Happy Monduesday, Meteor readers,

To mark the final day of Hispanic/Latine Heritage Month, we’re going to take a little stroll through the existential identity crisis of your favorite newsletter gal (🙋‍♀️). Plus, we’re taking a moment to salute the one and only Tarana Burke and applaud President Barack Obama’s words to Black male voters.

And speaking of voting! We are three short weeks away from Election Day. Do you know where your polling place is? Is your registration up to date? Does your state have early voting dates available? Find out, make a plan, and #GetReadyWithUs by clicking here.

Let’s get into it,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

Making history: On this day seven years ago, #MeToo went viral, shedding light on the millions of people who have experienced sexual assault and harassment. It was a breakthrough moment. But for Tarana Burke, the woman who first used the term “me too” as a rallying cry back in 2006, it was a moment filled with fear. As she wrote in her memoir Unbound, she worried that the viral discourse, sparked by a white woman’s tweet, would erase her story and her work, focused on Black survivors, from history.

Burke’s tenacity wouldn’t allow that to happen. She swiftly introduced the work she had been doing since 2006 to an audience of millions, and her organization, me too., is now a global network stationed in 34 different countries where sexual violence against women is on the rise. What began as a grassroots project to help women in her community is now one of the largest and most recognizable anti-violence movements in the world, giving survivors the tools they need to rebuild their lives. The words “thank you” don’t feel strong enough.

AND:

• Lilly Ledbetter, whose activism led to the passage of the Fair Pay Act of 2009, died on Saturday at the age of 86. Twenty years into her employment at a Goodyear tire plant in Gadsden, Ala., she received an anonymous note informing her she was being paid drastically less than her male counterparts. “Never…did I want to be a troublemaker,” she told NPR in 2009. But that note “took my breath away. I felt humiliated. I felt degraded.” And the rest, quite literally, is history.

• The Biden administration has given Israel 30 days to improve Gazans’ access to food or risk losing military aid—just two days after the U.S. had authorized sending 100 American troops into Israel to operate an advanced anti-missile system in the country’s ongoing battle with Iran. “The U.S. military is now inextricably involved in this war, directly, without any illusions of barriers,” says Middle East analyst Séamus Malekafzali.

• During a campaign stop in Pittsburgh, former President Barack Obama made a heartfelt plea to Black men voters, a group that reportedly has been “unenthused” by Harris’ candidacy. One factor in their lack of enthusiasm, according to Obama? Sexism. “You’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.” Say it louder for the voters in the back 🗣️.

• Sean “Diddy” Combs, who is currently indicted on federal charges of sex trafficking and racketeering, is now facing six new civil lawsuits accusing him of sexual abuse. One woman claims that Combs “violently raped” her at a promotional event in 1995, while one of the men alleges that Combs assaulted him when he was only 16 years old during one of his “white parties.”

• A glimmer of good news out of Georgia: A state judge has ruled that county election officials can’t delay in certifying election results, or decline to do so. Democrats are still in the thick of challenging similar recent laws passed in Georgia but, tonight, voting rights advocates will breathe a little easier.

To Be or Not To Be “Latina”

That is the lifelong question

BY SHANNON MELERO

A CHILDREN’S CHOIR IN TEXAS PERFORMS AT A COMMUNITY CENTER IN HOUSTON TO COMMEMORATE HISPANIC HERITAGE MONTH. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Today is the final day of Hispanic/Latine Heritage Month and as is the case every year, I find myself revisiting the question of what it means to be Latina, or as some people might dare to call me (but never to my face) a “whitetina.”

I’m a Puerto Rican from the South Bronx, which felt to me for a long time like a race in and of itself. I knew who I was: I was the product of strict, loud, bold women, each varying shades of brown or beige. Everyone around me was Latine, Black, or a combination of the two. The smattering of white people in my life—teachers mostly—didn’t register in my mind as White People. They were just people who happened to be white. (Please know these two classifications are very different: whiteness is about one’s appearance, while Whiteness is appearance plus the lived myth of superiority.)

