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mixed roots

Mixed Up

They say;

half and Half,

quarter this, part That.

 

They ask;

What,

never Who.

 

They insist;

This looks Right,

but that must be Wrong.

 

They claim;

you are one of Us,

or you are one of Them.

 

I am no riddle, no puzzle,

not a problem to solve.

 

why not Double,

why not Whole?

why not Neutral,

why not All?

 

They say;

half and Half,

quarter this, part That.

 

They ask;

What,

never Who.

 

They insist;

This looks Right,

but that must be Wrong.

 

They claim;

you are one of Us,

or you are one of Them.

 

I am no riddle, no puzzle,

not a problem to solve.

 

why not Double,

why not Whole?

why not Neutral,

why not All?

 

By October 2014 Guest Blogger: Lill Salole

Lill T. Salole

Lill Salole is a writer and speaker who holds an MA in Psychology. For over a decade, she has been working with issues concerning children and youth growing up in migrant and mixed families. She is particularly interested in issues of identity and belonging, as well as accessing resources in intercultural lives and communities.  Salole comes from an international family and had a cross-cultural childhood. She is currently living in Oslo, Norway.

(due to an abundance of spam, we’ve had to turn off comments here, but please head over to our Facebook page – we’d love to hear and share your thoughts there! facebook.com/MixedRootsStories)

What’s Your Mix?

”Where are you from”? That feeling. When you don´t easily fit into any clean, closed categories. When your looks don´t match people´s expectations and definitions, and the answer is messy. Confusing. Ambiguous. Sometimes even deemed as politically incorrect and provoking. Like being part black, part white. Or having an upbringing influenced by Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, Atheist, as well as Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu principles.

When this question is posed, I often have to deliberate. I must quickly decide whether to give whoever is asking the long or the short version. I always have to consider my relationship to them, and evaluate how interested he or she really is in this story. I have to think about what my mood and level of patience is, as well a how much time we have.

The trouble is, even the short version quickly becomes very complicated. Because the factual answer ”I-am-Ethiopian-Somali-Italian-Maltese-Norwegian-but-I-grew-up-in-England-Italy-Ethiopia-Zimbabwe-Holland-and-my-family-also-has-roots-in- Yemen-India-and-Egypt-now-everyone-lives-all-around-the-world”, usually throws people off. Sometimes puts them off, in fact. If I had a dollar for every glazed look of polite incomprehension or just plain frustration when people are presented with my life narrative. And this explanation, of course, is only touching the surface of my mixed heritage.

Naturally, my replies often probe many follow-up questions, and sometimes just plain statements and exclamations. ”Wow!” ”But which place feels most like home”?, ”Which languages do you speak?”, ”So Exciting!”, or ”How Exotic!”. I never quite know how to respond, because to me this is not out of the ordinary. It is normal. My belonging cannot be quantified in fractions or emphasized in measures. Every place and no place feels like home.

Typically, something is said on the theme of interpreting my looks. Here are some examples of reactions I have received throughout the years: ”Are you sure you are not South American, because that is what you look like”, ”maybe Japanese?” “Peruvian or Spanish?”, ”Never seen freckles on a brown girl before”, ”I would not have thought you were part black if you hadn´t said so, you look white to me”. “You are coloured, would never pass for white”. My personal favorite is a story my father recalls from when I was little. A man came up to us and insisted that we should be very grateful that my skin ”was not white with large brown spots like that of a cow”.

I am bilingual, which means I am fluent in both English and Norwegian. I need both languages to communicate who I am, both integral parts of my life. They are both necessary to express emotion and reason. If one of these languages is not in use, I feel like part of me is missing. Lying dormant. However, people regularly start raising their voices and speaking slowly when they hear or see that I am mixed. Something about this story seems to enhance the impression that I am language or hearing impaired.

Frequently, people just plain give up trying to follow my answers and explanations about where I am from. Recently I attended an event where I was asked this question and preceded to give the medium version (just listing the places in which I and my family have roots in a kind of order). Half way through, one of my conversation partners excused herself and made her way over to speak to someone else. Too many hyphens, too few borders.

