representation

There have been times in my life that, I choose to give my input or opinion on a sociological, political, or socioeconomic issue specific to my race, I’m often told that “my opinion doesn’t count I’m not full___.” The common misconception with this phrase is that I cannot or do not understand the full weight of whatever the topic at hand is because I do not 100% represent that part of my culture. It is a hard argument to have with an individual who already has their mind made up that because I’m mixed, I don’t get it. Perhaps you have been the subject of said scrutiny or experienced a similar situation in which you feel invalidated and are cast off to that isle of misfit toys that many multiracial people find themselves on.

Being mixed with Black and Mexican roots I have often been told I got the best of both worlds. Sometimes that’s an actual heartfelt response, other times it’s sarcastic since these are two notoriously oppressed racial groups here in the United States. We are at a time period where social injustice is running amuck from police brutality to underrepresentation in literature and the media. Since I am half Black am I immune to feeling sorrow, anger, and despair for victims like Trayvon Martin because I am not fully black? No. I feel the emotions and call to justice just as much as the next person and should not feel bullied or belittled if I want to say Black Lives Matter, though I’m only half black. Being mixed does not mean I don’t understand or that I cannot help and I should be empowered to speak my opinion without judgment, but that’s not always the case. Instead I receive more scrutiny because I’m expected to show how committed to my race I really am through how I choose to express said opinions or sentiments. How black am I and by whose standards? Who is the ultimate judge that gives me a pass as being 100 percent Black and Mexican?

The presidential elections have front-runners like Donald Trump labeling Latinos “criminals,” and “rapists” with the discouraging notion this could be someone actually leading our country someday. Should I not be allowed to protest or have a discussion on Trump because I’m not all Latina? I am entitled to that conversation just the same as another Latino because I do understand. You are marginalized being mixed-and the constant act of trying to prove something to anyone who challenges your authentic self can be exhausting.

I understand the fear that comes with admitting you have family members or friends who are undocumented and people label them illegal or joke about getting money to turn them in. It’s unsettling knowing my grandmother did back breaking work being a janitor at a bank and earned the right to live in America but people only care if she has papers. I feel the hatred associated with being called a nigger because a classmate thought it would be funny to ridicule me when I was in fifth grade. I felt the expectations to prove how Black I was because my classmates used to challenge my speaking voice by laughing when I spoke slang. When I entered my first interracial relationship at the age of fifteen I remember being picked apart by my peers for dating outside my given races because my boyfriend was white. My hair is the largest representation of both my cultures and I’ve witnessed the wide eyes that come when I wear it big, down, and natural as if I’m a wild child.

I shouldn’t have to make an argument or pull some statistics, facts and figures out to audience to show how authentic I can be since I’m mixed. There is an infamous scene in the movie Selena with Jennifer Lopez in which her father is discussing how being Mexican American is tough because they have to be educated on their own culture and American culture. His popular quote is:

“And we gotta prove to the Mexicans how Mexican we are. And we gotta prove to the Americans how American we are. We gotta be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans both at the same time. It’s exhausting. Damn! Nobody knows how tough it is to be a Mexican-American.”

Quotes like these to me represent the struggle in being a mixed individual in society because there is a constant state of scrutiny, judgment, and the sense that we have something to prove to somebody. Everyone’s journey is different in being mixed in terms of identity and what we struggle with, but what’s hardest is when that judgment comes from within our cultures daring us to prove ourselves. It’s a challenge we shouldn’t have to face when we are already seeking to make peace with our complex identities and dual cultures.

The act of imparting prejudice on a mixed person because they don’t embody physically or genetically one race over the other creates racial superiority and exclusion within minorities that we don’t need. Who is the overall judge and jury over how important my opinion is? Is it the person who happened to be born to reflect one hundred percent of a specific race over the other? The assumption that mixed people do not encounter or understand discrimination on the same level as other minorities is false and excluding our voices is a direct reflection of that. Challenging our knowledge, picking apart our speech, color, hair type and how we choose to represent our most authentic self is exactly that. When you tell me I couldn’t possibly understand discrimination, struggle, or hardships from the outside world because you assume I get a “pass,” because I’m mixed excludes me from sharing my story with you. My story that understands racism, discrimination, disappointment, trials and triumph just like you because I am mixed and represent two races. Our voices count, they matter and if we are working to educate and empower ourselves within out prospective races that should be enough.

