Reckoning With Brown

By Dayna Cobarrubias

I was caught in a recent text interaction with my parents where we disagreed about what color emoji accurately reflected my skin color. They questioned my use of the medium brown skin tone when communicating with them. “This is more like your skin color,” they replied in our group chain sending over an emoji of a girl in the skin tone second to the right of whitest. My initial reaction was to send back a medium brown thumbs down. Instead, I typed back something like, “I don’t idealize whiteness” from my bed in my pale neighborhood. I sulked for the rest of the afternoon, offended that my own parents would dare to question my brownness.

My parents are partially right. I’m likely a shade in between the second and third emoji skin tones but the options my smartphone offers me are too few and inaccurate to capture the nuances of pigment. What disturbed me most about my parents’ comment is that it stood in stark contrast to how I remembered my childhood self. It bothered me to be told that my perception of myself was wrong. Their comment embedded itself under my skin as I questioned whether I view myself as darker than I am.

I first learned I was brown in elementary school. Always a fast learner, I grasped this was not a good thing. In the library, a classmate spun a globe and asked me while pointing to the orange L-shaped country the United States sat atop, “Where on here are you from?” I blushed, unable to answer. I didn’t want to confirm that I was from any place other than where he was from and I didn’t know enough about my background to even proudly declare a mythical place of origin. At 10, I had never been to Mexico and couldn’t name one relative, dead or alive, who lived there. Another much younger student with a face of a cherub looked me in my eye wanting to know if I was the housekeeper of the school. I smiled and said nothing while praying under my breath, ‘Forgive her father for she knows not what she says.’ And yet another peer told me before our 8th grade graduation that he would be able to recognize me at our reunion because I would be the one with a gaggle of children. These assumptions were all born from their perception of me as Mexican. As a middle-class monolingual Chicana generations removed from my home country, I was unsure of where I fit, one foot in the margins, the other in the mainstream. My classmates seemed to know more about who I was supposed to be than me, forcing me to reckon with my identity.

I’ve been surrounded by white people for most of my life. This was by design, our family like good Americans, believed that the schools, neighborhoods, and institutions where white people were en masse would afford me the best the world had to offer, opportunity by osmosis. During my school age years, I dove, or was plunged rather, into a new level of whiteness when I was admitted to a prep school in an upper class suburb adjacent to Los Angeles, the city my Mexican-American family had called home since the 1920s. When I entered the classroom for the first time, I discovered I was one of a few students of color. Like crumbs, we were sprinkled throughout the school, an attempt to mirror the city’s diversity in a building in a part of a city that was not built for us. Here, my head was submerged as if I was being baptized. I held my breath and when I came up for air, I looked at myself with a new set of eyes. My former color-blind self had drowned and in its place I emerged with skin covered in slimy self consciousness.

The moment I walked into this school I had entered the Garden of Eden. A serpent slithered around me as it whispered in my ear a litany of the ways in which I wasn’t good enough. My classmates around me insisted on pointing out to me I was something other than white so I became consumed by what I lacked, whiteness. The forbidden fruit offered to me held the promise of acceptance and I ate from it. In an instant, I grew ashamed. First, of not being white, then of wanting to be white, and later of being too white. A trilogy of shame would follow me from here forth.

I found a journal from my pre-teen years with a prompt that asked me what I would change about myself. I confessed in a blue ballpoint pen my desire for lighter skin, bigger boobs, and invisible arm hair.

Later as a teenager, I was often presented with questions in Spanish I could never answer. A woman approached me on the street to ask if she was in the right place. I wanted to tell her none of us were. She showed me the address of the office where her appointment was. I was tongue tied again. My memory possesses only a few phrases I picked up from Spanish class or family members who only speak the language with droplets of words, slang, and phrases. Tonta is one of those words. This means dummy. Like a tonta I stared back at the woman and mumbled an apology for appearing to be something I was not. “Lo siento,” I offered in her language.

Prep school blue bloods weren’t the only ones who made me wish for whiteness. Within many Latinx families, we aspire for it as a way to earn enough penance to release us from our miscegenated purgatory. After all, the darkest amongst our ancestors were killed, pillaged, captured, plundered, and called stupid or ugly. The racial caste system in colonial Latin America condemned Indian blood as impure and Black ancestry as a stain. This memory haunts the subconscious of our grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, even ourselves as we bestow upon each other skin-colored nicknames, negra, guero, moreno, indio, and compete with each other in a contest of who has the fairest features.

