I am stupid but I say I am smart until everyone believes me

Growing Up Whitegirl in America

Chapter Two

Thirteen years old – Bisection:
Mommy said she wanted a bigger kitchen but what she meant was somewhere richer and whiter and where we don’t have to report gunfire to 911 on summer evenings (it was not fireworks I know what guns sound like I have a lot myself Daddy always argues). So we buy a modest house at the foot of a hill pockmarked by four-story estates so we can go to church with people who pay ten dollars an hour to put their kids to bed and watch satellite until eleven-thirty. Behind our crumbling subdivision stretch corn and onion and flower fields where Mexicans come to harvest and sometimes they stay.
I am white and it means something I haven’t quite figured out, like when I sat next to Samantha on my first day and she was nice until she found out my family name didn’t end in ez like hers and I am just white (she wasn’t sure at first, which is weird since I know Korea from Vietnam). Here my friends are white except for the twins Hassan and Hussein who are black from Sudan actually African unlike the five black kids who are Americans from way back so not really African at all and stand under the dripping overhang and I can’t go over because that would be weird. My academic classes are all white except for the Africans and Michael who’s family is Martinez but he’s third-generation and no habla español so I guess the administration decided it was okay to put him where he’ll actually learn instead of with the Mexican half of the student population in the portables with the mice that run across the floor during Super-Silent Reading, like Monique next door who was so smart until a teacher told her she was dumb ‘cause even though her surname doesn’t end in ez it’s impossible to pronounce without a tilde so Monique outlined her lips with brown pencil and never did homework again.
A school bus full of white kids is a Twinkie and you’re not white you’re pink next to my brown well I guess he’s cute for a Mexican we don’t have time to fight you we’ve gotta decide between skiing and boating this weekend while you pick up your primo from the Ranch. Cuídate chato ‘cause Jesús is fourteen with a messt-up bigote and that’s a folded blade on the chain ‘round his thick neck and he just said somethin’ nasty about your mom’s chonies. Mira Jesús I don’t have a boat or skis, my house is cooled by windows in the summer, and my eyes are brown enough and my necklines wide enough to pass for some sort of criolla until you talk to me I understand Spanish but never speak it so po’fabor ignore me in the darkroom while you divorce the paper-cutter from its heavy rusted blade.
Even Mommy doesn’t like this. Her culture is not hatred she saw enough of that in 1968 Arkansas plus she speaks Spanish and thought Monique had potential so Mom volunteers to translate at school board meetings where pale administrators with purple bags under their eyes swear the classes are not segregated but we’ll change it so parents can choose if they fill out this English form that of course was there all along if you only asked. The Footprints finds otherwise when a Latino kid gets detention for wearing the same naked-lady shirt that last week a white kid only had to turn inside out; his parents must be loving if they drive a Navigator. Fast cars with flame stickers and girls take early childhood development so they can see their bebito during the school day ‘cause in America you don’t have to stay with yo’ baby’s momma and there’s no gunshots but knife fights that aren’t as loud and a car horn that beeps La Cucaracha at five in the morning and it doesn’t matter ‘cause all the gringos who couldn’t dance to save their lives lost their jobs to Singapore but people still have to eat and the tomatoes are red balls of concentrated sunshine.