February 5, 2025 • 22 mins
What happens when a single comment online unravels years of deeply rooted beliefs about cultural identity? Join me as I share a personal story of navigating the complex tapestry of Dominican heritage, where African, Spanish, and Taino strands are woven together. This episode takes you through a candid reflection on why Dominicans, influenced by figures like Trujillo, often fiercely protect their Spanish roots while grappling with the colonial legacy that shapes these perceptions. Through my own experiences, we explore the emotional weight of defending one's identity and the resilience required to embrace every facet of our cultural history.
Discover the challenges and discomfort of unlearning ingrained ideologies and the journey toward embracing a multifaceted identity. We delve into the heart of why our beliefs are often defended so passionately and what emotions lie beneath that defense. I invite you to ponder the parts of your identity you hold dear and to question whether this attachment is born from pride, fear, or something else entirely. Let's continue this vital conversation on Instagram, sharing stories and reflections that acknowledge the full spectrum of our heritage. Plus, get a sneak peek into next week's topic on the impact of dismissing others' experiences with the phrase, "it didn't happen to me.
If you’re enjoying these conversations, check out my YouTube channel! Explore Defining Latinx, Latine, Latina, Latino, where I reflect on books by Latine authors and uncover the diversity and strength of our community.
Don’t miss #TheOrdinaryBruja, my serialized story about Marisol, a bruja rediscovering the power of her ancestry and her own worth.
Subscribe now to join the conversation and celebrate our stories together!
🌳 Step Under The Flamboyant Tree! 🌳
Experience a story of family secrets, magical realism, and the rich heritage of the Dominican Republic. Under The Flamboyant Tree follows Isabella Prescott as she unravels her past, seeking healing and redemption in her homeland.
Preorder today and be among the first to journey into this unforgettable world of resilience and self-discovery.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh, we could, we could fly.
Welcome to this new season ofthe have a Cup of Chahani
podcast.
So I want to title this newseason that I'm embarking on
with I'm Growing, so this isgoing to be the season of growth
and that's what I'm going toshare with you throughout the
(00:20):
season.
So I thank you for coming overhere and sitting with me and I
hope you enjoy.
Hola vasitos, and welcome toanother episode of have a Cup of
Johannie podcast, where we sipon coffee and dive deep into
life's lessons.
(00:40):
I am your host, anjua for short, and this month's theme it's
all about the things I'velearned from my kinfolk, my
fellow Dominicans, through someheated, thought-provoking and
downright fascinating onlineinteractions, and if you hear
some sort of purring, that'sOctavia.
(01:01):
She's my co-host for today.
Nevertheless, today we'retalking about something many of
us wrestle with but don't oftenname the weight of defending
identity.
Why is it that we, asDominicans, feel so fiercely
protective of our culturalidentity and, more importantly,
(01:24):
what happens when that defenseinadvertently erases parts of
who we are?
Grab your cafecito, tuchocolatito, tu té, whatever it
is, because this one is going tobe good.
All right, let's start with alittle background.
Folks, recently, I shared apersonal experience online where
(01:45):
I replied to a reel onInstagram from at Naturally,
julie.
Her focus on Instagram is aboutfoods and her video was about
how us Dominican folk, while ourcultural specifically our food,
cultural specifically our foodis so heavily tied to Africa, we
(02:12):
reject that side or ignore thatside, while heavily emphasizing
or uplifting the Spanish sideof our legacy.
And I replied I saw her video,I resonated with it and I
replied I saw her video, Iresonated with it and I replied
and I was like hey, dominicanhere, and I worked with
Spaniards while I lived inEurope and they called me I
won't say that name here becauseit's a bad name and said that
(02:38):
they consider us halfway savageson culture, not polite or
lacking decorum, laughing emojihere.
So as much as Dominicans loveto claim them, they don't claim
us like that.
Ijs laughing emoji, thinkingemoji, upside down emoji, eyes
emoji and my point was tohighlight how some Dominicans
(03:00):
they claim, they claim Spain alot, but the Spaniards don't
claim us like that, you know.
And that comment, though, itsparked some intense reactions
and one comment in particularstood out to me and it was from
(03:23):
at Felipe, something Felipe.
And in there this person said58 million Spanish in Spain, and
you talk to how many?
