One target identity that I could align with is my background (i.e., where I come from), because it's from a very small town in Southern Ohio, an area that most of my friends joke around with me being known as generally uneducated. Something else about where I come from is that people slap a race label on the public school system. For instance, my cousin was telling one of her friends where I was from. The conversation went as follows:
Cousin: I'm just spending time with my cousin.
Her friend: Where does he go to school?
Cousin: Chillicothe
Her friend: Oh, so is he black?
Assumptions like that aren't uncommon regarding my high school. Despite being biracial myself, and coming from a school that was probably 1/3 black, it was hard for me or anyone else who I went to school with to escape that identity imposed upon us.
A non target identity of mine is being a (visibly) white male. It's a privilege bestowed on me that I don't stop to think about often enough, considering many people are faced with oppression based solely upon the color of their skin. Considering we have a systematic racism problem in this country, and I'm biologically biracial, I don't realize how often I take my white privilege for granted that my dad or any of my family may not be get to experience.
Your comments on your cosmetics vs biology are spot on. My dad (full Mexican, looks kind of like the guy from the Dos Equis commercials) was once handcuffed on a police car because he was in an affluent neighborhood looking for his friend's house because the police thought he was casing the houses for a robbery. This is clearly something I will never have to deal with despite sharing biological makeup, and I really do think I take this for granted.
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