Exotic White
Rita Hayworth was born Margarita Carmen Cansino and she originally worked under the name Rita Cansino. Her early movie career involved relatively small parts, usually as a foreigner of some sort.
Someone suggested her image was too Mediterranean and her last name sounded too Spanish. So she adopted her mother's maiden name, dyed her hair ginger red and had electrolysis to alter her hairline so people would read her as a classic American.
After that, her career took off.
A few years ago, I wrote a piece titled Diversity and Being Less Exclusionary and part of what I said was: The way to improve diversity is to identify the actual barriers to participation for some demographics and remove those barriers.
That street runs both ways and this seems to go largely unrecognized by most people.
The people who are adequately "White male passing" or "inner clique coded" without harping too much on what makes them different get accepted into the old boys club.
When I worked at Aflac, a Black teammate commented on how much trouble I was having with her name and at least one other name for a Black teammate. She wasn't ugly about it but I felt like it was a polite accusation of racism and acting like I was being disrespectful to Blacks.
I was extremely impaired due to being deathly ill at the time and also rarely interacted with teammates. I mostly have exposure to European languages and the names of Black Americans are frequently different from European coded names and probably influenced by African languages.
I wasn't intentionally being disrespectful, no. If non-whites are inclined to assume a White person is a racist asshole because they can't readily learn an "exotic" name, that may help explain the following two factoids.
1. One study found that in the US if your resume has a more Anglo name, you are more likely to make it to the interview stage than if it sounds too foreign. Perhaps people in hiring positions have had multiple experiences like the one I had above of someone signaling with plausible deniability "I hate White people and any error you make will be filed away in support of my assumption YOU are a racist piece of shit!"
Which just helps keep systemic racism alive. If you can't even get to the interview stage because hiring Whites are once bitten, twice shy, well there's zero hope of establishing a successful career.
2. I had a long distance relationship to a very successful man who wasn't remotely White-passing but went by Tom instead of Tomas. He did so to make himself more approachable to the Anglo world and not make an issue of his ethnicity.
This likely helped him have a successful career in the military and afterwards as an urban planner because he didn't make a mountain out of a molehill about White Americans typically only being fluent in English.
I wanted to be fluent in multiple languages and never achieved that. My German mother didn't want to teach me German and when I lived in Germany I had shockingly few opportunities to practice my German because anyone who knew English leapt at the opportunity to practice their English with a native speaker.
So it annoys me when people act like White Americans are lazy or racist or something for only knowing English. I spent years trying to learn other languages and I know a smattering of several but never became fluent through no fault of my own.
Ricky Martin already had a successful career as a singer when he decided he wanted to break into the American market. He began using the Anglo pronunciation of his surname and modified his appearance to be more palatable to the American market, similar to the choices of Rita Hayworth.
A quick search suggests that Whites constitute 57.6 percent of the US population. It wasn't too many years ago it was 70 percent.
This is triple the number of Hispanic Americans (19.1%) and more than quadruple the number of Black Americans (14.0%). So if you want to make good money in the US, you need to appeal to or be approachable by White Americans as a practical matter.
Ricky Martin wasn't White passing and didn't try to pretend he wasn't Latino. But like Rita Hayworth, he positioned himself as "White enough" and it paid off.
British, Canadian, Australian and other foreign Whites often do well here if they read as "American enough." I think of such people as "Exotic White."
British groups like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Queen were accepted in the US to a degree where people forget they are actually foreign. Queen is especially pertinent to my point because their lead singer, Freddie Mercury, was ethnically Persian and originally from India but was effectively accepted as White.
People who read as Exotic White are doubly appealing because they are "normal enough" to be approachable but different enough to be interesting and thought provoking and world expanding.
People who complain about racism are often essentially complaining that they want the majority to understand and embrace people like them and objecting to some other demographic wanting the same and getting it by sheer weight of numbers.