I live in Madrid and not evenone Spaniard had ever said
anything like that.
So I guess you don't have allthe truth.
Now let's pause for a second.
(03:45):
This response wasn't just adisagreement, it was a defense.
A defense of Spanish identity,sure, but also, indirectly, a
dismissal of my lived experience.
And it made me wonder why arewe so quick to defend one part
(04:06):
of our identity whileoverlooking the rest?
Why do we defend our identityso fiercely?
And I think there are a fewreasons why we feel this weight
to defend our identity.
To defend our identity,colonial legacy, right, which
(04:33):
I've said in various socialmedia posts.
For centuries Dominicans havebeen taught that Spanish
heritage is synonymous withsophistication and superiority,
and the closer that you are toEuropean ideals, the more you're
seen as worthy.
And that legacy has beenheavily emphasized in the
Dominican Republic.
(04:53):
It was brutally enforced by oneof the worst dictators in Latin
America, trujillo.
I mean, just look up theParsley Massacre, you would see
that this legacy, this coloniallegacy to attach ourselves so
(05:15):
fiercely to Spain as kind oflike our mother country, as kind
of like our thing that gives uslife in the Dominican Republic
was brutally beat into us by notjust this dictator before him
(05:35):
and after him, and thatcontinues on to this day, but
(05:59):
what Trujillo did was hecemented that in blood, you know
, to show what can happen if youdare uplift the African and the
Taino legacy that are also partof the Dominican Republic, you
see.
So that right, there was likeboom, cemented that there's also
pride and resilience.
So let's be real, dominicans,we love our culture.
We love it.
I think, like when I firstimmigrated to the United States,
(06:19):
people would try to guess whereI came from and I would just
say I'm Dominican, and whichwill leave people aghast right
away.
You know, I have learned a lotof things since then, and I have
learned a lot about my mixedheritage, my mixed legacy and
everything that makes me me.
So I am able now to presentmyself to other people in the
(06:45):
United States easier, butnevertheless, we love our
culture, and rightly so.
I mean, we've built somethingbeautiful out of a painful
history.
But sometimes that pride canmorph into defensiveness,
especially when we feel likesomeone is challenging the
(07:05):
narrative we've been told tobelieve and the narrative that
we have accepted as well,because it's not just like
somebody told us to believe.
They told us we took it fromthem and we accepted it.
We carried it out and we aregiving it to the generation
after generation that comesafter us.
So it's like the sunk costfallacy, right?
(07:30):
You have put so much time andeffort, you have brainwashed
yourself for so long with thislie, that when anybody objects
to it or tells you somethingdifferent, you automatically get
defensive with it, because thenyou're thinking about is my
(07:53):
entire life a lie?
Why do I need to getuncomfortable and see myself
through a different lens?
You see, so it's veryuncomfortable for people to come
out of a belief system, right,that they have believed and
accepted their entire lives, orfor most of their lives, to
(08:17):
something else, even if thatsomething else is factual.
They also have fear ofrejection.
That's another big one, and Isaid it on my video when I
talked about this, theseinteractions that I've been
having.
Fear is a powerful motivator,people, and that's what Trujillo
thrived on.
(08:37):
He instilled fear in theDominican folk, and now that
fear lingers, whether spoken orunspoken, that if we dare to
admit being more than justSpanish, we will lose our place
in the world.
(08:57):
Other people will view us asless than Spanish, because that
has been ingrained into us, thatif we don't identify or present
ourselves as Spanishdescendants, as Spaniard
descendants, and we instead, youknow, either accept our mixed
(09:19):
heritage, you know, and embraceAfrican and Lutaino ancestry as
well, or we dare say we areAfrican-descendant Dominican or
we are indigenous-descendantDominican.
Oof, that is like you say thatin the middle of a group of
Dominicans and they will chewyour ass out Because we don't
(09:46):
talk about Bruno, we don't talkabout that.
You know what I'm saying?
So, but that's because of thatfear, fear of rejection, fear of
losing your place in thehierarchy back in the day, and
even now, fear of incarceration,fear of violence against you.
(10:06):
Fear of incarceration, fear ofviolence against you.
Come on now, and if, out of allthese three motivators that are
here as to why Dominicans tendto fiercely defend that Spanish
identity, I will say fear is thestrongest of them all is the
strongest of them all.
