Becoming All Things by Michelle Reyes

Author:Michelle Reyes [Reyes, Michelle Ami]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

About Fellow Minorities

Just because minorities have historically been without power, it doesn’t mean we are immune to privilege. We also must come to grips with the fact that every community of color, both Black and Brown, has people with privileges that others within that community don’t have. Yes, we share in common the reality that every community of color suffers oppression because of the color of our skin. Yet we also must recognize that not every single person within the community is treated the same.

We must acknowledge, as author Ijeoma Oluo argues, that “some of our own are more negatively impacted by things like white supremacy and systems of oppression than we are—those who, unlike us, can’t cushion some of the blows of racism with at least some of the indicators of success valued by white people that we ourselves have been able to secure.”12 That, at its core, is what privilege means. It’s advantages you have that others do not, and these advantages allow you to experience injustice in our country to a lesser degree. This is one reason we still need to talk about interminority relationships as we discuss code switching. Ethnocentrism and tribalism exist, and we are equally capable of creating hierarchies among fellow people of color.

I see this reflected in my own life. Yes, I’ve had to work very hard for what I’ve accomplished, but even my story of struggle within higher education speaks to my privilege. I have a college degree, a middle-class job, and connections to white communities. I have eclectic tastes in music and food. I don’t live under the poverty line (not anymore), and most of my friends of color are people who talk, think, and act like me. But it would be wrong of me to look down on fellow people of color who don’t have similar degrees or who aren’t as critically minded as I am. I used to be quite proud and think less of people of color who didn’t have aspirations to climb the social ladder or conform to white standards. Then I began to recognize my privilege and saw that not every person of color has had the same opportunities and points of access that I’ve had. The deck hasn’t been stacked against all of us equally.

Colorism is one example of how this disparity exists among minorities. This is a by-product of racism that creates hierarchies within minority races based on skin tones. If you are a person of color with fairer skin, you may have benefited from unfair privileges because of your lighter skin tone, receiving better grades, job offers, or financial success over other minorities who were wrongly deemed more threatening or less trustworthy because of their darker complexion. Our lack of disadvantage in this area may even be a blinder preventing us from fully understanding the depth of the struggle. We need to call out colorism and any other disadvantage created by white supremacy, no matter what it might cost us. We don’t need to operate under the mentality of scarcity.

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