Sometimes I omit places of origin, to avoid the awkwardness. I enhance one or two countries, which will make sense in the context, and downplay the rest. Just Norwegian. Half Italian or Ethiopian. Somali. From Holland. Or ”British born”. The great thing is, this helps me connect with a lot of people. But I also very quickly begin to feel like a fraud. I am hampered in further pursuit of a conversation. This is due to the simple fact that I lack more than catch phrases in most languages, as well as a lot of references and cultural codes.  I have the roots, the bloodlines, and the stories. But I do not have my own memories from everywhere. In some cases I actually have them, but cannot communicate them in the right words.

Other times I just plain lie. Mimicking someone I know, also of mixed heritage, whose response to this question is to say that he is from Mongolia (although he is not, and has actually never been there). Perhaps this is not the most ethical of strategies, but it is an effective one. Sometimes more comfortable, and socially acceptable. Giving an expected answer, or choosing a place that few are familiar with, rarely gets follow-up questions or statements.

A whole lifetime of living and listening to the story about answering variations of the question ”where are you from”, has left me weary. Dealing with experiences of people processing a disconnect between the given facts and their assumptions, has made me a little cynical. And frankly, just plain fed up. I have grown adamant in my belief in the right to reclaim and define ones own identity, and the right not to be categorized, compared and objectified.

This is my stance:

You are welcome to ask me ”What´s your mix”? But you must be willing to accept my answer. Short, long, complicated, or avoidant. My passport country may not match my appearance or my story. My coloring, hair, eyes and body shape may not be the same as any of my parents, nor any of my children’s. My traits might not mirror yours. My language may not reflect your terms. My loyalties and identification might change and rotate. This too is part of my heritage. What always was and what always will be. The blend, the ”in-between”, the ”neither-nor”, the ”this-and-that” is where I come from. It is who I am.

By October 2014 Guest Blogger: Lill Salole

Lill T. Salole

Lill Salole is a writer and speaker who holds an MA in Psychology. For over a decade, she has been working with issues concerning children and youth growing up in migrant and mixed families. She is particularly interested in issues of identity and belonging, as well as accessing resources in intercultural lives and communities.  Salole comes from an international family and had a cross-cultural childhood. She is currently living in Oslo, Norway.

 

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MXRS Episode 4 – The Singer & The Songwriter

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TSATS & MXRS 2We were finally able to sit down with the wonderful duo who created our MXRS Podcast jingle: Rachel Garcia and Thu Tran – also known as The Singer & The Songwriter. Be sure to listen to the end, when they share a special treat with us – a live performance in Mark’s living room!

Here’s where you can find more info and purchase their debut album: http://thesingerandthesongwriter.com/

The Politics of Multi-Racial Identity-Part 4 of 4

My thoughts on Multi Racial identity throughout my college experience are still shifting, as this is written three weeks after my graduation from Chicago. In the infamous words of Zhou Enlai, “It is too soon to tell”[1]. Regardless, there were some definitive changes on campus that were apparent as soon as I arrived. The major was a demographic shift in terms of race and class. Upper class and white individuals now made up the majority of my immediate peer group, perhaps for the first time in my life. I was told that College was a time in which I was supposed to be pushed out of my comfort zone, so I supposed engaging in a very different aspect of society was part of that general shift.

There is, however, a distinction between feeling uncomfortable, and feeling threatened, and it was between these two feelings that I spent a majority of my time at Chicago. When I say I felt “threatened”, I should probably clarify. This wasn’t necessarily feeling threatened by physical violence—it was feeling threatened by a general sense of bad faith, and poor concern. While it has become a standard complaint that college campuses are hotbeds of “political correctness” that threaten the very essence of “academic freedom”, I would assert there being a difference between stifling discussion, and making discussion bearable for minority individuals of all demographics. A prime example of this was during our Orientation Week, which is the first week that first years are on campus. A series of exercises were designed to get students to “think” about their conceptions of race. One such exercise (and these have changed since my year): you’re walking alone late at night, and you see two black males walking towards you. Do you cross the street? Little discussion was actually had on the point.

