Before moving to the US, I never thought about my skin color. Actually, I only thought about it when I needed to choose sunscreen SPF. I'm so painfully pale that without SPF 70 sunscreen and staying under an umbrella, I'll go from pale to bright burning pink in a flash. In that aspect, my skin color has been clearly a disadvantage compared to people who can get tanned easily.
Everything that I wrote above screams white privilege. Being Brazilian and only caring about the color of my skin when choosing SPF shows that I obviously grew up without ever experiencing any racial prejudice. But skin color is less about pigmentation and more about how people see another person.
When I moved to the US, I found out that Americans thought I wasn't white simply because I was born in Brazil. Aside from thinking they are all American are color blind, I wondered why did they care? I thought to myself, it's OK that you believe that Brazilians are brown or black – sorry to disappoint you – but I couldn't pass the fact that someone thought it was appropriate to question someone else's skin color or race.
I began trying to find out what box I belong to. Or what box other people think I belong to. I always thought of myself as a Latino, but I preferred saying Latin instead. I think it is a broader term encompassing all countries with Latin as the root of their languages, like Italian and French. Maybe it's because of my own ancestry with Portuguese, Spanish, and French backgrounds. However, being Latino is not a matter of genetics. It's about how you identify yourself and how others identify you.
I know this is a loaded topic, so I tried to educate myself on the matter. I learned about the Latino community's fight in the US to be acknowledged and have equal rights and how the term Latino is empowering for the community. This term gained usage partly because it more easily accommodates Brazil's people (who speak Portuguese). To my surprise, I found out that if you ask Latinos in the US if they consider Brazilian Latinos, many of them are reticent or simply say no. That’s probably because Brazil being colonized by Portugal instead of Spain, like most of South America, makes Brazil sort of an outsider.
One curious thing I learned is that Latinos in the US don't think they are white, though. But the most important lesson I learned is that it's an entirely different ball game when you actually experience racial biases. In my life, I've experienced other types of prejudices before, so I could quickly identify the feeling too. It makes you understand the empowerment feeling that comes from the sense of a community that stands together. It gives you a different notion of context, politics, and identity.
Skin color matters because people still care too much about it. But mainly because it can be used to empower or disempower people. You can never learn enough about this topic because it's a dynamic subject that keeps being updated continuously. It's essential to always make education part of your journey in searching for your own identity.
Well, in the end, I realized that because I'm Brazilian, I'm not white enough to Americans and that the Latinos don't think I am one of them. Since then, every time I had to check the racial box, I choose alien.