Desiree Johnson is Texan Lady living in the windy, sometimes temperamental city of Chicago where she is getting her MFA in Creative Writing.

She has publications with The Rivard Report, NSIDE Publications, Study Breaks Magazine and Unite 4: Good. Her approach to writing whether fiction or non-fiction is to keep it as eclectic and diverse as her interest so she is ambitious in wanting to have her writing cross all platforms. She seeks to continue to improve in her skill set as an author, writer, and storyteller while educating others on being bi-racial and interracial relationships. As she continues finishing her MFA she looks forward to the new opportunities that lie ahead and embracing whatever life throws her way. She is currently a contributing writer for Swirl Nation Blog, EliteDaily.Com, an Editorial Fellow with The Tempest, and created the new “Your Hair Story Series,” with Mixed Chicks Hair Products.

“I wish I had white skin,” my three year-old daughter said, swinging breezily at the park.

Gulp. “Why do you say that, Sweetheart?” I asked, outwardly calm but inwardly exclaiming, Shit! What do I do with this?

“Because all of the friends at school have white skin.” Very matter-of-factly.

***

I think about race a lot, both professionally and personally, and perhaps more than the average person. I work as a professor teaching race-related literature classes and grew up as a “brown-skinned white girl,” as France Winddance Twine has called mixed race girls raised in white households and predominantly white communities. I remember as a preschooler myself in the 1970s telling my teacher that I wished I had long, blonde hair (and presumably pale skin) and, though I’m embarrassed to admit this deep-seated desire I held at the time, pastel underwear. So I wasn’t entirely surprised that my daughter, the beautifully brown-skinned child of her mixed race father and I, would develop feelings similar to those I’d had as a child, given the predominantly white school she attended.

But so soon? And how did she internalize the idea that dark skin is undesirable when she hasn’t been a TV watcher and has been celebrated with Doc McStuffins and brown baby dolls?

Fast forward to five:

“I love my brown skin,” she tells her gymnastics teacher one day, but on another day this boisterous girl turns timid around her brown paternal grandfather and great grandmother. Or she hides behind her father’s back when she meets other brown skinned kids at the park. He tells me she seems afraid of black people and that she needs to know she “comes from this,” as well as from whiteness.

I’m feeling defensive, like my choice to live in the town I chose and have my daughter attend a Catholic school is being called into question because it effectively surrounds her with whiteness. And the cultural critic in me is nagging behind this more visceral maternal response. “Wait a minute. What do you mean, ‘She needs to know she comes from this’?” Not until later, when my maternal angst is temporarily calmed, can I tease out the implications of this remark. No, I don’t want to raise my daughter to believe she “comes from blackness and whiteness” as if they are some geographical location we can visit in time and space, as if they are a location where all of this cultural coding and conditioning just is and therefore makes sense, as if this ephemeral blackness and whiteness she “contains” could be pinned down to the pseudo-science of racialized blood or moral character.

What I want her to know is that she comes from people. These people love her and she needn’t be afraid of them because of the various colors of their skin. By extension, she needn’t fear people she meets in the world simply because of their skin; if there are people to fear in the world—and there certainly are—it’s because of their actions, not their appearance.

When I talked to her about “black people” after talking to her father, she stopped me. “Black people?” she asked, and I knew she was imagining someone the color of her tennis shoes or the car ahead of us. Having preferred more literalness with descriptions of people, I’ve always talked to my daughter about our brown skin and others with brown skin; even white people aren’t the color of notebook paper but more variations of sand and tan. I’ve challenged her when she describes the peach colored crayon as “skin color,” and I’ve asked her to hand me a skin colored crayon, holding out my hand to indicate I mean a certain shade of brown. I point out the people she considers having “white skin” don’t look like that peach-colored crayon or summer day clouds.

