Whiteness. Privilege. Belonging.

PERSONAL POST COMING:

Whiteness. Privilege. Belonging. 

What does it mean to belong? Where does our/my pain spring from?

The question of belonging has been with me since I was a young child.

I feel an unspoken solidarity and kinship with "poor people". 
People who have struggled with financial hardship and who have had do with less. I know this place, I have felt the struggles, wrestled with the anger of financial oppression, with the feeling of belonging to a "lower cast". When I hang out with friends that have known that pain, there is a sense of "yeah, you get me".

I feel an unspoken solidarity and kinship with people of color (POC). 
This is deeper and subtler to the external eye.
This has two layers:
I am an Italian living in America land. I have seen the looks directed my way, the struggles in articulating myself in a broken English, a mainstream culture of people seemingly different than me, and when I first landed here, a group of new cool people that I so longed to belong to.
Even considering my struggles and levels of internalized oppression, my skin is still white and I enjoy a lot of the privileges that white peeps have (ex. the media culture is mostly tailored to people that look like me).

On Italian soil, a similar story repeated. Mom and Dad from Southern Italy, me born and raised in Northern Italy. 
The prejudice for having a last name ending in A (meaning you and your family are from the South - and likely to be poor, uneducated, lazy, and dark). For being called a "Terrone" (a derogatory term that literally, and ironically, means "of the Earth").
Internalized racism. Subdued anger and confusion.
When I hang out with friends that have know the pain of marginalization and oppression because of how they look or because of the legacy that one carries in their last name, I feel kinship, there is a sense of "yeah, you get me" (AND I have No idea of what it is actually like to have experienced what they have).

And, at the same time, I feel a kinship with White (gigantic, mono-cropping term) people. After all I have been raised in a industrialized culture, I benefit from my language dexterity, and from my looks and skin color. 

Yet when I hang out with White folks (like me, and at the same time, not-like-me) I sense a tension, a fear in speaking about cultural issues such as cultural appropriation and racism.

What may be going on with white people?

In my experience as a white person, I often feel tentative in speaking about these issues. I do not want to offend others or mis-speak, I want to be and look "evolved", politically correct and personally respectful.
It's easy to feel like I'm walking on eggshells. 
These topics are new and no one has really taught me how to face them fully, I'm learning as I go and meet others who teach me and I'm bound to make mistakes.

Let's go a layer deeper:
My experience of white culture and white people is of facing the loss of connection to ancestry, roots and land (and this is, of course, true of many POC).
The trail is lost in a past of colonization, slavery and enslavement, industrialization, and the frenetic run towards progress, towards bigger and better, and the cancellation of the past, the roots, the family, the simple, the slow. It's easy to feel like I don't know who I am, where I come from, and it's even easier to mask those confusing feelings.

I hold a white-person guilt from what has been perpetrated and continues to get perpetrated from people of my same skin color. The pain and injustice continues unconsciously through me, by me participating in the structures that keep the power imbalance the way it is today. I am working to change that within me and without me. I am thankful to those that help me see my blindspots.

May I remember Roots..connection with the Mother. The Earth. 
To know I am basically held, that I am safe. 
Let the healing continue. Lots of work ahead. 
My sleeves are pulled.