The Perpetual Delusion of Culture Vultures
This is a very unpolished reaction piece to the Hilaria Baldwin kerfuffle.
This weekend, I fell down a Twitter rabbit hole of jokes about a woman named Hilaria (Hillary?) Baldwin.
Don’t know what I’m talking about? Cool, let’s just dive right in.
Hilaria Baldwin (née Hillary Hayward-Thomas) is a white woman who grew up in Boston to a white family. She is not a Spaniard but has been affecting a Spanish accent and has been making vague claims of being mixed race for a decade. She is married to Alec Baldwin, is a yoga teacher and social media influencer. My personal reason for reading stuff about her is that she claims to be “from many places.” She even claimed to be of mixed ancestry in this interview, which is bogus. She recently got hit by the Twitter Cancel Train because she posted videos to her Instagram account that attempted to “explain” her drifting accent. And naturally, an irate pile-on ensued.
Baldwin follows a growing pattern of cultural pathology where white women decide to create a fake persona for attention or financial gain. You know who I’m talking about. Rachel Dolezal. Jessica Krug. In a less malevolent form, I think of Lindsay Lohan and her very public adoption of other people’s accents. (Evidently she’s test driving an Australian accent now.)
Maybe it’s because these women feel a genuine sense of connection to these cultures they are trying to mimic. Maybe they’re trying to cure their own insecurities with poor coping methods. We’ll never really know. But how this lands for people of mixed racial or cultural heritage (like me) is a different matter. Reading about these women always makes me feel unsettled and angry.
My ethnic and cultural backgrounds do not easily fix in a box. I visually look racially ambiguous. Explaining my heritage requires a discussion and maybe a map and a white board. I’m mixed race (Korean (mom) and Finnish / Scottish / European-ish?(dad).) Part of my paternal line are Finnish immigrants to Brasil (yes, I will continue to spell Brasil with an “S” it’s how they spell it) — they’re white folk who also have Sámi roots, and are now 3 generations in to being Brasileiros. It took me a long time to feel like I could claim being Latinx since it’s only 1/4 of my heritage. Also, my people are white and speak Portuguese, not Spanish. Anyway, see what I mean? It gets complicated.
I watched some of Hilaria’s Instagram stories, where she tries to explain herself. (Spoiler: she’s as clear as mud and explains nothing.) I mean, I get that family narratives can get a little complicated, and she’s clearly proud that they “ live abroad.” (This, of course, again, is in stark contrast to her own mother’s reaction to her odd cultural affectation. Go check Leni’s thread, it’s all there.)
But in the spirit of empathy, I started thinking about my own journey and the Texan dialect I have pick up along the way. I realized that I had experienced an adjacent sort of journey to Hilaria’s (maybe?) Let’s get to that in a second.
Before I dive into that, I want to make some important points that can’t get lost:
What Hilaria, Rachel etc. all do is a harmful and phony act of cultural pantomime.
That is a judgement and my opinion. People might get bent out of shape about call-out culture. But in these types of cases, I feel like being loudly called-out and even shamed is an important part of redefining cultural etiquette. What these women are doing is wrong and harmful and deserve loud, negative consequences.
This behavior is enraging because it is the height of cultural theft.
It is a deceitful act of chicanery. Like LITERALLY the definition of the word chicanery: dishonest talk or behavior that is used to deceive people. Sometimes it is grift — people benefit from increased influence or financial gain as a result of their deception.
Additionally, the reason it catches a visceral reaction and inflames some of us — particularly those that live at unique ethnic and cultural intersections or at the margin of dominant culture — is that these cultural frauds seem to get away with this charade with little or no negative consequences. So the harm continues. Their public attention surfaces doubt that some of us are forever holding on to, wondering whether we can genuinely identify as a part of a cultural or ethnic group.