To her question, I replied, “I think that’s a confusing term, too, but that’s a term used for people who look like your Grappa and even your dad and me.” Although many people find my daughter hard to peg, usually asking if she’s from India, I’m sure there will be times when she’ll be called black as well.

We know racialized terms are used to classify people; unfortunately, these terms are also used to define and often limit people. We know white power and privilege exist. We know racism exists. We know unspeakable things have been done in the name of these realities. We know, too, that black triumph against these atrocities also exists. Black people have done amazing things throughout history. So have white people. Black people have also done some terrible things, as white people have, and in these statements, I’m not forgetting the power that’s coextensive with whiteness in the United States and elsewhere. Still, these terrible acts that have been (and continue to be) done are the acts of people, performed in the name and game of race, even when their ideologies become institutionalized to the point that we forget their original presence at the root of injustice.

I would rather my daughter come to the realization that race is an imperfect and often detrimental way of talking about perceived differences, whether these are biological (like skin color) or socio-cultural (like language use) and that these differences don’t map neatly onto so-called racial lines. Nor can these differences be equated with anything inherent, including a person’s worth, potential, intelligence, character, behavior, or proclivity for violence and therefore worthiness of our fear.

So the conversation will continue. I don’t want V. to be afraid of her family or to internalize this culture’s racism, which is certainly what’s happening when she shies away from other brown skinned kids on the playground or her own grandfather when she hasn’t seen him in a year. I don’t want her to grow up thinking that she’s somehow diminished because of her skin or, conversely, more special because of it. Given the sometimes subtle yet pervasive negative associations our culture makes with dark skin, and given the predominantly white community in which I’m raising my daughter, I want to normalize skin color difference, to help her see skin’s “meaning” as equivalent to that of hair or eye color, hair texture or eye shape—in other words, in itself meaningless though laden with historical baggage she needn’t help tote.

This past Christmas, V. was visited by an “Elf on the Shelf,” and, significantly, hers was brown with a short pixie cut that favored her own. When she first noticed it sitting on the bookshelf, V. morphed into a human pogo-stick, bouncing up and down like our floor was a trampoline: “I got my very own elf!!! And she looks like me!!!” A few days later, we found The Gabby Douglas Story on Netflix; since V. enjoys gymnastics and I’m pointing to positive images of black people, we watched it. Early in the movie, she noticed the family.

“They look like me, ” she remarked, smiling.

“Yes,” I affirmed, “they look like us.”

I’m comforted at this stage to know she’s seeing these affirmations of brownness and that, by extension, she can feel affirmed not just in our home but hopefully in the world as well.

Still, I wonder whose responsibility is it to affirm children’s worth? Surely the parents are primarily influential in this regard, but are we alone in valuing our children? What role do schools play? What role does culture? I’m not trying to reinforce the current cultural climate of over-affirming children to the point of narcissism, but children do deserve to have their worth and potential affirmed and encouraged, respectively. Given my daughter’s sometimes negative responses to her skin, I’d say schools and culture are clearly influential. This influence should not be taken lightly but consciously crafted so that socially we can move away from images and ideologies that suggest singular notions of beauty or worth. In so doing, we can move toward a time when individuals such as my daughter won’t look at their skin in order to define themselves or determine their value in the world.

By: Guest Blogger Tru Leverette, PhD

[rescue_column size=”one-third” position=”first”] [/rescue_column]Tru Leverette works as an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Florida where she teaches African-American literature and serves as director of African-American/African Diaspora Studies. Her research interests broadly include race and gender in literature and culture, and she focuses specifically on critical mixed race studies. Her most recent work has been published in Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora and the edited collections Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speaking Out and The Search for Wholeness and Diaspora Literacy in Contemporary African-American Literature. She served as a Fulbright Scholar at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, during the Winter 2013 term.

If I’m Mixed…Does my voice honestly count?

Skin