Tubing and Almond Joy helped me understand my identity better
I recently found out that I inherited a very expensive family heirloom from my dad; I inherited his bad gums.
Over the past fifteen years, I have spent good money after bad on that precious family heirloom.
I was thinking about this because I recently looked at myself in the mirror and I thought, “Oh, my God! I have so many teeth!”
You ever think that; you open your mouth, and you are painfully aware your smile looks like a barber comb?
It might not always be this way; as I mentioned, my dad’s gum disease is out to get me.
Maybe at that point I’ll get some of those prosthetics so popular in Los Angeles.
Do you know what I’m talking about? Those 2x prosthetic teeth?
I love talking to people in LA because they live in a bubble with a vocabulary that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. This exotic vocabulary typically revolves around the way people look.
For example, I was having coffee with a friend in Pasadena, and he was telling me about gummy smiles. If you don’t know what it is, “Gummy Smiles” is when someone’s smile has too much gum.
But you don’t have to live with a gummy smile.
No, no, no.
You can pay to have your gums removed.
Maybe at that point you will have a toothier smile.
I’m guessing.
My friend didn’t tell me what the smile becomes when it loses its excess gum.
Later in our conversation, my friend explained that actors and models tend to have better luck at callbacks when people can’t tell their nationality or ethnicity.
This is known in casting circles as being “Racially ambiguous.”
I love the term!
I had never heard it before, but I knew exactly what he meant because, at times, I have felt racially ambiguous myself.
But not on the outside.
On the outside, it is very clear I’m Latino. If I ever try to deny it and another Latino is present, I would be told that I look so Mexican that the only thing missing from my forehead is a painted "Nopal" (or cactus).
Even though I’m not Mexican. I’m Colombian.
I still knew what he meant because I often feel racially ambiguous on the inside.
I’ve been living in the United States for more than 20 years now. The only connection to my roots is a loosely monitored WhatsApp group I’m part of with my high school graduating class.
The group started as a way to celebrate each other’s accomplishments and quickly turned into a platform to share porn because boys are disgusting.
I felt uncomfortable crowd-sharing and party-watching porn, so I opted out, and I don’t even have that connection anymore.
Once, as part of a corporate icebreaker, I was asked if I was a chocolate bar, which one would I be.
One of my colleagues said she would be an Almond Joy because she was brown on the outside but white on the inside. And she said it with a bit of snide.
There was a misplaced pride in the statement, as if her sugary coconut filling was the one thing responsible for her appreciation of the finer things in life, and she wanted to diss the 85% dark chocolate on the outside.
I felt at a loss trying to find a chocolate bar that represented me.
It wasn’t Almond Joy.
I knew I’m not white on the inside because I have been tubing in Kauai with my wife’s family, who are all white...
And tubing is not an activity brown people would choose to do.
Tubing is only an activity white people would choose to do because the kind of calm and ease you need to bring to tubing is something inaccessible to brown people.
Brown people can’t just glide down the river, letting the river take us where we need to go. We would much rather walk erratically alongside the river, trying to get to where we are going faster.
We always have a pep in our step that comes from figuring out where the next bite is coming from, when the next paycheck is going to hit, from sliding our credit card and engaging our core as if proper form is going to make funds magically appear in our bank accounts.
So tubing is terrifying to me, and that’s how I know I’m not white on the inside.
I think I’m mostly brown with a little bit of black, which I credit for being able to keep the beat — which was confirmed by an Ancestry app. So don’t cancel me.
I have small spots of white because I jokingly use words like accouterments and soup du jour, and I enjoy the occasional wheatgrass shot.
But there is no such chocolate bar.
If I have to compare myself to food, I think I’m more of a savory dish like a Risotto Ai Funghi because mushrooms turn everything brown in the same way my brownness colors my life.
My friend didn’t tell me if I can label myself racially ambiguous, if I’m constantly conflicted by my racial identity.
Hopefully this feeling will go away before my gum does.
