Tag Archives: racism

Guest Post on As Simple As That: "Maybe I should start passing out bags of Skittles to racists on street corners."

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Yesterday I guest posted on Hannah Brencher’s blog – As Simple As That. If you haven’t already read her bog, do me a favor and check it out. Right. Now. She’s a beautiful person with beautiful words.

Here’s the post.

Driving home from New Jersey last week, I had a crazy thought. So crazy I actually started laughing at myself. Out loud. In my car. Windows rolled down and the heat pouring in on all sides.

Maybe I should start passing out bags of Skittles to racists on street corners.
Picture the five-foot-tall white girl with a laundry basket full of the sugar candies like Santa Claus with his Salvation Army donation bucket. That’s what I’m going for.

Don’t you worry. I won’t be so bold as to smack a stereotype onto the passersby in the hopes of nailing the ones who need the message most. No sir.

I’ll wait to hear bits of conversations that fly past me, because nobody notices the Weird Girl With The Skittles. Nobody covers their mouths as they rush by on all sides with shopping bags and strollers, toddles and teenagers. They talk as if I am deaf, a fly on the wall who speaks another language.

I’ve heard it before. Just last weekend, I heard the exchange between two women sitting outside a bar on a Saturday night, discussing the boys they brought home.

I’ll hear it in their words, because you cannot hide something you feel strongly. Racism becomes a part of you. It envelops the way you see the world. The way you speak and the people you speak to. The words you use and the tone in your voice.

It’s not just a noun. A word to label the less-than-open-minded. It’s a mindset. And I hear it all the time.

My grandmother slips and calls all the Hispanics in her town Puerto Ricans. She starts talking about skin color and how it correlates to place of residence like we’re mapping this world into carefully organized sections.

Like we’re not bleeding into each other. Our love for each other ebbs and flows until we wake up in love with someone because of the way they act rather than the boxes they check off on census bureau surveys.

This is what I’ll tell anyone who gets a bag of Skittles:

“Taste the rainbow.”

I know, I know, it sounds sleazy. I don’t mean it like that.

“Have you ever had Skittles?” I’ll ask them.

And if they have, I’ll ask them their favorite color. Everyone has a favorite color Skittle; mine’s green.

But when you think about it, it’s kind of ridiculous. They all taste pretty similar. They’re all filled with sugar, all made in the same dark factories.

And us, humans, we’re made of the same things. We’re all 70 percent water. We all pump the same blood and breathe the same air and use the same organs.

I’ll wait for the weird look that’ll inevitably follow when you try to pair candy with philosophy. Trust me, I know. My friends don’t understand me, either.

“Imagine a bag of Skittles all one color,” I’ll say. “Like that one time when M&M’s had a promotion and if you got the bag with all green M&M’s you won a boatload of cash.”

It’s not like that, though. In real life, nobody wants the bag with all orange Skittles.

We love variety. That’s why there’s variety packs of Lance crackers and Frito Lays chips and Hershey’s Miniatures.

We don’t know what we’re missing, having a bag full of one color. A world full of one race. A town with one standard for beautiful.

Because here’s the kicker: Every heart beats the same. Every. Single. One.
The colors, they’re just for show.

Maybe I’ll even customize the message based on who I’m talking to. Like personalized therapy sessions on the shoulder of the highway, me giving out free candy and them rethinking everything they’ve ever known about Different.
Different skin. Different birthplace. Difference cuisine. Different words for the same thing.

I’ll give Tropical Skittles to the Northerners to reconnect them with the scorching South and Sour Skittles to the Southerners to reconnect them with the less-than-sweet North.

Crazy Core Skittles for the tame ones. Wild Berry for the cautious. Ice Cream and Smoothie Skittles for the lactose intolerant. Chocolate Skittles for the Plain Janes.

Maybe I’ll start taking special orders for people who want to save themselves from prejudice. Until people started lining up for a dose of Open-Mindedness or Bravery.

Until the first thing we do when we shake someone else’s hand isn’t measure the color of their skin against our own but ask them one question:

“What’s your favorite color Skittle?”

By the way, every month I send out a short + sweet newsletter brimming with cool finds related to the monthly theme. It'd be stellar if you subscribed. If it's not worthy, it doesn't go in the newsletter. That. Simple.

I'm an equal-opportunity lover.

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My mother didn’t teach me how to love suburban-style or warn me about falling in love with a boy for whom English was a second language.

Oops.

I’m concerned we’ve watched one too many movies set in the 1950s where everyone’s skin is the color of Wonderbread.

Is racism is now a chemical additive in our Skippy and Welch’s jars so that when we make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, all that bad stuff sticks to the inside of our mouths and lines our stomachs and eats away the acid?

I go to college in the south, where 80% of last year’s freshman class was white. My roommates don’t know about diversity. They never had the option to fall in love with a boy whose skin glows golden in the summer. Tanned arms wrapped around them on a breezy summer night like a blanket.

They might not think twice about cutting someone down because of the color of his skin or the love threaded into his mother’s cooking.

For the record, she made some of the best lasagna I’ve ever had in my life.

We’re not together anymore. Me and him. It had nothing to do with the way his mother says his name, a breath of air easing off her tongue in a way I could never master. Nor did it have to do with conversations between the two of them, while I stood on the other side of the staircase while they fought—her yelling in Spanish and him in English, just to drive her crazy.

It’s called code-switching.

And it doesn’t matter that he answers her in English, because she retorts back in Spanish.

That’s how love works, too. It happens to each of us differently, but we all know what it is. We all know the other person’s falling even if it feels like they’re speaking a different language.

I’ve been living with my grandparents for a month now. We don’t see much of each other except at dinner, and we generally get along. But sometimes, the generational gap creeps up on me from behind and pulls a sack over my head. Leaves me stuck in the middle of their kitchen with no words to defend someone else’s story.

My grandparents believe everyone in America should speak English. I never met my ex-boyfriend’s grandmother, even though she visited that whole first summer we dated. She doesn’t speak English, but I don’t think she needs to.

Because it doesn’t matter.

“If you live in the country, you should learn to speak the language,” my grandfather says to me. I try to find the words to tell him about the Hispanic families I drive by on the way to work in New Brunswick each morning. The mothers who push strollers and walk their antsy sons and daughters to the front steps of the elementary schools lining the road.

No words come. We are speaking different languages—me, the advocate for those with less money and more love, and him, the consummate logic-abider who does not budge for anyone.

I wonder how he would’ve reacted if my ex-boyfriend didn’t speak English. If my grandfather knew he isn’t technically an American citizen; that his mother sometimes stumbles over words and his cousins will probably always speak Spanish.

“Castilian Spanish,” my grandfather says to me. “That’s real Spanish.”

As if the rest of the dialects are fake imposters lined up in a county jail, waiting to be identified. Slapped on the wrist for trying to be a language. For trying to communicate amongst people, and share life and love and compassion.

If he weren’t from Madrid, should I have loved him any less? Should we cut someone else down because they came to America and didn’t have the resources or the brain capacity left to start learning all over again?

I wonder, if my grandfather moved to Spain, what he would do. I wonder if he knows that you cannot choose how you fall in love, but that you simply wake up, well after you’ve said your goodbyes, and realize the song “Forever Love (Digame)” by Anna Nalick will always freak you out.

Because my mother never taught me about the proper way to fall in love. For that, I can only thank her.

By the way, every month I send out a short + sweet newsletter brimming with cool finds related to the monthly theme. It'd be stellar if you subscribed. If it's not worthy, it doesn't go in the newsletter. That. Simple.