PRESS ENTER TO EXIT: Excavating My Racial Identity
“PRESS ENTER TO EXIT” is a perplexing phrase that flashes at me at least weekly from the dimly lit screen of my most often used ATM machine. Although I understand the functional instructions—if I press the button labeled “Enter” it will end my session with the ATM and the machine will hide all my financial information and ready itself for the next customer—I have often chuckled at the irony of the phrase. If I want to “Exit” why would I have to press “Enter?” It is asking me to do the literal opposite of what I am trying to achieve. However, the more I think about the phrase I realize what a profound existential truth it expresses. In order to exit a room, a building, a taxi, a relationship, one must first enter it.
To develop a racial identity requires this same logic. It is not possible to escape or combat racism, bias and inequality without first embarking on deep examination of my own identity, history and experiences. New experiences along the way, seen through an ever changing lens have me pressing the proverbial enter button again and again in the hopes of exiting out the other side with deeper understanding, ready, willing and able to take on the mantle of anti-racism.
I realize now that I did not contemplate my White racial identity until college. Even though I grew up in an incredibly diverse environment and I was spoken to about race and inequality by my teachers in an explicit manner all the time, I never truly contemplated the effects of my Whiteness and its privileges on my life. The phrase living in a bubble is usually used to refer to people who are leading sheltered lives which in all likelihood lack diversity and opportunity for understanding ways of life that are different than theirs. However, you can be stuck in many types of bubbles and the one I grew up in was the opposite of the one I just described.
I was born in NYC in 1972, the only daughter of two immigrants. My mother was from Norway and my father was from Spain. My father used to call me SNAP - a Spanish Norwegian American Princess. The countries my parents are from, where they moved to, the time period I grew up in, the school I attended all contribute to my cultural identity. Both my parents are White. However, it was a family joke that it was a mixed marriage. My mother being Lutheran and my father being Catholic - and very dark according to my Norwegian grandmother which she would add to the story with slight shudder that only kind of seemed like she was joking. I don’t think she started out joking, because the story goes that my mother’s parents didn’t really speak to her after she and my father eloped to City Hall. It wasn’t until I came around that the relationship thawed. By the end of my grandmother’s life my father was one of her best friends and she had clearly been on her own journey to become more accepting of differences, even if it was just between a Northern and a Southern European nation. Looking back, I realized this story was one of the first seeds planted in my head that “dark” could be considered less desirable, but I never contemplated it in a larger context beyond my mother being blonde and my father being brunette.
When my father came from Spain his family settled on the Lower East Side. He lived on Hester street right on the border between Little Italy and “Jew Town”—his terminology, which he swears was what everyone called that area in the 40s and 50s. While he had more in common from a cultural standpoint with the Italians to the west of him, he was able to communicate better with the Sephardic Jews to the East of him because they were from Spain and spoke Spanish. Because he was Christian, he was able to perform certain tasks for the Jewish families in his neighborhood that they were forbidden to do on the Sabbath. He was called a Shabbat Goy. He became best friends with two Jewish boys, and they are still friends until this day. In fact, they are more like family. I grew up calling them my uncles and their children my cousins and my children call their children cousins. They have spent every Christmas with us since I was born and we in turn spend Passover and Rosh Hoshana with them. We all lived in the same affordable housing complex on the Lower East Side.
In this housing complex we shared our playgrounds, laundry rooms, common spaces, play dates, cookouts with a multitude of ethnicities. Most families were immigrants. Many were from Puerto Rico, others from China and a large amount from Poland and the Ukraine. Because I identified mostly with my Spanish half, I also started to identify with the Puerto Ricans in my neighborhood. It was not until much later that I realized how different my experience was to theirs. The seventies and eighties in NYC were a gritty tumultuous time. There were race riots, the economy was bad and White flight was very real. My family did not leave the city though and neither did our friends. It gave me a false sense of being in the same boat as many families who were navigating the educational, housing and legal systems of NYC without hope of ever leaving.
