This is a guest post by Marina, an awesome writer, social-media-managing freelancer, podcaster, and overall person that I know. She and I are trading blog posts for today on the topic of Realizing that You’re Brown. You can check out my post for today as well as the rest of her writings at her eponymous site, Marina Rose Martinez.

Glendora, California is where I became a Mexican. It was 1999, the summer before my freshman year in high school, and I was standing at the check-stand in Albertsons still sweaty from the walk over and totally, completely, freakishly alone.

I don’t know how many times before this day I was in a building with only white people in it. It would have never occurred to me that we were different from each other, so it probably happened a lot. My grandmother and her second husband were both white, and they raised me from two to 13. I went to a private school, I took horseback riding lessons, I had a therapist. Whiteness was my entire jam. So, white was normal, I felt normal, therefore I was basically white. It didn’t help that my education, while extensive in most areas, left me with the incorrect impression that the history of racism in American was this: Slavery; Lynching; Dr. Martin Luther King; Racism is over.

So when the middle aged cashier told me a beaner joke, it was basically a scene in a horror movie for me. Continue reading “I Woke Up Like Dis – The Day I Was Brown” →