Moreover, I have seen how having an accent bears a real negative penalty for people in the workplace. I am reminded of stories I have heard, particularly from Latinx women who speak English and still retain accents from their Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking countries of origin. They encounter daily micro- and macro-aggressions because of their accents and heritage. The women I am thinking of are corporate executives who identify as Latinx and are ethnically white, fair-skinned, sometimes even blonde. The negative treatment is even more pronounced for Latinx people with Indigenous or African heritage. The point is, it’s bad for everyone with an accent. They have been passed up for promotions, had to deal with workplace bullying, and been made to feel like outsiders. Their accents negatively impact their lives, their career and their ability to provide for their families.
That is why culture vultures make people who are genuinely from those cultures angry. Their behavior perpetuates HARM, bias and racism. Let’s temporarily leave aside the other discussion that needs to happen about Spain versus Latin American , colorism, colonialism, slavery, etc.— there is a lot to unpack here.
But through my haze of rage, I tried to look at another, more personal perspective.
Let me tell a story about my own dialect drift.
I call it “protective camouflage.”
In 2009, I moved to Texas to learn how to organize and build political power for public school employees. Texas, like some regions of the United States (New York, the upper Midwest, Chicago, Philly, etc.) has an AGGRESSIVE culture and distinctive Texan dialect. Really, that should read dialects — as in plural — because the dialect in the Rio Grande Valley is different from Houston (which also has several dialects within it’s city) or the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex or El Paso or Beaumont. People don’t usually grasp the sheer size of Texas, or that there are at least five different cultural and geographic regions to the state (and dozens of other cultures within the five regions.) While I suspect suburbs and broadcast television have homogenized some parts of American dialect and culture, Texas continues to hold fast to a particular way of living. If you’re a non-native Texan who moves to Texas, accepting this and conforming to it helps. A little.
So, context. I lived in a handful of places before moving to Texas. I grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, which is a suburb of Washington, D.C.. I lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for six years, which is the border to the midwest and has its own distinct culture and dialect (“haw yinz doin’?”) I spent a year in Albany, New York, and then six years back again in Washington, D.C., in the city. I grew up in a household that spoke four languages — English, Spanish, Portuguese and Korean. I am not truly fluent in any language but English. Like a lot of kids of immigrants, I understand enough that I can shout back in English when I’m being yelled at in another language. Most of my friends were also kids of immigrants or first generation immigrants themselves, and had a similar dynamic with their families.
(If you’re wondering why I’m detailing all this nonsense, let me agree with you and say yes, it is nonsense but also it’s not hard to do. Hilaria makes a big point of saying — multiple times — how hard it is to detail her background. It really is not, I did it in 137 words.)
I was not prepared for the level of subtle and direct racism I was about to encounter in Texas. The first year was so profoundly hard. I had leaders that I worked for who actively encouraged me to conform to Texan culture. They had the best intentions and wanted me to be successful at my job, which was local and state political organizing. A significant part of the job was building trust with people.
One supervisor blatantly told me “sugar, you need to slow down your speech pattern because you’re scaring the leaders with your Yankee accent.” I didn’t know how a relatively neutral mid-Atlantic accent could be Yankee, but whatever. I tried. I remember coming home to DC to visit friends a year in to my new Texan life, and some of them asking me why the hell I had a fake ass Texan accent? To which I responded: THIS IS MY PROTECTIVE CAMOUFLAGE.
The more I let my dialect drift into a Texan twang, the more I saw that it was actually easier to connect with leaders and union members. I had to influence people that I had no authority over and you can’t do that when you’re an outsider. Dialect is a way to build inherent trust.
Humans are built for mimicry and we respond strongly to being mirrored. Trust me, the Republicans have done a better job at this that the Democrats. Years ago, when phone banking was more effective, GOP operatives would hire people locally and often get more traction with voters because they paid attention to local dialect. When I managed phone operations for national campaigns, I paid attention to this detail. If I could choose where the call centers were and match them to the regional dialect, I would have a measurably better impact in persuading voters. Also Southern call centers tended to have a lower refusal rate than call centers in the Northeast. [insert shruggie] There is something inviting and nonthreatening about the Southern dialect, for some people.
