Pepper pepper pepper salt

I’ve never been more than mildly aware of my skin colour, beyond the lingering guilt regarding the need for regular sunblock. If I was white, it was incidental – the people around me were white, brown, red, black, blue, caloo calay. Skin colour was like hair colour: without intention, without value, without notability.

Canadian playwright Djanet Sears states in her play Harlem Duet (and I paraphrase) that she likes going to Harlem because everyone there looks like her. I cannot within reason deny that Harlem contains a higher percentage of her particular epidermal tone, to be sure, yet I never really understood why that was such a big deal. Sitting on the subway in Toronto, surrounded by the many hues of the world’s allegedly most multicultural city, I thrilled in the sameness of our differences. Why would you want to be in an homogenous group wherein you could disappear, unremarkable and ordinary? How is that preferable?

I was looking forward to being a güerita in Mexico, perhaps a little. Mexico is, like every other country on this blessed planet, racist. According to my friends here, the ease in which you will find success in life in often directly in proportion to the lightness of your skin. As one who is almost translucent, this assumedly places me at the top of the pigmental pyramid. In October, clutching onto Pável in the marketplace, keeping my head low with shyness but laughing out loud, it was exciting to be called out to like I was some wonderful, unusual bird. The label “güerita” – despite being, in essence, quite diminutive – conjured up notions that I was special, desirable, unique.

And, if I am to show my hand in the name of self-revelation, I’ve had moments of race-based arrogance since arriving. Pável teases me about the way men look at me here – they are undressing you with their eyes, he says deliciously, this is your opportunity – and it has become tradition for me to relay any creepy encounters I’ve had with slavering men as though they are a logical extension of my pallour. Mexican mothers will want me for their sons, I am warned, because they want güero babies. Mexican women will hate me for the innate power I have over the men. A continual stream of race-based assumptions that place me as somehow… what?... superior? It starts to rub off a little, causing me at times to catch someone’s eye and think to myself, oh yeah, eat your heart out, baby.

Yet while it’s romantic to think of yourself as some exotic superstar, it’s also utterly unsustainable regardless of how charmingly arrogant you may be. Back home, basking unwittingly in the warm embrace of being a member of the majority culture, I mistook the experience of being the same for the experience of being different. Genially naïve, I could not see the politics involved when the difference is ethnic.

Here, I am like a houseplant placed in the centre of the room – a sensation that is far less romantic and exciting than that of being some glimmering luminescent glow. Standing on the Metro on the way to work in the morning, I am unable to settle into that vague centre of nowhere state of being practiced so sternly on public transit back home, as it is impossible to not notice the swiveled heads. Rarely an intense lecherous gaze or a critical glare, most often it is the look of vague curiosity I myself have likely levied on women in burquas or other uncommon sights. If I smile in a wan attempt to dispel the tension (likely entirely on my end), I rarely receive one back.

And suddenly I am acutely uncomfortable. I feel as though the room has gone silent when I enter, not because the people around me are desperate to hear my first words but because they are mildly surprised I decided to show up at all. It is intensely intimidating, I am currently in the habit of rushing home after work and taking refuge in the safety of my home rather than having to endure the pervasive sense of objectification for longer than I have to.

This is new for me, and insightful.