The University had the awkward job of attempting to efficiently maintain boundaries, while not appearing racist. So, with one hand, they loosely offered support to minority communities of race, gender and class, while the other tugged on the strings of the UCPD, racially profiling people on campus to ensure that, in particular, African Americans not part of the UChicago community spent as little time on campus as possible. I remember being told to stay away from certain transit lines, as I would die if I took them.

Things get interesting when we remember that Chicago, as a university, is structurally a Western creation, and this made transitions for non-Western groups incredibly difficult. I can only speak to the Chicago experience, and only of my perspective on that experience, but there appears to be occasional moments in which similar frustrations have been expressed. The Black Bruins’ spoken poetry last year[2] and Alok Vaid-Menon’s “Break-Up Letter with Stanford”[3] both speak to this tension of maintaining one’s sanity, while having feet both in a part of the hierarchy created, and as an outsider. If we read people like we do texts, then the role of a University is to produce people who can be read as marked by Reason, with a capital R. The sort of Reason that one might expect from a Western Enlightened institution.

Chicago may have been a slightly better place in the sense of coming to terms with its origins in this regard. As a friend of mine once remarked: “At UChicago, you’re only as good as your last argument”. In theory, this sounds like the brilliant beginning of a serious engagement with a post-racial world, and I would like to believe it was. On the other hand, there was a definitive double standard for the theories that pointed out the need for multicultural engagements. I’ve seen and heard more than one classmate in this regard refer to the academic projects of provincializing the West as “bullshit”. In this regard, we might say the transition to college included a reflexive aspect of inquiry, one that might even be said to challenge the empirical realities of a student’s past.

We might say this if it wasn’t for the fact that white hierarchy was shown, again and again, to reject the offerings of diversity and discourse. This may seem like a radical claim, but it is difficult to shy away from when one considers how, year after year, another series of incidents occur to de-stabilize the utopian racial harmony construction that diversity was supposed to engender. One year, it was African Americans being body slammed in our main library[4]. Another year, it was a party entitled “Conquistador Bros and Aztec Hos”[5]. Despite Asians only making 16% of the College, there was a constant barrage of whispers about how there were “so many Asians”, which of course, discounted the South Asian demographic. During my second and third years, a variety of anonymous sub forums would reveal the drastic difference in how individuals perceived race—some going so far as to suggest African Americans ought to be removed from the University, and that Hitler might not have had the worst ideas.

Of course, one might defend the College experience by claiming “not all white people” or “not all men” whatever the category in question may be. However, that such vitriol existed is enough to suggest that the navigation process was extraordinarily different than the one that had existed in high school. When I invoked “threatened” I meant that, at certain points, I was no longer sure how much I could actually trust classmates.

The worst aspect of this environment was that it fell upon minority voices to offer pushback on most of these issues. What had been billed as “diversity” actually entailed minorities on all fronts to defend their rights to exist. And at times, this included opposition from the University itself. Thus, when someone like Sy Stokes says “Because our faces are just used to cover up from the public what’s really inside//Revitalizing lies to perpetuate your disguise//Stop pretending that the wounds of our past have healed”, one might imagine how this could resonate with a larger population than simply students within UCLA.

This was what I meant when I earlier stated that the failure of early humanities education on a whole made the diversity project harder. Rather than having a basic sense about how the past influenced the present, and how racial structures permeate through time, to the present, it was easier for people coming from privileged backgrounds first experiencing other groups to deny there was anything wrong with society. Eighteen years of structural validation meant that transforming perspectives on the relationship between empirical and conceptual race-thinking was much harder than it should have been. This was best illustrated by an unwillingness, for example, to acknowledge the backhandedness of a comment like “you speak so well for someone of your culture”. To challenge the authority of the cultural hegemony laid down by racial hierarchy was to challenge everything a majority of the College had experienced up to this point.