(10:27):
But now let me tell you aboutwhat happens, right, when you
become lost in this dividedmindset, right, and this, like I
feel like this is a fracturedmindset to have, because you're
(10:47):
tracking one of your manylegacies that you have.
So I feel that it's divided andit's fracture, so you're not
really embracing your fullidentity, right?
And here's what can happen whenyou don't embrace that.
And I've been there before.
I was born in the DominicanRepublic.
(11:09):
I came to the United States,okay, and I was that one person
because I learned that from myfamily, I learned that from the
island, okay.
And I know Dominicans are goingto come for me when I say that,
because whenever I talk aboutthe things that I learned over
there, that I had to unlearnhere, they get mad at that too.
(11:30):
Once again, because pride, right, we take pride in our culture,
we take pride in our educationand we take pride in who we are,
and that is good.
I tell everyone of my homecountry, everyone.
But I am not ignorant to thefact that there are things that
(11:52):
need to change in that it.
And here's what happened.
If that comes to fruition, ifwe erase that, when we defend
(12:29):
just one part of that identityat the expense of the others,
we're not just erasing history,which is already dangerous
enough.
When we erase history, we arealso erasing ourselves.
Think about it.
If we only see ourselves asspanish, what happens to the
african rhythms in our music?
The tiny rhythms in our music,the Taino techniques in our
cooking, the resilience andcreativity that come from
(12:55):
generations of blending cultures.
More importantly, what messagedoes this send to future
generations?
By ignoring or downplaying ourfull heritage, we teach them to
reject part of themselves.
And that rejection doesn't juststop with the self people.
It spills over into how wetreat others, and that's where I
(13:16):
draw the line.
For example, it's nocoincidence that this
hyper-focus on Spanish identityoften comes with an undercurrent
of anti-Blackness oranti-Haitian sentiment.
It's no coincidence those aretied.
When we idolize whiteness andEuropeanness, we create a
(13:39):
hierarchy, the same hierarchythat they instituted, where
anything that doesn't fit thatmold it's less than, and that
hurts us all, all of us, becauseall of us are mixed, you know.
(14:01):
So here's my takeaway what Ilearned from this comment,
because that is what thispodcast is about.
I know I'm heavily on thepreaching side right now, but
let me tell you, on thepreaching side right now, but
let me tell you, I mean, I havelearned so much from interacting
and dissecting and thinking onthese comments and writing about
(14:24):
it.
I've been doing so many blogposts and recordings on this
because, to me, I feel aresponsibility, as someone who
is Dominican, to dissect this,to learn from this and to share
with other people in the hopesthat we can learn to be better.
(14:44):
We can learn to identify withour mixed heritage, our mixed
heritage, which is African,spaniard and Taino.
Okay, and here's what I learned, specifically that defending
identity is human.
It's very human, and the reasonwhy I'm so chill about it and
(15:06):
why I'm so chill in the commentsand very polite and things of
that nature, is because Iunderstand that as humans, we
try to stay as comfortable aspossible.
We don't want to getuncomfortable.
Big feelings make us feel as ifwe are in the danger zone and
(15:28):
when you're trying to pull outsomebody from an ideology that
they have held on for so long,that's a very uncomfortable
feeling to have.
Even if it's coming from acomplete stranger that they
don't even know that is writingthese things and comments in the
internet, they feel as if youare personally attacking them
(15:50):
because you're scraping at theidentity that they have formed
about themselves.
So, because I understand thatit's so recent, why I'm so chill
with it and I have chosen tocontinue to talk and reply as my
energy sees fit, whilemaintaining my calm and my cool
(16:14):
and not getting too hype aboutit.
But now we need to be mindfulof what we're defending now and
why.
You know, like I get it, thatdefending is a human thing to do
, but I also know that we, ashumans, we have reasoning right,
(16:35):
we have these brains that canreason, that we can construe
logic.
So I ask I always ask great,you're defending, but what are
you defending and why are youdefending it?
Because when I read that comment, I realized that it wasn't just
about me or my experience inEurope.
(16:57):
It was about something deeper acollective fear of facing our
full history and the messy,beautiful complexity that comes
with it.
