Maria Vargas’s Reviews > For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts: A Love Letter to Women of Color > Status Update

We all adhere to a version of respectability politics—“we” being BIPOC. We all switch our speech, accents, behaviors, appearances into more palatable ones around normative culture, which I will rightfully refer to as white culture.

Some days, you will forget that you are smart and worthy, because you might stutter when you have to speak English in front of a room of native English speakers.

When women began to be recognized for their professional successes, impostor syndrome led them to believe what they had been socialized to believe—that any accomplishments resulted from luck, teamwork, and outside help.

When you are made to feel like you are not beautiful, and society teaches you that the worth of girls and women lies in their beauty, then you start to feel unlovable.

Because I have my papi’s Brownness but mi mami’s gender, a curse—I was born female and Brown, in a cultura that hates females and especially hates the darker ones.

We did not create anti-Indigenous sentiment; we were taught it, we were forced to accept it, and then we internalized and perpetuated it on our own. That is the insidious nature of colonization. Many people have survived by assimilating toward the dominant group’s values, and this internalized racism continues to traumatize entire nations.

I call short-term white “helpers” voluntourists because that is what they were doing: touring our country and our people and disguising their tourism with the “good deeds” of helping us. Do not let them fool you into believing otherwise.

As a non-Black and also a non-white person, I am often prompted to pick a race category that does not include me. I am either given a white or black box to check, and I did not always understand where I belonged.

Your laugh carries liberation in it.