Sometimes harm doesn’t announce itself. It just stands in the doorway with a smile, looking you up and down like it’s deciding whether you count.
When I met my husband’s family—back when he was just my boyfriend—I felt something I couldn’t name. A tension, a stare that lingered too long, eyes dragging up and down my body like I was being appraised, not welcomed. I told myself they were just curious. New person. New girlfriend. New dynamic. I swallowed it.
But time has a way of sharpening blurry things.
There were little clues: nicknames they used inside their own family that were “harmless,” but never actually harmless. The way darker cousins were teased. The way certain people were warned about the sun. The way certain features were pointed out like flaws. All tiny paper cuts you don’t feel individually until your skin starts burning.
I didn’t know then that they referred to me—when I wasn’t around—as “that Black girl.”
Not my name. Not who I was. Just a color they decided was too much of something.
I didn’t know any of that ... until life ripped the blindfold off.
One day, it all came out. The comments, the biases, the unspoken hierarchies. And then, in one moment I will never forget, someone crossed a line that should never exist in any world that claims it holds love. They said words soaked in a worldview older than them, uglier than them, and nowhere near about me. I was told, straight to my face, that a Black person and a white person being together was an abomination.
Never mind that my husband is a white-skinned Latino.
Never mind that I’m Dominican.
Never mind that our ancestors would probably laugh themselves hoarse at the idea of “purity” in any of our bloodlines. I walked away from that day shaken—angry, hurt, humiliated, and stunned. It’s a strange thing to be told who you are by someone who has never truly looked at you.
But here’s the part that surprised me: The healing didn’t come from them apologizing (because they didn’t).
It didn’t come from pretending it didn’t matter (I tried).
It came a year later, in the middle of a conversation with Guatemalan American author Héctor Tobar.
Tobar made me see that colorism is not logic—it’s legacy. A cracked lens passed down so many times people forget it’s broken.
During Audible’s Latino and Hispanic Heritage celebrations, our Unidos impact group invited Héctor to have a conversation with us about Our Migrant Souls—his exploration of Latinidad, mixedness, ancestry, and the contradictions we inherit without consent. Tobar talked about the impossibility of purity in cultures built on collision. He talked about the identities we’re taught to guard even when they make no sense. Hearing him speak about what it means to be Latino, what it means to belong, what it means to be the product of histories we don’t choose, it did something to me: It made me realize that the ugliness I met wasn’t about me. It wasn’t my worth, my beauty, my identity, my place in the world. It was someone else’s confusion, someone else’s inheritance, someone else’s warped idea of purity inside a culture built entirely from mixtures. Tobar made me see that colorism is not logic—it’s legacy. A cracked lens passed down so many times people forget it’s broken.
And suddenly, for the first time in years, I felt something unheavy: What happened to me wasn’t about me. It wasn’t even about my now husband.
It was about a person clinging to a worldview that never served them, a worldview that shrinks them, embarrasses them, exposes their fragility, and has absolutely nothing to do with my worth.
Their hate wasn’t a reflection of me—it was a confession of them.
That worldview isn’t powerful—it’s pathetic.
And whatever was projected onto me wasn’t truth—it was fear.
Maybe a woman who looked like me once stood their ground. Maybe their own insecurities festered until they needed somewhere to land. Maybe they never learned to love themselves enough to see beyond their conditioning.
But that’s not my burden, because my skin is not a warning. My presence is not an intrusion.
And my existence? That is not negotiable.
Thanks for hearing me out.
