What Whiteness Looks Like in Cuenca

Notes from inside whiteness, after thirty-three years of paying attention.

The easiest way to understand whiteness in Cuenca is to notice what changes when Jonathan leaves the room.

I did not arrive in Cuenca newly aware of race or suddenly introduced to the idea of white privilege. That work started long before we moved, and a lot of it sharpened during the years I've spent with Jonathan.

I was born and raised in Detroit, but inside almost entirely white environments. White neighborhoods, white Catholic schools, white social circles, white family systems. Detroit in the 1970s was already one of the most segregated cities in the country, and growing up white inside it meant being trained, mostly without anyone naming it, to treat that segregation as background rather than design. Whiteness was treated as normal and neutral, which meant everyone else became the category.

Meeting Jonathan in college changed the trajectory of my life, though not in the simplified way interracial relationships are sometimes framed. He did not exist to "teach" me about racism, and I resist narratives that turn Black partners into educational experiences for white people. But loving someone whose reality moved through the world differently than mine made certain forms of denial impossible to maintain. Over the last thirty-three years, I've had to relearn a lot of things I originally absorbed without question.

"The easiest way to understand whiteness in Cuenca is to notice what changes when Jonathan enters or leaves the room."

Part of being anti-racist, at least for me, means accepting that racism is not limited to openly hateful people. White supremacy is structural, cultural, historical, and deeply embedded in how white Americans are socialized, including those of us who think of ourselves as progressive. I don't believe white people become exempt from that conditioning because we are politically aware, interracially partnered, or willing to use the right language. None of us are standing outside the system watching it happen to other people.

Moving abroad did not erase any of that. If anything, it gave me a different angle from which to see it.

Some things feel different in Cuenca than they do in the United States. Some things feel painfully familiar, and some dynamics became more visible because we were suddenly operating outside the specific racial framework of the US while still carrying all of our conditioning with us.

One of the clearest examples is how differently people behave depending on whether Jonathan is with me.

When I'm alone, white expats often speak to me with a level of immediate familiarity that has very little to do with who I actually am. Conversations can shift quickly into complaints about Ecuadorians, frustrations about "how things work here," or comments that reveal an expectation that life abroad should still revolve around white comfort and white standards, even if nobody says it directly.

"What stands out to me now is not just what gets said, but how often people assume I'm someone they can safely say it to."

Sometimes the racism is overt. More often, it hides inside language that sounds socially acceptable on the surface: conversations about "safety," "professionalism," "efficiency," "education," or whether a neighborhood feels "civilized." The vocabulary changes depending on how self-aware people are, but the hierarchy underneath it usually feels pretty recognizable.

What stands out to me now is not just what gets said, but how often people assume I'm someone they can safely say it to.

That dynamic tells me a lot about how whiteness actually functions socially. It often operates less through overt hostility than through assumption. Assumption that agreement will exist, that certain frustrations are self-evident, and that other white people will instinctively understand the rules of the conversation without needing them stated out loud.

And honestly, some expat spaces in Cuenca feel familiar to me in ways I don't find comforting. Not because Ecuador is the same as the United States, and not because every white expat behaves this way, but because white-centered social dynamics adapt very easily. Colonial attitudes adapt easily too, along with anti-Blackness and the expectation that white comfort should remain central no matter where people relocate.

Moving abroad does not change who you've been trained to be.

A few weeks ago we were at an expat hangout we'd been to plenty of times before. The longer the night went, the more the drinks loosened people, the more you could feel something coming. Then it did. A younger white woman we'd been friendly with for months got up and sang a rap song. She did not edit herself.

When the word landed, half the room turned to look at Jonathan. That part is hard to describe to people who haven't lived through it. The harm isn't only the slur. The harm is the room turning to the Black person to perform a reaction. Either object and be seen as the angry one, or stay silent and be seen as okay with it. Either way, the burden gets transferred. He didn't make the word happen, but the room made the word his to manage.

He said, "Whoa, not cool." Nobody else said anything. They were still watching him.