Because, as I unlearned thatideology right, and my first
(17:17):
instance of unlearning startedin college, when I joined this
third world organization and itwas filled with Caribbean folks,
black Caribbean folks and oneAfrican-American person, and
through conversation with themand with friends, right, just
(17:38):
friendly conversation, nopressure, no nothing I
understood the commonality thereand I saw myself in them and
organically, I startedunderstanding that I don't just
come from Spain, I don't justcome from the colonizers.
(18:00):
Part of me, the other two partsof me, came from those folks
that were colonized and Iremember being in the shower
because that's where I usuallyhave these introspective
thoughts and really coming, justcentering on that thought that
(18:24):
I am half colonizer and halfcolonized, and how I come from
ancestors, and it makes me wantto cry from ancestors and it
makes me want to cry when Ithink about it.
And that's why I'm soempathetic to these people in my
comments, because I know thebig emotions that they must be
feeling, you know, because itmakes me want to cry just
(18:45):
thinking about that moment whenI centered that thought and I
was alone in the shower, just meand the water coming down on me
, and it was as if the water wascleansing everything that was
not meant to be there.
And I stood there, grounded inthat thought, understanding that
(19:05):
my legacy is half of thosepeople that inflected deep pain
and violence on the other halfof me.
It is tough to come to thatrealization, to know that that
is what makes you you now.
But what empowers me is knowingthat I choose now who to be.
(19:32):
I choose now who to be and Ichoose now to look out for
injustices and I choose now totalk about injustices and reply
to comments, right, that try toinvalidate that mixed legacy
that we have, because I knowthat when we try to erase that
legacy, we're, in a way, erasingour history, and I don't want
(19:56):
that history to repeat itself,because, let me tell you, our
identity is not fragile at all.
It doesn't need defending.
In fact, the more we embraceevery part of it the African,
the Spanish, the Taino thestronger we become.
So I want to leave you withthis question, vasitos what
(20:20):
parts of your identity do youfind yourself defending the most
, and is that defense rooted inpride, fear or something else?
Take some time to reflect on itthis week and, if you're feeling
brave, share your thoughts withme.
(20:40):
I told you before I don't getthat much traction on Instagram.
This comment that I made onsomebody else's video has gotten
a lot of traction, but usuallyI don't.
So if you want to come to myInstagram is at
haveacupofjoannie Come over,leave a comment, send me a
message or tag me on yourresponse on Instagram and let's
(21:03):
keep this conversation going,because it's one that we all
need to have.
But let me tell you what'scoming next.
Well, this is all I have fortoday's episode, and I thank you
for your time with me.
Your time is precious, andthank you so much for giving it
to me for being open to thisdialogue.
(21:24):
Next week, we're diving intoanother layer of this topic.
The problem with this phrase itdidn't happen to me.
With this phrase, it didn'thappen to me.
We'll talk about why dismissingsomeone else's experience hurts
more than it helps.
Until then, I want you to takecare of yourselves, embrace your
(21:45):
roots.
See you next time, bye.
Thank you so much for listening.
I want to hear from you.
Leave me a comment, do a ratingif you can on the podcast,
share it with somebody you love,but, most importantly, come
back.
See you next time, bye.
Oh, we could, we could fly.
Welcome to this new season ofthe have a Cup of Chahani
podcast.
So I want to title this newseason that I'm embarking on
with I'm Growing, so this isgoing to be the season of growth
and that's what I'm going toshare with you throughout the
(00:20):
season.
So I thank you for coming overhere and sitting with me and I
hope you enjoy.
Hola vasitos, and welcome toanother episode of have a Cup of
Johannie podcast, where we sipon coffee and dive deep into
life's lessons.
(00:40):
I am your host, anjua for short, and this month's theme it's
all about the things I'velearned from my kinfolk, my
fellow Dominicans, through someheated, thought-provoking and
downright fascinating onlineinteractions, and if you hear
some sort of purring, that'sOctavia.
(01:01):
She's my co-host for today.
Nevertheless, today we'retalking about something many of
us wrestle with but don't oftenname the weight of defending
identity.
Why is it that we, asDominicans, feel so fiercely
protective of our culturalidentity and, more importantly,
(01:24):
what happens when that defenseinadvertently erases parts of
who we are?
Grab your cafecito, tuchocolatito, tu té, whatever it
is, because this one is going tobe good.
All right, let's start with alittle background.
