In a society where privileged people might position themselves as disempowered to gain sympathy, how do you focus on building your identity around your self rather than in opposition to another?
Hilaria Baldwin. Pic/AFP FILE
When gossip about Hilary Baldwin's 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 non-mainstream ethnic background in order to seem interesting and marketable.
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I 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 English.
Her Spanish is allegedly very good. But speaking a language fluently is one thing and appropriating a heritage by denying one's whiteness so to be seen as someone with Spanish origins... that's cashing in. It is inherently disgraceful because it invalidates the very real struggles that people who do not have white privilege experience.
I followed the story as it kept mutating to reveal the enormous scale of deceit that had been consciously coded into Hilary's packaging of her identity. You can bear retrospective witness to how she never quite lies so much as guides whoever is interviewing her to re-validate her story of Spanish origins.
Even in one of her apology videos where she admits to being white, she still suggests she comes from different ethnicities. It's 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 life.
This 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 abusers.
This 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 isn't uncommon to wake up to the news of a trans person being murdered for daring to be trans. Rowling's 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 argue.
Sometimes 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 one's self and building one's 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 ourselves.
It 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 Spanish-speaking people in the US.
The 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 subjectivity.
I 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. I'm 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, I've been collecting some of the words that exist in our family's register. It's a fun exercise. It really moves me to think about how in trying to make home in another continent I'm rediscovering all the previous homes I've lived in or have had to make for myself. At 35 I'm finally synthesising all my lived experience and assessing how fundamental it has been to how I perceive myself.
Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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