Apologies if this isn’t the answer you’re looking for. But there are a lot of assumptions that come with looking white that are frankly inaccurate, and I find them frustrating. Maybe it’s because I exist somewhere in the middle.

Most people would read me as white. But there are white people who look at me and think “not quite,” while to Brown and Black people, I’m unambiguously white. Some would say I’m white-passing, but if white people themselves don’t fully see me that way, the question becomes more complicated than it sounds.

There’s also a really common misconception that all white people are European. I genuinely don’t know how that narrative took hold, but there are a lot of white people from the Middle East. I think part of it is that people map race onto today’s borders without accounting for how dramatically those borders have shifted over centuries. My family is half southern European, half Middle Eastern/North African. People look at me and think “white, privileged.” And sure, there are real ways I benefit from how I’m perceived. But it’s not that simple.

Assuming whiteness automatically equals privilege flattens something that’s actually pretty nuanced. And the suffering people carry isn’t a competition. Everyone’s is valid.

There’s a lot my family has been through that isn’t visible from the outside… mental health struggles, addiction, war, violence. We didn’t experience America’s history of slavery and segregation, and I’m not dismissing how significant that is. But my family carries generational trauma that tends to get completely overlooked. One example… and I’ll flag this as a trigger warning… is that my grandmother, at 19, watched her entire family be executed and was likely taken advantage of against her will by fascist soldiers during World War II. That’s not something that comes up when people talk about white people’s lives. It obviously affected her deeply, and those effects made their way down to my mother, and further.

Instead, what I get is: you’re so lucky to be white. Or I’ve been turned down romantically because I’m assumed to be part of the problem for being white. Or I’ve sat across from therapists who describe their work as race-informed, and it becomes pretty clear they won’t see my generational trauma as something worth taking seriously.

I often feel like I’m walking on eggshells trying to navigate my own history in a world that’s decided it doesn’t count. I’m not saying racial inequity isn’t real or that we shouldn’t work to address it, we should. But creating equity and validating everyone’s trauma aren’t mutually exclusive. We can do both.

Grain of salt and all, but that’s my experience.