Folks, recently, I shared apersonal experience online where
(01:45):
I replied to a reel onInstagram from at Naturally,
julie.
Her focus on Instagram is aboutfoods and her video was about
how us Dominican folk, while ourcultural specifically our food,
cultural specifically our foodis so heavily tied to Africa, we
(02:12):
reject that side or ignore thatside, while heavily emphasizing
or uplifting the Spanish sideof our legacy.
And I replied I saw her video,I resonated with it and I
replied I saw her video, Iresonated with it and I replied
and I was like hey, dominicanhere, and I worked with
Spaniards while I lived inEurope and they called me I
won't say that name here becauseit's a bad name and said that
(02:38):
they consider us halfway savageson culture, not polite or
lacking decorum, laughing emojihere.
So as much as Dominicans loveto claim them, they don't claim
us like that.
Ijs laughing emoji, thinkingemoji, upside down emoji, eyes
emoji and my point was tohighlight how some Dominicans
(03:00):
they claim, they claim Spain alot, but the Spaniards don't
claim us like that, you know.
And that comment, though, itsparked some intense reactions
and one comment in particularstood out to me and it was from
(03:23):
at Felipe, something Felipe.
And in there this person said58 million Spanish in Spain, and
you talk to how many?
I live in Madrid and not evenone Spaniard had ever said
anything like that.
So I guess you don't have allthe truth.
Now let's pause for a second.
(03:45):
This response wasn't just adisagreement, it was a defense.
A defense of Spanish identity,sure, but also, indirectly, a
dismissal of my lived experience.
And it made me wonder why arewe so quick to defend one part
(04:06):
of our identity whileoverlooking the rest?
Why do we defend our identityso fiercely?
And I think there are a fewreasons why we feel this weight
to defend our identity.
To defend our identity,colonial legacy, right, which
(04:33):
I've said in various socialmedia posts.
For centuries Dominicans havebeen taught that Spanish
heritage is synonymous withsophistication and superiority,
and the closer that you are toEuropean ideals, the more you're
seen as worthy.
And that legacy has beenheavily emphasized in the
Dominican Republic.
(04:53):
It was brutally enforced by oneof the worst dictators in Latin
America, trujillo.
I mean, just look up theParsley Massacre, you would see
that this legacy, this coloniallegacy to attach ourselves so
(05:15):
fiercely to Spain as kind oflike our mother country, as kind
of like our thing that gives uslife in the Dominican Republic
was brutally beat into us by notjust this dictator before him
(05:35):
and after him, and thatcontinues on to this day, but
(05:59):
what Trujillo did was hecemented that in blood, you know
, to show what can happen if youdare uplift the African and the
Taino legacy that are also partof the Dominican Republic, you
see.
So that right, there was likeboom, cemented that there's also
pride and resilience.
So let's be real, dominicans,we love our culture.
We love it.
I think, like when I firstimmigrated to the United States,
(06:19):
people would try to guess whereI came from and I would just
say I'm Dominican, and whichwill leave people aghast right
away.
You know, I have learned a lotof things since then, and I have
learned a lot about my mixedheritage, my mixed legacy and
everything that makes me me.
So I am able now to presentmyself to other people in the
(06:45):
United States easier, butnevertheless, we love our
culture, and rightly so.
I mean, we've built somethingbeautiful out of a painful
history.
But sometimes that pride canmorph into defensiveness,
especially when we feel likesomeone is challenging the
(07:05):
narrative we've been told tobelieve and the narrative that
we have accepted as well,because it's not just like
somebody told us to believe.
They told us we took it fromthem and we accepted it.
We carried it out and we aregiving it to the generation
after generation that comesafter us.
So it's like the sunk costfallacy, right?
(07:30):
You have put so much time andeffort, you have brainwashed
yourself for so long with thislie, that when anybody objects
to it or tells you somethingdifferent, you automatically get
defensive with it, because thenyou're thinking about is my
(07:53):
entire life a lie?
Why do I need to getuncomfortable and see myself
through a different lens?
You see, so it's veryuncomfortable for people to come
out of a belief system, right,that they have believed and
accepted their entire lives, orfor most of their lives, to
(08:17):
something else, even if thatsomething else is factual.
They also have fear ofrejection.
That's another big one, and Isaid it on my video when I
talked about this, theseinteractions that I've been
having.