Anyway, I ended up marrying a Texan. You really will absorb the speech patterns of the people around you, especially family. I eventually found myself saying “y’all” just as naturally as breathing (I’d say that took about 5 years? Maybe less.) I hired a stylist and changed the way I dressed. I even took makeup lessons because I got tired of a couple of leaders telling me that “you’d be pretty if I would just wear a little lipstick.” [EYEROLL] Listen, I was a theater geek once upon a time. I just treated it like performance, which it certainly was.
But through it all, I tried to be very clear that I wasn’t a native Texan because I wasn’t born in Texas. (People take that very seriously here.) I never expected to be a “true” Texan. But the acts of cultural adaptation seemed to work. People stopped asking me where I was from, and started asking if I was from Houston. (Houston has a very large Asian population. Insert tired shruggie.)
Eleven years later (ie. today), what can I tell you? Austin — where I live — does not have an aggressive “Texan” dialect. Lots of people are from hometowns outside of Texas. But if I have to spend extended time in parts of Houston or Dallas, sure, I might come back speaking with a different dialect for a little while. I might walk around with a bit more makeup than usual. It’s a vestigial habit of self protection. What started as camouflage has become absorbed as an authentic part of my identity. If I ever move back East, who knows if these artifacts will linger. They might just get displaced by new artifact and new dialect.
[Deep sigh. Big shrug. Can’t lose.]
I think about Madonna and Megan Markle and their protective camouflage when they moved to England. How Americans and Brits would ridicule them for the drift in their dialect. I don’t know their lives and yet I see contours that look familiar. I’ve only spent two weeks in England, but I will never forget the excruciating experience of being stared at every time I spoke. Getting contact solution at a Boots was an ordeal. Even in simple transactions, there was always an undercurrent of hostility that I felt from everyone. Imagine deciding to live in that? I can understand why someone might do what they can to blend into an intractable dominant culture. Even if the new dialect might initially sound phony to some.
Authenticity isn’t easy. It’s a mutable, dynamic process of trying to surface our truest selves. It can take a whole lifetime to discover. Maybe we want to be an entirely different person or circumstances demand adaptation. So we start to add and subtract from ourselves. Some of it might feel natural, some of it requires studied practice. But it’s important to check that our integrity is intact. If the reinvention is radically different than the previous self, what is really driving those choices? What is the real you? What is artificial? Why are you doing it?
As I think about my own experience and what we know about Madonna and Megan Markle (please forgive me for grouping my experiences with these celebrities), I did realize that there is a common thread of trying to assimilate. Which is predicated on survival. Not a choice to — as someone said on twitter — wear someone else’s culture like costume jewelry.
So let’s go back to Hilaria. What the hell Hilaria is doing? Because she doesn’t need to assimilate. She is white, married to a wealthy white celebrity, living in a country that is still run by white people. If her affected accent is protective camouflage, what exactly is she protecting against? Why the need to seem some phony version of “exotic”? Also, this charade has been playing out publicly FOR A DECADE. She can’t even commit to a character of her own invention. This isn’t assimilation or discovery of self. This is a tacky, disingenuous cultural pantomime.
Human beings, on occasion, are fairly good at spotting fakes. Nothing makes for better clickbait than a good takedown or a festering cover-up. Thanks to social media and hubris, we find ourselves in a target-rich environment.
For the rest of us who continue to struggle with claiming our authentic identities because we live in an undefined space, let me say that I see you. There aren’t any quick or easy answers. Belonging to a group is important. It ensures our survival on many levels. But conforming just to belong is an act of self-harm.
If you’re being truthful in your evolving authenticity, it won’t be hard to be faithful to yourself. Parts of the journey might be awkward. I would suggest exploring in a private way with trusted friends. But yes, explore! Try things on, figure out what works for you, what sits right in your gut when you claim it and walk around in it. Ultimately, there should be nothing to cover up and nothing to defend, because it is your truest self. It should be unforced and a natural expression of who you really are.
I keep thinking about Dolly Parton. She’s famous for saying, “[f]igure out who you are, and do it on purpose.” It’s a good guiding star.