When I left for college, I was suffering from white people fatigue. I wanted nothing more than to immerse myself with other brown people. I buried my white girl tendencies. The Dave Matthews Band and Natalie Merchant CDs became plastic skeletons in my closet. Instead, I chose to highlight my knowledge of hip hop and r&b, and even picked up a newfound musical interest in rock en espanol. I learned the chorus to songs by Maná and Juanes but couldn’t tell you what their lyrics meant if you asked me. Thankfully, no one did. After living in Stanford’s ethnic theme dorms for two years and spending the rest of my time frequenting the university spaces where students of color studied, danced, ate, organized, and sometimes slept, I graduated successfully with honors and without any white friends. On graduation day I draped a multi-colored serape stole over my graduation gown, a symbol to myself that I had assuaged my assimilated guilt. Or had I?

At some undetermined age after I graduated from college, I became unrecognizable. Until then, most everyone I met assumed I was Mexican. No one could place me anymore. I try to pinpoint the moment it happened or what about me had changed. Had I become Instagram filtered in the flesh? Had my designer dress up clothes turned me into a chameleon, my class status now more prominent?

The inescapable ‘where are you from’ question, however, still finds a way to track me down, a benign reminder that I am not from here even though I am. As a non-Black Latinx who identifies as mestiza, my skin privilege makes me ethnically ambiguous. I am now mistaken for Persian or Middle Eastern by strangers. Their faces shift to disappointment or shock when they discover I am “just” Mexican. They find this unbelievable. I don’t know how to interpret their reactions or whether I should be flattered.

Of all the neighborhoods to choose to live in Los Angeles, I chose one that is 75 percent white. Like an addict, I just can’t stay away from that white stuff even after all these years. The other day I sat in a cafe unbothered to be one of a few brown people there. I caught myself feeling numb to the whiteness surrounding me. A small part of me wanted a pat on the back for learning to play the part, getting the role I had been auditioning for my whole life. The other part of me found my reflection in the glass. When did I begin to find comfort in my discomfort? When had I become immune to being a token, immune to myself? Had I finally paid off my debt of brownness by becoming acceptable to white people?

Or even worse, were my childhood memories figments of my imagination? Had I imagined being brown or had I actually faded, my Chicana awakening only a phase?

Was I just fooling myself? Was it only a matter of time before the egg shell of my façade cracked? I needed reminding.

My reminder arrived during the days of reckoning following George Floyd’s murder. Long-standing demands to confront the death toll at the hands of anti-Blackness gained attention in all corners of the country, even unexpected ones. What were once foreign sounds in my sheltered West Hollywood neighborhood became a nightly soundtrack of sirens and helicopters. I joined the crowds calling for justice. My heart swelled both hungry and hopeful for change, a feeling I hadn’t felt since the years when protests were as crucial as college parties. I rolled my eyes at the white people around me to express my holier than thou attitude towards their newfound outrage. The national guard parked itself in front of the CVS where I pick up my prescriptions. Their tanks were intended to signal protection but only provoked fear. They served as a warning that none of us are safe from white supremacy, even those of us like me who cling to our otherness and degrees in race studies as a way to avoid the ways in which we might be complicit.

I recall if part of the reason my parents’ text conversation stung so much is because it forced me to confront the white adjacency I worked so hard to reject after those many years of striving for it. I’ve devoted so much time reconciling my brownness relative to whiteness but being non-white is not the same as being Black. I can carry around my colonized wounds and still be complicit in colonization, including my very own. I must not injure myself and others. My brownness alone does not absolve me; my demons still need exorcising.

Dayna Cobarrubias is a third generation Angelena whose writing explores the role race, ethnicity, and class play for Latinx diasporic communities when they are upwardly mobile and generations removed from the immigrant experience. Themes of racial and cultural ambivalence, authenticity, and assimilation permeate her work. She is an alumna of Voices of Our Nation (VONA) Summer Workshop, Tin House Summer Workshop, and a graduate of Stanford University. Dayna is currently completing her first novel.