One factor that contributed to my multicultural bubble was the school I attended from preschool to twelfth grade. It was a magnet school for “gifted” children. Admission was based solely on your score on one test. Those who scored highest got accepted. Whether or not it is appropriate to test four-year-olds in this way is a topic for further exploration. But for all intents and purposes it was a meritocracy plain and simple. The drawbacks of this type of system are manyfold but that will have to wait for separate excavation of self and society. We could explore such questions as “Who knew about the test?” “How were the children prepped for the test?” “Who wrote the questions for the test and what were they looking for?” For now, I focus on the fact that because it was the belief that everyone deserved to be there based on their own merit, then I believed I deserved to be there too. I believed everyone had a fair shot of being there. While at that school, I was surrounded by every religion and ethnicity. I was friends with a varied cross section of New York society. At that school children of all colors thrived. However, in reality it was still over 50% White. While the teachers did an excellent job of bringing all cultures into the classroom, they did not bring Whiteness into the classroom. It was the heyday of multiculturalism and so I marched on Martin Luther King Day, I ate dumplings on Lunar New Year and sang Hebrew songs in chorus. I even learned about the oppression and hardships of different ethnic groups in NYC. Mainly I learned about how unfairly Black people were treated. What I didn’t learn was how unfairly I was treated. How I was able to count on certain truths simply because I was White. I never knew how or if my friends of different ethnicities were treated differently. I didn’t ask and they didn’t mention it. In the confines of our meritocracy all seemed fair and right.
It was at college that I started to truly understand that racism and ignorance still existed as a part of normal everyday life. It was there that for the first time I was part of a very overwhelming majority of White people. So much so that people actually considered me to be an ethnic minority with my Spanish sounding name and being from New York City. When I met someone I had only spoken to on the phone for the first time she unabashedly expressed relief that I was not Latina. She told me that with my name and the fact that I was from New York City and played basketball she was expecting someone that “looked different.” It was the first inkling I had of what others go through. How would she have treated me if I had, in fact, been darker? It was not unusual for classmates to be intrigued by my city upbringing. It was there that I realized that my mother being a teacher and my father being a firefighter was not necessarily seen as something to be proud of, as I had always been, but rather as plainly blue collar. My name was often called out across the academic quad by friends and acquaintances jokingly using an exaggerated Spanish accent. College was also the place where I first heard someone make a distinction between surnames that end in a vowel (mine does) versus those that don’t (e.g. Washington, Lincoln, Madison, Jefferson). It seemed like the general logic was that the latter can get in country clubs and the former can’t. I leaned into it. On some level I wanted to show these people what else was out there, but all the while wanting to scream at them “I’m White!” Could I really be adding the diversity to their lives? Had their experiences been that homogenous? I so badly wanted to burst their bubble, but in reality it was they who had burst mine.
I realize now that while I had been taught to counter racism in my everyday life by loving everyone and being fair to all, I had not been given any information about institutional racism and deep seeded policies in our country that perpetuate a very unfair status quo. Multiculturalism and color-blindness do not address actual racism. It is time to fully confront “the power dynamic that pulls at the levers of social interactions and the cringing indignity of where I am in that order either as the afflicted—or as the afflicter” (Hong, 2020, p. 74). And so this White, female, heterosexual, Spanish Norwegian American Princess, who at times reads Hispanic with a major affinity for the Jewish religion and culture, is hitting “enter” in the hopes that one day I will work my way or help someone else work their way out the other side. The exit is a long way off, and it may not even be an exit at that. Maybe the machine will just politely hide my messy process and ready itself for the next customer.
Cristina Soto is a preschool teacher at The Brick Church School in New York City. She is also the Interim Director of Children’s Music at The Brick Presbyterian Church. Prior to becoming a teacher in 2013, Cristina had a career in international and business relations. She held various leadership positions at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Business Council for International Understanding, the Institute for International Research, and The Economist. Cristina graduated from Hunter College High School and went on to earn a BA with a double major in Music Education and International Relations from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. She is currently pursuing her MA in Early Childhood Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Cristina lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and two children.