Fear is a powerful motivator,people, and that's what Trujillo
thrived on.
(08:37):
He instilled fear in theDominican folk, and now that
fear lingers, whether spoken orunspoken, that if we dare to
admit being more than justSpanish, we will lose our place
in the world.
(08:57):
Other people will view us asless than Spanish, because that
has been ingrained into us, thatif we don't identify or present
ourselves as Spanishdescendants, as Spaniard
descendants, and we instead, youknow, either accept our mixed
(09:19):
heritage, you know, and embraceAfrican and Lutaino ancestry as
well, or we dare say we areAfrican-descendant Dominican or
we are indigenous-descendantDominican.
Oof, that is like you say thatin the middle of a group of
Dominicans and they will chewyour ass out Because we don't
(09:46):
talk about Bruno, we don't talkabout that.
You know what I'm saying?
So, but that's because of thatfear, fear of rejection, fear of
losing your place in thehierarchy back in the day, and
even now, fear of incarceration,fear of violence against you.
(10:06):
Fear of incarceration, fear ofviolence against you.
Come on now, and if, out of allthese three motivators that are
here as to why Dominicans tendto fiercely defend that Spanish
identity, I will say fear is thestrongest of them all is the
strongest of them all.
(10:27):
But now let me tell you aboutwhat happens, right, when you
become lost in this dividedmindset, right, and this, like I
feel like this is a fracturedmindset to have, because you're
(10:47):
tracking one of your manylegacies that you have.
So I feel that it's divided andit's fracture, so you're not
really embracing your fullidentity, right?
And here's what can happen whenyou don't embrace that.
And I've been there before.
I was born in the DominicanRepublic.
(11:09):
I came to the United States,okay, and I was that one person
because I learned that from myfamily, I learned that from the
island, okay.
And I know Dominicans are goingto come for me when I say that,
because whenever I talk aboutthe things that I learned over
there, that I had to unlearnhere, they get mad at that too.
(11:30):
Once again, because pride, right, we take pride in our culture,
we take pride in our educationand we take pride in who we are,
and that is good.
I tell everyone of my homecountry, everyone.
But I am not ignorant to thefact that there are things that
(11:52):
need to change in that it.
And here's what happened.
If that comes to fruition, ifwe erase that, when we defend
(12:29):
just one part of that identityat the expense of the others,
we're not just erasing history,which is already dangerous
enough.
When we erase history, we arealso erasing ourselves.
Think about it.
If we only see ourselves asspanish, what happens to the
african rhythms in our music?
The tiny rhythms in our music,the Taino techniques in our
cooking, the resilience andcreativity that come from
(12:55):
generations of blending cultures.
More importantly, what messagedoes this send to future
generations?
By ignoring or downplaying ourfull heritage, we teach them to
reject part of themselves.
And that rejection doesn't juststop with the self people.
It spills over into how wetreat others, and that's where I
(13:16):
draw the line.
For example, it's nocoincidence that this
hyper-focus on Spanish identityoften comes with an undercurrent
of anti-Blackness oranti-Haitian sentiment.
It's no coincidence those aretied.
When we idolize whiteness andEuropeanness, we create a
(13:39):
hierarchy, the same hierarchythat they instituted, where
anything that doesn't fit thatmold it's less than, and that
hurts us all, all of us, becauseall of us are mixed, you know.
(14:01):
So here's my takeaway what Ilearned from this comment,
because that is what thispodcast is about.
I know I'm heavily on thepreaching side right now, but
let me tell you, on thepreaching side right now, but
let me tell you, I mean, I havelearned so much from interacting
and dissecting and thinking onthese comments and writing about
(14:24):
it.
I've been doing so many blogposts and recordings on this
because, to me, I feel aresponsibility, as someone who
is Dominican, to dissect this,to learn from this and to share
with other people in the hopesthat we can learn to be better.
(14:44):
We can learn to identify withour mixed heritage, our mixed
heritage, which is African,spaniard and Taino.
Okay, and here's what I learned, specifically that defending
identity is human.
It's very human, and the reasonwhy I'm so chill about it and
(15:06):
why I'm so chill in the commentsand very polite and things of
that nature, is because Iunderstand that as humans, we
try to stay as comfortable aspossible.
We don't want to getuncomfortable.