Combine this with a deep commitment to the Marxist tradition at the time—the elimination of class would eliminate other sources of social struggle—and you understand why I did not initially desire to engage my classmates on issues of race. Part of this was a deep desire to believe that society was structurally fine, and that our problems were based in a couple of unintelligent people who would never amount to anything politically relevant. However, the longer I remained in the College, the more I realized that Arendt’s diagnosis of Eichmann was equally applicable to most of my classmates, in some regard. Darin Strauss best expressed what I mean in his use of Arendt during the Paula Deen scandal:

“ In Arendt’s most famous book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, she argued that sometimes what we call evil — and what can bring about the most horrible outcomes — can often more accurately and simply be thoughtlessness of a sort…

…Again, Arendt was perhaps the first to write coherently about the trouble communities have in seeing the world as being something other than what they have been conditioned to see — without any kind of cultural empathy.”[6]

If we take this suggestion with some merit, then it appears as though the role of college diversity is to inject this cultural empathy that had been lacking for so long from my classmates’ experiences. Yet, this completely ignores the fact that this conditioning is also operative for the sources of diversity that are expected to maintain cool, calm and collected in the face of comments, microaggressions and queries that make us re-evaluate our role in these schools on a day-to-day basis.

I would like to end this story, coming full circle. I started with the empirical facts of my race, and the conceptual aspects assigned to me by my peers in kindergarten. One of the points of college is to escape from parental units, and looking at one’s life without the shadow of constant adult supervision. In my case, this meant being removed from the most powerful reinforcement of my white identity—my mother. I didn’t see it in this way until much later—as Vaid-Menon wrote, “your parents – called it ‘becoming an adult’ but you called it staying out past your bedtime dancing, called it holding his hand on the street, called it safe, and sometimes even freedom”.

It was late one night, after a study session in our main library, and I was heading back to the dorm, during winter. I had a large North Face jacket, the sort with fur around the hood, which was up because Chicago winter. I had been walking briefly, when I saw a friend walking towards me, somewhere ahead of me. I went to shout a greeting, but before I could, he stepped back and crossed the street. I don’t know if he recognized me, or if he just saw a large hooded jacket headed towards him. There could be any number of reasons this occurred, but I think one would be a fool to not consider the reality of the situation. I had begun with an identity that was completely maintained in the sphere of White, and ended with experiences that rapidly placed me into Black.

I wasn’t quite sure how to react, so I didn’t, and I’ve quietly born the experience alongside the many others I have had as I watched other people balance where I do or do not live, and what claims I do or do not get to make. Even now, I get the random email or message from some person or another questioning about what right I have to appropriate racial experiences.

I am still unsure if I have mapped out exactly what I wanted to bring to the discussion about Multi Racial identity. My basic point is to illustrate the power society yields in the deployment of conceptual categories in regards to race, and what Multi Racial bodies have to do in order to navigate those politics, for where there is power, there is certainly a set of politics that guide how that power is used. And it is through the careful engagement of these navigations that we may be able to formally create spaces in which Multi Racial subjects of all backgrounds may feel comfortable laying claim to all engagements of this social power, since the way people perceive us is incredibly dynamic and dependent on a variety of factors beyond our control.

 

By: July 2014 Guest Blogger- Marley-Vincent Lindsey

MVLphoto

Marley-Vincent Lindsey is a freelance writer and independent researcher located in New York. He recently graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in history and is primarily interested in 16th century Colonial Spain, the influence of Christianity on colonial institutions, subaltern studies and postcolonial theory and the relationship between digital media and history. He will be presenting at the Sixth Annual  Conference on Power and Struggle hosted by the University of Alabama, and is publishing a paper entitled “The Politics of Pokémon: Socialized Gaming, Religious Themes and the Construction of Communal Narratives” in the forthcoming volume of Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet. When he’s not on the academic grind, he’s probably playing Starcraft and other related strategy games, skating or thinking about contingency plans for the zombie apocalypse. He can be contacted via email (mvlindsey92@gmail.com) or through his notebook-blog (mvlindsey.wordpress.com). He also really likes cats.