"He didn't make the word happen, but the room made the word his to manage."

We paid the bill and we left. On the way out, the owner came over to say goodbye. Jonathan told him why we were leaving. The owner said, "Yeah, they're just having fun up there."

We haven't been back. We may or may not. That decision for Jonathan isn't as simple as it sounds when you're the only Black person in most rooms. Leaving a place where you've been harmed isn't a clean answer when the next room is the same room with different furniture. The community is small. The choices narrow quickly. Avoidance becomes its own kind of cost.

There are things I haven't included in this piece because they aren't mine to tell. The karaoke night was one moment of many that Jonathan and I have lived through together over the years. The pattern has been consistent enough that I can write this essay from observation, but the specific weight of those moments belongs to him.

That creates a strange knot I haven't figured out how to untie. White people, in my experience, listen more when I speak than when Jonathan does, even when I'm describing the same thing he's describing. That's not a complaint. It's an observation about who gets heard, and it shapes what I do with my own voice. Writing this piece is one of the ways I try to make the dynamic do something useful, knowing I can't make it disappear. I am also aware that doing it at all risks reinforcing the exact dynamic I'm trying to name.

What I have noticed over the past year is that almost all of the moments I'm describing have happened inside expat spaces. Not on the street, not at the market, not in our neighborhood, not with the Ecuadorian people we've come to know. Ecuador has its own complicated racial history, including anti-Blackness toward Afro-Ecuadorians, deeply embedded discrimination against Indigenous peoples, and the colorism that runs through both, and I'm not claiming otherwise. But the racism that has shown up most directly in our daily life here has been imported, not local.

"The thing they actually encounter is themselves."

That's worth naming carefully. The thing white Americans worry about when they imagine racism abroad mostly isn't the thing they actually encounter. The thing they actually encounter is themselves.

There are also quieter things I notice about myself now, especially after spending decades paying attention to how differently Jonathan and I move through the world.

I notice how differently frustration gets interpreted when it comes from me. People tend to move toward helping me quickly, even when I'm the one who is confused or inconvenienced. My confusion is usually treated as understandable rather than suspicious, and I'm still granted a level of softness and harmlessness automatically that I know is not extended equally to everyone.

None of that feels invisible to me.

Interracial life sharpens the contrast constantly. I pay attention to who addresses me first and who addresses Jonathan first. I notice when people become more formal around him and more relaxed around me. I notice when tension enters a conversation and people instinctively look to me to smooth it over. I notice how often whiteness still gets read as approachable, reassuring, or socially neutral even after all these years of supposedly progressive conversation about race.

Most of these moments are small on their own. Together, though, they form a pattern that becomes difficult to unsee once you've spent enough time paying attention.

One thing that has become increasingly uncomfortable for me over the years is how many white people still want anti-racism to feel emotionally flattering. They want awareness without accountability. They want distance from "bad white people" more than they want to examine the systems that continue benefiting them.

I understand that impulse because I was raised inside it.

But after more than three decades in an interracial marriage, I no longer believe not noticing is neutral. At some point, silence becomes a decision. Pretending whiteness is harmless becomes a decision too.

For me, accountability means resisting the temptation to separate myself from other white people as though proximity to Blackness somehow exempts me from participation in these systems. It doesn't.

What it does do is remove some of the distance. It becomes harder to dismiss patterns as isolated incidents when the person you love experiences them repeatedly. Harder to retreat into abstraction. Harder to keep pretending racism only counts when it arrives in its most obvious forms.

Whiteness adapts easily. It changes language, aesthetics, political branding, and geography very quickly, but it remains deeply invested in protecting comfort, authority, and innocence. That does not disappear just because Americans relocate.

If anything, sometimes the distance makes it easier to see clearly.

I've been writing about what whiteness in Cuenca looks like from inside it. The other half of this story is Jonathan's, and he's written it. Cuenca for Black Expats: My Experience is in the Race, Power & Identity Abroad section whenever you're ready.