I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir

Throughout her teens, Gharib is fed the message that she and her immigrant family must strive to be like white people. Though she does not realize it until later, her family’s rhetoric reflects a larger societal issue of positioning whiteness as the cultural norm. Depicting whiteness as “standard” implies that people of color are inferior to white people. Both white people and people of color can use this type of rhetoric, but it ultimately upholds white supremacy.

As a teen, Gharib’s family and the media convinced her that “white > whatever the hell I was” (71). She uses a greater than symbol to indicate her belief that being white is better than being non-white. She lists all the reasons she thinks white people are superior: “Clothes and make up just look better on them! They don’t smell like fried fish and fried garlic in the morning. They’re richer than everyone else! They get to have cool jobs, like magazine editors. They have clean, perfect, huge houses” (71). White Americans have more generational wealth than other racial demographics, largely due to America’s legacy of enslavement and white supremacy. This results in larger proportions of white people owning their own houses and having higher-paying jobs.