 

(due to an abundance of spam, we’ve had to turn off comments here, but please head over to our Facebook page – we’d love to hear and share your thoughts there! facebook.com/MixedRootsStories)

The Politics of Multi-Racial Identity – Part 2 of 4

My childhood area of New York bordered the remnants of the Puerto Rican Loisaida, and edges of Chinatown. As a result, our class was a mix of working class Asians and Latinos, along with Italians and African Americans. My kindergarten class was a reflection of this composition, which would have made any proponent of diversity happy. Our cognition of race at this point was limited to what we interacted with in reality. We could perceive a correlation of skin color to racial identity—lighter individuals being white, and darker individuals being black, with Asians and Latinos having their own looks—and this correlation was hammered home by interactions with the families of students. If one’s identity was not made immediately clear by their body, the sign to be read was the body of the person who was generally responsible for the student.

This is where the fluidity of my own racial identity began. In my mind (and the minds of my five year old peers) I was white. My skin color might have identified me as Latino, but my mother was a working class, Western European woman and that identity became my own. Indeed, my first memory of directly engaging race was mentioning to my mother something about how I was white. To which she responded that my impression was a half-truth; I was part white, but my dad was also Jamaican and Chinese.

This was not the biggest surprise in my mind. I was cognizant of a difference between my mother and myself, but this difference was brought out by social interactions. What enforced the conclusion of my whiteness in the classroom was the presence of my mother, a white woman. However, this was not enough for all people outside the classroom and it was the interactions with these people that made me suspect there was more to my identity.  A prime example: there was a park near our apartment in which I regularly played. While the children played on the jungle gym, or by the sprinklers, our parents would gather and have the sorts of conversations adults have. Years later, my mom informed me about the subject of one such conversation: another white mother had seen me with my mother, and was not deceived. Thus, once I was out of earshot, she asked, “Where did you get him from?” This woman thought that my mother had a contact with a Latin American adoption agency.

It was not a moment of malicious racism, and the woman became apologetic upon realizing that we were indeed biologically related, but it did reflect a number of normative assumptions she had made and was comfortable with sharing in public. Her question did not entertain the notion that a biological relation was possible—it made the normative assumption as one of adoptive kinship. This is reflective of a historical consciousness in which the world makes more sense maintaining the strict lines that bind our conceptual categories of race to empirics, rather than suggesting that the lines between them could change.

Of course, it is difficult to say whether biological relations ought to be presumed as normative ones for society, but what I wish to highlight is the selective standard by which this question of normativity is raised. It was not any other relation between child and parent that was question—it was my mother and myself. This is a question continually raised by people who think they are clever: “How do you know what you are if you never knew your dad?” The separation of empirical verification and conceptual trust is one that exists in every parental relationship. For all any of these people know, their parents had lied about being their parents, and were actually ex-KGB operatives. These explanations are rejected because they seem more complex and difficult to maintain. However, when it comes to multi-racial identity, everything that does not have immediate empirical verification, is available for strict scrutiny.

These forms of “benign” racism were equally prominent within my peer group. In fact, by 2nd grade, my peers had become incredibly good at creating groups based on ethnicity, and policing those lines. Throughout my interaction with Asian friends, for example this was a common response I would receive when they heard I was Chinese: “No you’re not. You don’t look it!” This was another simple negation, one that seems benign, as it came from seven year olds with little world experience. We would expect this of children in the same way we might expect a child to disbelieve in purple potatoes until presented with one. But people are not potatoes, and this was indicative of a larger problem—namely the inability to differentiate between races beyond empirics. These early experiences with empirical validation of race would later be the source of my peers’ conceptual ideas of race. This wasn’t a failure of the individual, but one in which the American state itself has been incapable of understanding racial lines, both conceptually and empirically, as moving targets.

When a student learns history in elementary school, the typical revisionist charge is this history is the “old dead white dude” variant of history. My only contribution to this discussion is that even in the most virulent threads of historical fantasy, in which the Civil War was one of “Northern Aggression” there is some acknowledgment that other races existed, if only to be subservient to the white one. Yet, both revisionists and traditionalists police these very lines that we learned as children: races do not mix. Even the more progressive histories, based on popular historians like Howard Zinn, still spend very little time pointing out that Multi Racial identities exist[1]. And when this absence of mention is combined with the tradition of separation, it is no surprise that children cannot conceptualize Multi Racial identity as something possible. My identity was practically a unicorn—non-existent.

