy that Dean just brushed past us a little.
Disasters are so depressing.

Don't know if you all have seen the PBS series and website on "Race: The Power of Illusion" but it gets to some of the things you're talking about here. I particularly found the online exercise here extremely interesting. And Nez, with your interest in the physical traits assigned to "race" this might be right up your alley. I'd love to hear how you did if you try the exercise. I, by the way, completely flunked.

NL, i dont disagree with the point being made by that page. but if they wanted it to feel honest or accurate or convincing, they really should have made the faces about 500% bigger, and photographed under uniform light. otherwise it really comes off as none of those things. not honest, not interested in accuracy, just sort of a gag. and honestly, they could have made the same point even shooting it and presenting it in a way where people's faces can really be scrutinized, and under uniform lighting conditions.

i have known people who defy the "traits" of their "race." i do understand the point. i also do understand that race definition/construction is arbitrary and a construct designed to wield power, as luisa reminds me above. i mean, i did have all these discussions with people when i first began blogging on these things. when i talk of my experience with "race" it is of course (or hoped) that people understand i am relating a subjective experience, living under that construct as believed in and reinforced by others around me, in my world.

i hope that the PBS series itself is better than the pop-up game! :)

Man RC, you lucked out...no Oso Blanco for you. Now thats a nasty prison complex if I ever heard one. The war on drugs is tearing us apart. For those of us who see the violence and the blood soaked gutters, its hard to sympathize with the "petty" drug offenders, until you realize that the bichotes are running the prisons and corrupting the goverment. It is they and not the guy with the dime bag in his pocket that betrays everybody around them like Tony Montana on crack. Sorry to hear that you spent your time in Las Cucharas, thats gotta suck big time.

I see what you're saying Nez about the size and lighting of the pictures - but the whole exercise seems to have led me to a different conclusion than you, which is probably indicative of the different things we needed to learn about these concepts. When I did the exercise, it reinforced for me the problem with assuming things about people based on a set of falsely constructed physical charactaristics. I need to stay open to learning about each individual person, where they come from, and who they are. That's something I need to work on, rather than do the shorthand of assuming I know something about them based on these physical signs.

From what I've read that you have written about your experience, these physical charactaristics of being Mexican meant a whole different thing to you. I haven't lived your experience so I don't want to speak to it - but it seems that you needed to embrace them because they indicated something very meaningful to you.

I think you probably know that for those of us who are caucasian, they have been mostly associated with things we need to "unlearn."

Finally though, I'm here to learn. And if there is something in all of this I've said that doesn't make sense, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

I have read this post twice now and I still find more to digest. Your account is not for the faint of heart. I haven't written about YKos because I am still sorting through my experience there. Your perspective helps me clarify mine, at least in part. Thanks.

no, you make sense, NL, definitely. i mean, what you took away from that site is the point of the exercise on that page. i just think you may have misunderstood my response.

I see what you're saying Nez about the size and lighting of the pictures - but the whole exercise seems to have led me to a different conclusion than you, which is probably indicative of the different things we needed to learn about these concepts.

well..it is true we may be in different places, but if you read my comment, i am actually not at a "different conclusion," but rather agreeing with the point of the game. that's why i said "i dont disagree with the point being made by that page" as well as "i have known people who defy the 'traits' of their 'race.' i do understand the point. i also do understand that race definition/construction is arbitrary and a construct designed to wield power, as luisa reminds me above."

what i was saying (and its but a methodology point, not an ideological one, a point that would be made re: data gathering or sampling for statistics, or psychological research, etc) is that it's a good exercise making a good point. but they should do it justice and use faces you can SEE. what good is the exercise at showing us our eyes/thoughts bring us illusory delineations between appearances...when we can't see, and when there is no "control" (consistent lighting). do you get me? it would be like taking a spelling test and the teacher mumbles the words. the grade wouldn't really tell you about your memory, nor your learning, nor your ability to spell.