Growing up, I was frequently reminded that as a light-skinned Latina, I looked and spoke like a White Person. This was intended both as an insult and a sort of gift. My proximity to whiteness meant I could ascend. I could be something. But the thing about being a person who happens to be or look white is that it doesn’t come with the same advantages or security as actually being a White Person.

MY MOM AND ME OUTSIDE OUR FAMILY’S HOME IN PATILLAS, PUERTO RICO. I’M TOLD THAT HAIRCUT WAS VERY FASHIONABLE FOR THE TIME. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR) 

Picture it! A bathroom, 2009: I had just gotten out of the showers in my freshman dorm and was building up the mental fortitude to finish detangling my very long, very unruly hair, which was being decimated by the hard water of upstate New York. As I stared down at my array of creams, oils, and combs, a girl walked in, struck up some small talk, and then, without invitation, touched my beautiful locks and said, “Your hair is so exotic.”

At the time, I didn’t understand the gravity of that exchange. I was annoyed and offered up a fake laugh and an unconvincing nod. But now I realize it was the first moment I was confronted with the question of my own race and discovered that I didn’t actually have an answer.

It was the first of many hard lessons of my college years. The White People saw immediately that I wasn’t white. To them, I was exotic. Loud. I pronounced “bagel” and “water” wrong. My body was proportioned strangely, an academic way of saying I had a big ass, and some of my floormates teased me about how hard it must be to find clothes that fit. Try as I might, and I tried very hard, I couldn’t squeeze into the mold of whiteness. So I decided I would be more Latina. Whatever that meant.

A 1940 CENSUS DOCUMENT WHERE MY GREAT GRANDFATHER, JULIO, HIS WIFE, AND HIS FIVE CHILDREN WERE LISTED BY A SURVEYOR AS BEING OF THE RACE “DE COLOR” MEANING THEY WERE “COLORED” BUT NOT BLACK. (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR) 

To my utter dismay, it meant reading a lot of history and coming to grips with a litany of uncomfortable truths. The biggest of these was that “Latine” isn’t a race; it’s a racialized status, meaning it’s an invented labeling concept intended to group together a variety of people in one box. And as Laura E. Gomez beautifully explained in her book Inventing Latinos, the term “Latino” was primarily created to establish a race that was lower on the totem pole than White but still somewhat above Black (making it more difficult for the two “lesser” groups to demand the same rights of the first). After all, how can you systematically strip millions of people of their rights and dignity or justify a yearslong occupation of their lands if you don’t first strip them of the one thing that guarantees their protection: Whiteness? You make them something else. You make them something lesser. And then you give them thirty days to celebrate their “unity.”

The failure of Hispanic/Latine Heritage Month is that it relies on the false premise of “Latinidad,” that we are all united because of the one thing we have in common: being colonized by Spain. But our actual heritage cannot be attributed to a single colonizer, nor can it be captured in a category rooted only in our post-colonial existence. The Taíno traditions and history of Puerto Rico are not the same as those of the Maya, the Aztec, the Inca, the Quechua, the Zapotec, the Macorix, the Arawaks, the Garifuna—I could go on.

MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER, JULIO, WAS NOT CONSIDERED BLACK IN 1940. HOWEVER, WHEN HE WAS REGISTERED FOR THE DRAFT IN 1942, HIS RACE WAS FILLED IN AS “NEGRO.” (COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR) 

But when we celebrate Latine “heritage,” we’re not celebrating those cultures. We’re celebrating a Eurocentric, watered-down, post-Columbus, post-Spanish occupation version of ourselves. We’re celebrating who we became, not who we are.

It’s a trap many of us are lured into at a young age. We’re trained to forget ourselves, only to learn that our skin color isn’t enough to grant us full White Privilege. And when we finally unlearn all of that, we find a beautiful, rich history waiting for us, along with enormous grief that we’ve wasted our lives assimilating and no longer feel a connection to who we are. We buy fully into the American dream only to find out that we can’t have it because we are not really white, not really American. And if I cannot be white or American, and I cannot be Latina because my Taíno ancestry is lost to time, then I have to ask: What am I allowed to be?

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