Part of this erasure is a refusal to engage with the reality in which we exist, and the history behind it. In middle school, our humanities curriculum was well developed, with emphasis on primary sources, and even a trip to the NY Supreme Court to argue the case for slave reparations. But there was always a sense that we were playing with dead ideologies—this court case was partially imaginary, in the sense that none of us were forced to consider race as an element of the present. I remember some peers being very surprised to hear that racism still existed as a politically powerful force, as though racism ended with Brown vs. Board of Ed. The failure of our humanities education was the inability to link this history with the social structures of the present[2].

This connection was made for seldom few of us as children, but I would suggest that the living experience of dealing with racial discrimination, combined with the historical knowledge of the past (and here, parents become teachers as well—for example, people who fought for civil rights) means that non-white children make this connection much more quickly. There are a variety of studies that show white students tend to be less aware of race as a profoundly influential factor in the possibility of advancement. By denying these connections, or at least failing to address them, the later work of “diversity” becomes exponentially harder—something I will return to in a later post.

My first engagements in which my peers became actively aware of the political stakes for race-thinking, and the ideologies it spawns was in high school. This began a long journey, one in which I had to begin navigating how I wanted to identify, and as what others wanted me to identify. I will go more into detail about this process later, but I will close with the basic distinction between my early childhood days, and my life as a teenager.

As a child, my identity as Multi Racial appeared to have few stakes involved. My mom, as a sign, meant passing was imposed upon me, and while moments of tension surfaced when this sign was challenged, they meant little in the grander scheme of my own opportunities. Yet, it wasn’t as simple as a conscious decision to act and appear white at all times. I still interacted with my peers, expecting them to accept my racial identity as empirically valid, regardless of the conceptual construction of my educational trajectory as white.

At a high school where the distance between my empirical and conceptual identities began to grow wider, the stakes became raised. No longer was the question whether I actually was Jamaican, or Chinese, but whether I had the right to claim that identity as my own. My peers became less concerned with the empirical, and more concerned with the conceptual.

 

[1] Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States has become the standard form of popular marginalized histories: http://www.thegoyslife.com/Documents/Books/A%20People’s%20History%20of%20the%20United%20States-%20Howard%20Zinn.pdf .

[2] The literary scholar Gayatri Spivak has some powerful words on the role of the humanities in education within this lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZHH4ALRFHw .

 

By: July 2014 Guest Blogger- Marley-Vincent Lindsey

MVLphoto

Marley-Vincent Lindsey is a freelance writer and independent researcher located in New York. He recently graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in history and is primarily interested in 16th century Colonial Spain, the influence of Christianity on colonial institutions, subaltern studies and postcolonial theory and the relationship between digital media and history. He will be presenting at the Sixth Annual  Conference on Power and Struggle hosted by the University of Alabama, and is publishing a paper entitled “The Politics of Pokémon: Socialized Gaming, Religious Themes and the Construction of Communal Narratives” in the forthcoming volume of Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet. When he’s not on the academic grind, he’s probably playing Starcraft and other related strategy games, skating or thinking about contingency plans for the zombie apocalypse. He can be contacted via email (mvlindsey92@gmail.com) or through his notebook-blog (mvlindsey.wordpress.com). He also really likes cats.

 

(due to an abundance of spam, we’ve had to turn off comments here, but please head over to our Facebook page – we’d love to hear and share your thoughts there! facebook.com/MixedRootsStories)

The Politics of Multi-Racial Identity -Part 1 of 4

Race-thinking has two distinct aspects: the real, and the conceptual. Both of these are important in the development of the racial politics of identity. These politics surround both what we know to be true about race (the real) and what we are taught corresponds to that reality (the conceptual). What these aspects have in common is their role as signifiers in the categorization of people both for the state and the individual. Stuart Hall suggested that the entire construction of race was an exercise in turning the body into a text, something that is neat and well defined, in order that we might better understand it[1]. Skin color, and the physical associations based on that color, become signifiers that we use to organize and categorize groups of people in a way that is convenient for a plurality of the population. If this idea is taken with some merit, then we can say that a whole series of problems in discussions of race are problems of language. When we argue about stereotypes, negative or positive, we are arguing about how accurately we have read people in the context of the state. The confirmation of stereotypes represents a successful unification of the real with the conceptual.