we all need to unlearn many things this society had taught us, i think. caucasian or otherwise. and you are right, i am proud of my brown eyes and my hair, and my appearance as it relates to mexico! also, i think brown shades of skin are lovely, no matter if they be on "Irish" people or "black" people, or "indian" people or "White" people...i dont really care what label they wear. i really enjoy certain differences. but i DO agree that we should realize that these differences are not limited to Them Over There. and that is a point that could be taken from this test, too. again, it would be a more convincing test/result if the method was more professional.

i also think to myself that maybe we should relearn/reteach the value system placed on certain appearances, rather than convincing ourselves differences dont exist between ethnicities of peoples. that's sort of what i try to do in various ways. overturn the "white is right, fair is better, dark is bad" values that quietly underwrite so much literature and media messaging. that is the point of Brown Pride, and in my switching up phrases from "it was a dark omen" to "it was a bone-white fear she harbored" etc. You may not notice me doing things like this, but that is my way of slowly peeling off those same "lenses" that you mention help us to see things distorted. it is this myriad language of values against melanin-rich folks and supporting the idea of White is Right that helps people become racist without even konwing it. once you begin paying attention to all your media, phrases, figures of speech, archtypes, the heroes in stories, the villains, etc, you see that it is not the blatant things that really propagate this racism disease so much as it is a network of very hardly noticeable codes and signals.

finally, i also celebrate anything you (or anyone) are doing which helps you feel a better, wiser, kinder person.

Hey Rafael, you know the scene in PR, that is for sure. I moved to Vieques so I didn't have to have a gun anymore. I lived way inside El Yunque in the era of no phones and no cell phones {early to late 80s} and they used to dump bodies {humans} and abandon stripped cars nearby {500 feet}.
And I guess you know that Oso Blanco is now, finally, history. Yes, Las Cucharas was bad, but lovely compared to Oso Blanco.
{Rio Piedras Penitentiary, apodado - The White Bear}.
I will be honest and say that while my case was fabricated by the actual guilty party and I was eventually acquitted after 12 preliminary hearings, the prison experience, for me, was a serious deterrent from ever wanting to cross the line and end up there for a long stretch. I would rather feel myself constrained by the societal hierarchy while relatively free than to be behind bars.
After Las Cucharas I really retreated from interaction with the mainstream of society, the radical sector of society and the government in any way possible and have since kept an extremely low profile, so much so that most people here in a very small town are not sure what I do.
Readers-- guess why it is called Las Cucharas?

Just a note that Las Cucharas is the name of the Ponce PR Prison, but the holding sections of Bayamon Regional are often referred to by that name due to the overcrowding. I was never held in Ponce.

Thanks Nez. I think I see your points more clearly now.

And on what you said about words and language - I've always appreciated the beauty of the words you choose - like that post today about a peaceful planet. But I'll have to start looking a little more closely now after I've absorbed the beauty - to see what else is there.

I read a great book a few years ago titled "Native Tongue" by Suzette Haden Elgin. Its science fiction (something I'm not usually into) and takes place at a future time when women have been completely returned to property and baby-making machines. The most revolutionary thing these women doto break these chains...create their own language.

NL,

sci-fi can be terribly racist and misogynist, and otherwise supportive of a host of terrible ideas, but placed in the future and in supposedly "advanced" humans, which is one of the sad, harmful things about a genre i actually love. maybe that's why you dont normally like it.

but that story you tell of, now THAT sounds like a great story. someone taking sci-fic and turning its normal unspoken conventions on its head and using it for some of the power it has inherent in its parameters. what i find so disappointing about sci-fi is the potential for new thought and new ideas, or at least a format where they can be explored, and seeing that used to promote the oldest, most tired, harmful ideas we have around here. but authors like you mention really do a great job of breaking the mold. again, maybe that's why you like that story. also check out ursula k leguin, a brilliant writer who foretold a long time ago, the whole torture "dilemma" the USA now faces with stories that had themes like "is it worth having a happy society if it means locking up a person and subjecting them to terrible conditions to do it?"

You're probably right about why I have avoided science fiction. And I don't remember how I got ahold of this book I talked about. But I actually went on to read two others that she wrote as part of this triology. In the last one "Earthsong" she does a pretty bad job of storytelling (at least to my taste)