Big feelings make us feel as ifwe are in the danger zone and
(15:28):
when you're trying to pull outsomebody from an ideology that
they have held on for so long,that's a very uncomfortable
feeling to have.
Even if it's coming from acomplete stranger that they
don't even know that is writingthese things and comments in the
internet, they feel as if youare personally attacking them
(15:50):
because you're scraping at theidentity that they have formed
about themselves.
So, because I understand thatit's so recent, why I'm so chill
with it and I have chosen tocontinue to talk and reply as my
energy sees fit, whilemaintaining my calm and my cool
(16:14):
and not getting too hype aboutit.
But now we need to be mindfulof what we're defending now and
why.
You know, like I get it, thatdefending is a human thing to do
, but I also know that we, ashumans, we have reasoning right,
(16:35):
we have these brains that canreason, that we can construe
logic.
So I ask I always ask great,you're defending, but what are
you defending and why are youdefending it?
Because when I read that comment, I realized that it wasn't just
about me or my experience inEurope.
(16:57):
It was about something deeper acollective fear of facing our
full history and the messy,beautiful complexity that comes
with it.
Because, as I unlearned thatideology right, and my first
(17:17):
instance of unlearning startedin college, when I joined this
third world organization and itwas filled with Caribbean folks,
black Caribbean folks and oneAfrican-American person, and
through conversation with themand with friends, right, just
(17:38):
friendly conversation, nopressure, no nothing I
understood the commonality thereand I saw myself in them and
organically, I startedunderstanding that I don't just
come from Spain, I don't justcome from the colonizers.
(18:00):
Part of me, the other two partsof me, came from those folks
that were colonized and Iremember being in the shower
because that's where I usuallyhave these introspective
thoughts and really coming, justcentering on that thought that
(18:24):
I am half colonizer and halfcolonized, and how I come from
ancestors, and it makes me wantto cry from ancestors and it
makes me want to cry when Ithink about it.
And that's why I'm soempathetic to these people in my
comments, because I know thebig emotions that they must be
feeling, you know, because itmakes me want to cry just
(18:45):
thinking about that moment whenI centered that thought and I
was alone in the shower, just meand the water coming down on me
, and it was as if the water wascleansing everything that was
not meant to be there.
And I stood there, grounded inthat thought, understanding that
(19:05):
my legacy is half of thosepeople that inflected deep pain
and violence on the other halfof me.
It is tough to come to thatrealization, to know that that
is what makes you you now.
But what empowers me is knowingthat I choose now who to be.
(19:32):
I choose now who to be and Ichoose now to look out for
injustices and I choose now totalk about injustices and reply
to comments, right, that try toinvalidate that mixed legacy
that we have, because I knowthat when we try to erase that
legacy, we're, in a way, erasingour history, and I don't want
(19:56):
that history to repeat itself,because, let me tell you, our
identity is not fragile at all.
It doesn't need defending.
In fact, the more we embraceevery part of it the African,
the Spanish, the Taino thestronger we become.
So I want to leave you withthis question, vasitos what
(20:20):
parts of your identity do youfind yourself defending the most
, and is that defense rooted inpride, fear or something else?
Take some time to reflect on itthis week and, if you're feeling
brave, share your thoughts withme.
(20:40):
I told you before I don't getthat much traction on Instagram.
This comment that I made onsomebody else's video has gotten
a lot of traction, but usuallyI don't.
So if you want to come to myInstagram is at
haveacupofjoannie Come over,leave a comment, send me a
message or tag me on yourresponse on Instagram and let's
(21:03):
keep this conversation going,because it's one that we all
need to have.
But let me tell you what'scoming next.
Well, this is all I have fortoday's episode, and I thank you
for your time with me.
Your time is precious, andthank you so much for giving it
to me for being open to thisdialogue.
(21:24):
Next week, we're diving intoanother layer of this topic.
The problem with this phrase itdidn't happen to me.
With this phrase, it didn'thappen to me.
We'll talk about why dismissingsomeone else's experience hurts
more than it helps.
Until then, I want you to takecare of yourselves, embrace your
(21:45):
roots.
See you next time, bye.
Thank you so much for listening.
I want to hear from you.
Leave me a comment, do a ratingif you can on the podcast,
share it with somebody you love,but, most importantly, come
back.
See you next time, bye.
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