The need to categorize is not exclusive to race-thinking; it is how we make sense of information. Without classifications and groupings, we are left with a variety of data that have little meaning behind them. Yet, if we look at race-thinking as a series of signs within language, then the importance of categorization is open to another set of problems. These are problems of relative identity. The French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, perceived language as a series of signs that were ultimately relative[2]. Particular words gained their significance only when defined in relation with their antithesis: “open” only really means something when compared with “closed”, “up” with “down”, and so on. “White” and “Black” is another example of these antithetical pairs. A long history is associated with these colors, and their applications. As one example, Augustine in the 5th century CE used the concept of light—another synonym for white—and the fall from light to denote those who maintained piety, and those who fell into sin, respectively.

“White” and “Black” as historical terms gained power within the conceptual that has never been fully developed. This history is also what complicated issues that made the line between them less distinct. And here, Multi Racial identities become actively political. To have someone who physically embodied White and Black is to actively challenge not simply the hierarchy, but the categorizations themselves. This was the reasoning behind legal prohibitions of miscegenation, as well as social de-valuations of Multi Racial Subjects. As Frank Furedi noted, in ”How Sociology Imagined Mixed Race”: “The research agenda of the emerging race relations industry was dominated by the imperative of damage limitation”. This policy began with the interactions of the Americas with Europe, and continued up to policing commercials for Cheerios[3]. It relied on lines that could be imposed and enforced to the point that policing boundaries became subconscious. Edward Said’s process of Orientalizing the East is another way of formulating the creation of this category. Orientalism is a way of creating such conceptual categories, where lines are very clearly defined in the subconscious, although they may be difficult to articulate—we might recall Justice Stewart on pornography: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced with that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it”.

The political power of these subjects, of course, has been subverted to serve the role of structural power. As Antonio Gramsci asserted, the culture of the powerful became the culture of the state. Those whose identities challenged this cultural form of hegemony were inevitably perceived as political.  The scholar of the Classical World, or that of 18th century poetry is able to conceal political identity to her writings in a way that is never accessible to those whose histories were based on a past of permanent dislocation. We might say the “white” category has been established as default. As a result, those who study white areas cannot be said to be political—they seek to understand the history of our world.  And yet, even structures have their politics.  As Edward Said noted in Orientalism: “No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of a society”.

In this sense, the multi racial subject is paradoxically both political and apolitical. Within reality, her appearance is not enough signage to read her as belonging to the white or black category. However, her very existence is testimony to the long struggle at the periphery of such well-formulated categories. This means the mixed race identity is one that is always partially compromised: “What are you?” is less offensive for its depersonification and more for its historical erasure. Those who do not fit neatly in structured conceptions of race and culture do not belong, and need to be modified to fit with the worldview: “No, you can’t be Chinese!” the implication being that it violates some natural law of civilization.

What can we do about this problem? Our current solution, grounded in the empirical sense of what is feasible, suggests that it is merely a problem of experience. The whole debate about diversity is that experiencing the “real” aspects of people is enough to shift the “conception” of people[4]. There is no doubt that this must be part of the solution, however, it is not as simple as merging the boys and girls at a middle school dance. The beauty of ideologies is that they maintain their powers not simply in the real experiences of people, but also in how those people conceptually engage with categories through structures. As Arendt noted, part of the process of opinions turning into ideologies is this: “The appeal of both [in reference to history as an economic struggle of classes and as a natural fight of races] to large masses was so strong that they were able to enlist state support and establish themselves as official national doctrines”[5]. In short, factual blind spots that are tacitly endorsed by state action do not disappear through rectification. The larger ideological traces must be addressed as well.

