No offense, but are you Mexican?

I love it when people ask, but even more when they just guess. Because people from the Midwest are crazy. “Indian?” “Brazilian?” “Hawaiian?” Not one Midwesterner has ever asked me if I was Mexican. Best not to offend?

I can hardly see a week before someone asks me “what I am.” Back home, out in the west Texas town of El Paso, no one ever asked me “what I was.” After eighteen years, I barely knew that I was biracial. OK, I knew, of course. I can remember the day in high school I said hi to a chulo (homie, gangsta, etc. in Spanish) from class and he called me a coconut in front of all his friends and their baggy pants. Get it? It’s brown on the outside, white in the middle. It didn’t even bother me. It really didn’t. I kind of thought it was funny. What is there to be upset about, I thought. It wasn’t racism because racism is a white people problem. It’s why they can’t laugh at certain jokes or say certain words. If you want to be comforted by the lesson that racism can come in all colors, look elsewhere. We can laugh, he and I. There are words were allowed to use.

Once a darling journalism major told me I should refrain from using the word “Mexican.” As in “My mom is Mexican.” Fresh from a lesson in Cross Cultural Journalism, she informed me that “Hispanic” is the preferred term. What is so offensive about being Mexican? I told you the Midwest was crazy.

Back home, in a racially diverse city the likes of which Missouri does not know, it’s actually an insult to be white. My girlfriends would call me white if I made a ditzy comment. I’ll let you in on a secret. Among the friends of a biracial girl, “white” means certain things: bland, ignorant, slutty. It was nothing to be too offended over. In the Midwest, don’t call someone a Mexican. In the southwest, don’t call them white. Apologies again, no lesson here that these are equal offenses. They aren’t rooted in the same kind of racist thinking. Missouri was a slave state after all. I saw my first confederate flag the year I started at Mizzou, learning to be a journalist inside a world and racial status I didn’t know existed.

I grew up in a house where a map of the Western hemisphere was hung upside down in the study. I asked, as a curious third-grader, why that was. My parents said it was because, in space, there is no up or down, and why should our country look like it was on top? God Bless Everyone. At the proper age, I was told it was my choice to wear high heels — if I was OK with wearing a symbol of woman’s oppression and making myself less mobile and decorative, like a cake on a stand. I chose to wear them and still do, but I’m conscience of their meaning. I was the kid who was taken out of school on Martin Luther King Day (not a school-holiday in the Texas public school system, I’m sorry to say) to attend a celebration and memorial of a man I was taught to admire. I was the kid who plastered my high school with anti-war posters back in 2003, before it was common sense to think the war on Iraq was based on a lie.

I was born into a family of some true-blue leftists, and I’m proud of that too. It makes me special. I’m no self-righteous, recently-enlightened kid from the ’burbs who rails against Wal Mart because that’s what matches my asymmetrical haircut.

I got into high school journalism to stick it to the man. I fought for inclusion of stories in the yearbook that highlighted the fact that almost every teenager in El Paso crosses the border to party in Juarez, Mexico. I won. I weathered the threat of a libel suit at the tender age of 17 from a mom who was upset her son decided to come out in the yearbook under a nickname. I didn’t win that one; I just didn’t lose. She decided to drop it.

I got into collegiate journalism because I like reading. I was a much more ruthless journalist in high school than I am now. Now I’m the kid who isn’t the ruthless reporter. Now I’m the kid who isn’t the relentless copy editor. I’m content to work and learn. I’m much more mellow. Frankly, I don’t even have the ego needed to enjoy writing about myself. I like to think that makes me a J-School rarity. A white tiger — brown on the inside. Mostly, I quietly contemplate racism and why the Midwest is so strange. I think about who I am all the time, it’s that time in our lives, I guess. But since living in the Midwest for four years and having to constantly speak to “what I am,” I think about “who I am” very differently. These Midwesterners have scrabbled my brains with their shallow diversity-consciousness. The answer to “what” and “who” I am is the same: I don’t know. I love it when I don’t know, but even more when I just guess.