Being a Person of Color Doesn’t Grant Immunity From Internalized Racism

It's hard to sit with the feelings from a racist's view. Although I am a POC, I am not black, and I do not know what it is like to live that life.

I do know what it is like to be brown. I know what it is like to be treated as someone who should be subservient to the majority, even to some in the black community.

I also know what it is like to pander to the majority group with a "pick me" perspective because I didn't have a tribe to belong to. My own people did not accept me as "one of them" because I was Americanized, and I do not speak my native language.

It's hard to navigate through the concept of racism when we are experiencing a life of bigotry. It's messy.

It's also hard to argue against racism with POC who have identified the black community as 'others' while they, themselves, complain about racism.

Then, as someone who has been generationally conditioned with racist lenses while complaining about racism, it's shocking to realize how much you've been conditioned to accept as the norm that is actually racist.

My brother got a degree in Ethnic Studies and found a tribe with the black community. He married a black woman, and that was when I saw the ugly really surface with the people in my heritage.

A person who identified themselves as a member of the moral and privileged race majority shared a moment when she assumed a black man stuck an unpaid product in his pocket. She admitted she didn't realize how deeply embedded her racism was, and she was deeply regretful for her words.

It's a lot to realize how the racial majority perpetuates generational conditioning that normalizes racist attitudes. When racism is embedded in songs, legendary advertisement jingles, athletics, and entertainment, it's frustrating to navigate the oppressive prose we have adopted, and that can make it hard to listen to understand.

Monte Mader shared that she was raised to dominate through verbal prose by quoting chapter and verse and disallowing any oppositional contribution. This is noticeable in the current racial majority's favorite news entertainment (not news), where it's louder, more aggravated posturing than sharing information and polite debate.

This toxic behavior has infiltrated our congressional hearings with the political party identified with racial and gender oppression and cruelty, while sanctimoniously waving a book of faith around for reputational optics that panders to their target audience for the votes they are hoping for.

As hard as it can be to sit with the words of what the oppressed are trying to say, it can be hard to understand what someone is trying to communicate when our minds are too busy sifting through generational learned behavior.

It isn't easy to listen to understand when we've learned to interrupt when we feel uncomfortable, and to get louder when we feel unheard, and attacked. It's also hard to understand difficult concepts when our cognitive skills are stunted.

Behavioral patterns are hard cycles to break. They can be broken. It involves a metric ton of gruelling work to see the messy middle. Once we see the messy middle, it's harder to get ourselves to dive into it and wallow in it to embrace everything between the black-and-white thinking we were raised to believe was 'fact.' When, in fact, it was a lot of historical lies to maintain power and glory.

There's truth to Paolo Friere's stance that 'the oppressed become the oppressors,' and it is my current stance that this is the oppressor's greatest fear. It isn't necessarily that they know or don't know what they are doing is wrong. They're afraid that what the oppressed experienced will become their experience, which is why they eagerly and fervently cast the stones from their glass houses.

Intra‑POC racism is real, and it’s rarely talked about.

Some POC adopt anti‑Blackness as a way to climb closer to proximity to whiteness.

It’s painful to witness, especially when those same people complain about racism while perpetuating it.

This isn’t because they’re uniquely cruel.

It’s because they’ve been taught that:

- hierarchy is natural

- whiteness is safety

- Blackness is danger

- solidarity is optional

Those messages are old. They’re global. They’re colonial. And they’re deeply embedded.

Many POC silently wrestle with how:

• You can be marginalized and still absorb the majority’s worldview.

• You can be harmed by racism and still enact it toward others.

• You can long for belonging so intensely that you contort yourself into a “pick me” shape without realizing it.

That’s not hypocrisy. That’s conditioning.

When you grow up in a society where whiteness is the default, the norm, the standard, the “right way,” you internalize those hierarchies even when they’re hurting you.

And when your own community treats you as “not enough”—not brown enough, not traditional enough, not fluent enough—it creates a vacuum where assimilation feels like survival.

You’re not alone in that.