Beurette in your web search engine and you will be bombarded with thousands of porn results. In 2016, Beurette was the most searched term on Pornhub.fr and today, some consider it a racial slur. What was once a badge of pride of origin and heritage, has been reduced to a video tag on xHamster. As a matter of fact, that is now the only context in which it thrives. I am not naïve to how cultural and political forces shift and reconstruct narrative. Perhaps, this is why I am overprotective of mine. My experience is capital that I refused to squander; not for Debbie, not for her Feminist plaything, not for 3 euros an hour. “Well, you’ll write the interview guide for me, won’t you?” Debbie asked. “It just counterintuitive and even if I did write the interview guide, I think it will be hard, to mimic the natural conversational flow of a podcast, you know?” I asserted, avoiding eye-contact. Debbie’s lips began to twitch, she was itching to interrupt me. “I will not apologize for being a white woman, okay? Like, I know I am white, and I am privileged and whatever but that doesn’t mean this is something I shouldn’t be talking about.” It was a surreal moment – I felt as if I had left my body, and was looking at myself, across the room, judging and pointing: token brown woman, silent brown woman, passive and complicit, tip-towing around her boss’s whiteness. I could feel my throat swelling
up. I pushed my glasses up on the bridge of my nose as to not let Debbie get a glimpse of my watery eyes. I don’t remember much of what was said after. I do remember feeling emotionally drained at the end of my shift, disillusioned, and cynical of the world. As I sat down on my desk to write my resignation letter that night, I kept thinking of Debbie, who seems to move through the world blissfully unaware of her whiteness until its dominance is called into question. Reni Eddo-Lodge, who can no longer talk to white people about race, said she “can no longer engage with the gulf of emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of color articulates their experience” for “their intent is often not to listen or learn, but to exert their power, to prove me wrong, to emotionally drain me, and to rebalance the status quo” (Eddo-Lodge, xii). Full of dread, I glared at my computer screen, repeatedly asking myself how I can synthesize a clear case of appropriation to AUP’s Career’s office. Typing and deleting, moving between raw emotion and rigid diplomacy. How do I eloquently phrase, “Debbie doesn’t give a shit about Maghrebian women?” How do I say, “Debbie showed no genuine interest in educating herself about the issues she wanted to discuss on her podcast, only in consuming, capitalizing, using my experience
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