My Time Among the Whites by Jennine Capó Crucet

Author:Jennine Capó Crucet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

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One morning, I snuck cookies from the previous night’s dinner into my saddlebag for that day’s ride: The six hours a day on a horse turned out to be a conservative estimate and I needed snacks. Cookies were a bad choice, though, because the chocolate in them melted in the heat and left my hands sticky, and also because the rancher took to calling me Cookie Monster once he caught me eating one while on my horse, yelling out, “Let’s go, Cookie Monster,” every time I’d lagged too far behind or got my horse in the wrong spot while trying to pen cows.

To shake off the Cookie Monster label, I tried to be on the rancher’s side when it came to dealing with the French film crew. Over dinner one night, the Wannabe Leader tried to talk to us all about wine (there was no wine on the table; the rancher was strictly a spirits man, from what I could tell). I knew enough about wine to understand what he was talking about, but I kept that knowledge tucked away that night, instead turning to the rancher with a face that said, Can you believe these fancy jerks? The Frenchman then began talking about how us Americans ate turkey on the Fourth of July. “Why do you do this?” he asked, and even though I realized right away he was confused—he meant Thanksgiving—I kept my mouth shut.

One reason why the Frenchman was talking as much as he was might have been the fact that during every meal, from the minute we walked in, the TV perched at the end of the dining table was on and permanently set to Fox News. The volume on low, no one really acknowledged that it was on, but it seemed to me that everyone at the table was watching and not watching, the hum of hatred unacknowledged even though we could all hear it. The Frenchman was trying to drown it out, which was more than what I was doing. After hearing the rancher go off about Mexicans getting free passes into the United States—he used the word Mexican as a synonym for Hispanic, and I was, I learned in that moment, passing as white to him—I was too afraid to ask if we could perhaps change the channel.

The rancher’s misinformed grievance about Latinx Americans is one I hear often because, as a light-skinned Latinx woman, I often accidentally trespass into moments that are essentially displays of white power intended only for other whites. It wasn’t until my first year of college, when I read Nella Larsen’s novel Passing in a course, that I first recognized this trespassing as an act in which I had sometimes found myself but didn’t yet know how to define: White people who misread me as also white sometimes display the kind of pervasive racism usually reserved for white-only spaces. They inadvertently include me in these white power moments, ones that we aren’t supposed to witness, which

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