What is it that makes you you

When gossip about Hilary Baldwins alleged appropriation of Spanish heritage reached me I was amused and upset at the same time It was enraging that yet again a white woman had chosen to position herself as having a nonmainstream ethnic background in order to seem interesting and marketableI joined the bandwagon and watched video after video of how meticulously she had crafted her representation to suggest she was an immigrant to the US that she came from Spain The cherry on the cake is a video in which she is demonstrating a recipe and performs as if she cannot remember the English word for cucumber She tried to defend herself later by saying when she speaks in Spanish she gets into a mode that makes it hard for her to remember EnglishHer Spanish is allegedly very good But speaking a language fluently is one thing and appropriating a heritage by denying ones whiteness so to be seen as someone with Spanish origins thats cashing in It is inherently disgraceful because it invalidates the very real struggles that people who do not have white privilege experienceI followed the story as it kept mutating to reveal the enormous scale of deceit that had been consciously coded into Hilarys packaging of her identity You can bear retrospective witness to how she never quite lies so much as guides whoever is interviewing her to revalidate her story of Spanish originsEven in one of her apology videos where she admits to being white she still suggests she comes from different ethnicities Its part of a broader narrative in which women or female patriarchs as bell hooks might say who come from various kinds of mainstream privilege position themselves as if they are from a disempowered minority to gain sympathy without actually doing the work of living a feminist lifeThis year JK Rowling did her own version of it when she publicly declared her issues with seeing trans women as women then defending herself by speaking about how she had been the victim of sexual violence when she should instead have been apologising She was using her victimhood in a bid to construe that trans women could potentially be abusersThis is horrifying considering the range of documented abuse that trans people face on a daily basis and how world over those who identify as trans become the subject of hate malice and cruelty It isnt uncommon to wake up to the news of a trans person being murdered for daring to be trans Rowlings vitriol has to be read in the context of how it perpetuates transphobia It cannot be blindly advocated as her right to free speech as many writers who came out in her defence tried to argueSometimes I wonder what the world would look like if we all followed a very basic principle live and let live The dictum has this undertone of a radiant commitment to nursing ones self and building ones identity in relation to that self rather than in opposition to another So many of us who exist on the margins of the mainstream feel doomed to present the truth of who we are in relation to who we are not thus evolving narratives about our identity by othering ourselvesIt feels defeating especially if you would like to be more than just one thing identify more broadly and beyond the constructed binaries of gender and race It irks me when someone like Hilaria Baldwin stakes claim to the right to be seen as a multiple of many things and instrumentalises many important emerging discourses on body positivity and race to defend instead of apologising for her complicity in perpetuating images of thinness as ideal and sexy and her exoticising of Spanishspeaking people in the USThe timing of the Hilary scandal has coincided with my critical evaluations of how my own identity is often misrepresented where I am often robbed of my agency to dictate how I see myself As a writer I have to constantly resist being pigeonholed by the mainstream I have had to reject various offers from magazines who only think of me as a contributor when they are working on an issue of erotica I have often been excluded from many serious panels because most people in power are not keen to invest in exploring my multiplicity They disregard or remain ignorant about my enormous archive of art criticism and even these weekly columns I have had the honour of writing since January 2016 Or my expansive essays in which I freely play with formal conventions inflecting the genre with whatever is unique about my subjectivityI have been recently rediscovering how my upbringing as a Bombay Goan has contributed immensely to how I engage with the world and how I am also othered by it Im delighting in the politics of my migrant history especially now when in exchange for my partner teaching me German I am introducing him to the pidgin language we speak at home which can only be described as Konkani spoken in English Many Mumbaikars call it mak or makapav and try to mimic it to caricature the community Lately Ive been collecting some of the words that exist in our familys register Its a fun exercise It really moves me to think about how in trying to make home in another continent Im rediscovering all the previous homes Ive lived in or have had to make for myself At 35 Im finally synthesising all my lived experience and assessing how fundamental it has been to how I perceive myselfDeliberating on the life and times of Everywoman Rosalyn DMello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover She tweets RosaParxSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper