Grey like them.

Their world is grey. Grey skies, grey lives and grey tv screens.

In order to see me they put on their grey screeners and tell me that I am just like everyone else. Not true. While I want the acceptance, I won’t be taken with a flimsy wash. I am Mexican-American. My life is not only different, it is everything to me. Every time you say the my food is wrong, or you sneer at my clothes you are guilty of the racism and inequity the has been put on me.

When you see your son with me, I can see the hope that he will leave me for a ‘serious’ wife. That my earrings and dresses are not enough for your son who went to the number 8 college in the world (he told me so on our first date). – By the way, is that really the last time that you were proud of him?

The coldness of your family I can learn to exist with – never saying hi because I stole your son away and the general snarl that I get at dinner times– but when that coldness surrounds me in a blizzard of ‘why would you want your mouth to hurt when eating’ and ‘I can’t take my phone out on the street, its worth more than the annual income’ I know what you are saying. You are telling me, just like the world has been telling me, that I will never be enough for you.

I heard you. I saw the hate in your eyes and heard it in your hearts and I have to say that I feel guilty for being rude in pointing out your rudeness here.

Your son thanks me for opening his eyes to my world and the racism that exists, but he isn’t all the way there yet and I’m not sure that he ever will be.

I have to make the decision to give up pieces of myself in hopes that one day he will tell you that what you are saying to and about me and my culture is not okay.

As we spend more time with you, I don’t think that that day will ever come, because he knows that you will never speak to him again. And you wouldn’t because you are lost souls.

Grey is your color.