I would like to show how a different approach to education is necessary, through my own experiences. While the origins of the problem in racial hegemony is similar to that of most minorities, there is still a unique encounter of the Multi Racial Subject as merging the expectations and identities of these two conceptual categories of “White” and “Black”. Just how fluid their assignment is can be seen in our own president, and his own struggle to fluctuate between seeming “Black” in some parts of his real struggle (encounters with police, for example) but also acknowledging his “Whiteness”. It is a microcosm of the multi-racial struggle on a whole, one whose solution is best presented in the words of Said: “All systems of education alas are still deeply, sometimes unconsciously, nationalistic. So I think we have to de-nationalize education and realize, and make it possible for people to understand that we live in a very complex and mixed world in which you can’t separate cultures and civilizations from each other but, in fact, history ought to be taught as the exchange and of course the clash of civilization”[6]. This process of nationalization includes a history by which we are invested in separating these categories, which cannot be so easily done in the context of the Multi Racial Subject.

I propose that my own experiences bear out to a more pressing issue—the socialization of racism. Children are aware of the racial boundaries that separate us, when they are a concern of those children’s realities. And they mirror the same sort of boundaries without consciously being aware of what they are doing. This is because they see the structures around them, and understand those structures to be models. A true humanities education is one in which the structures themselves become the subject of inquiry as much as any one particular subject. As a recent New York Op-Ed summarized: “Duncan said that Americans tended to be “ahistorical” — that is, we choose to forget the context of our past, perhaps as a way for a fractious nation of immigrants to get along.”[7] This context is essential, if we seriously seek to reform how race-thinking defines the worlds in which we inhabit.

A couple of warnings: one, these are my experiences. As such, I have little protection from the sort of critical cross-examination that is necessary for any sociological proposal. I don’t think of this as an answer—if I am lucky, it is the beginning of a question. The second is that, as I am a cisgender, heterosexual, male, several large aspects of identity are mostly put to the side. I don’t mean for them to be unimportant—rather, I have no serious experience being a minority in any of these camps, and would rather, like Foucault to the prisoners, “let them speak for themselves”. It is my belief each could write a narrative similar to my own, and those with multiple aspects could note the role of intersectionality in these debates.

 

[1] Stuart Hall, “Race as a Floating Signifier”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRk9MZvOd2c

[2] As an informal guide, the Wiki page on Deconstruction is helpful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction#From_diff.C3.A9rance_to_deconstruction

[3] For this particular commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYofm5d5Xdw . The comments had to be disabled.

[4] http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Documents/BoardDiversityStatement-June2012.pdf . This statement is demonstrative of what is called “positivist” tendencies about diversity—its value is only determined by what it produces.

[5] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published initially by Jovanovich in 1973, available here: https://ia600509.us.archive.org/7/items/originsoftotalit00aren/originsoftotalit00aren_bw.pdf .

[6] This was a review of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, given by Edward Said in a lecture. For the transcript: http://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/404/transcript_404.pdf . For the lecture itself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPS-pONiEG8 .

[7] Timothy Egan, “Lost in the Past” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/opinion/egan-lost-in-the-past.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=1 .

 

By: July 2014 Guest Blogger- Marley-Vincent Lindsey

MVLphoto

Marley-Vincent Lindsey is a freelance writer and independent researcher located in New York. He recently graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in history and is primarily interested in 16th century Colonial Spain, the influence of Christianity on colonial institutions, subaltern studies and postcolonial theory and the relationship between digital media and history. He will be presenting at the Sixth Annual  Conference on Power and Struggle hosted by the University of Alabama, and is publishing a paper entitled “The Politics of Pokémon: Socialized Gaming, Religious Themes and the Construction of Communal Narratives” in the forthcoming volume of Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet. When he’s not on the academic grind, he’s probably playing Starcraft and other related strategy games, skating or thinking about contingency plans for the zombie apocalypse. He can be contacted via email (mvlindsey92@gmail.com) or through his notebook-blog (mvlindsey.wordpress.com). He also really likes cats.

 

(due to an abundance of spam, we’ve had to turn off comments here, but please head over to our Facebook page – we’d love to hear and share your thoughts there! facebook.com/MixedRootsStories)

UPAJ = Tap Dancing + Ancient Indian Dance

“How can you evolve without giving up your integrity?” is what Pandit Chitresh Das asks at the end of the trailer for this wonderful new film called Upaj:Improvise. Watch as he and Jason Samuels Smith learn from one another and share their cultural differences openly, critically – and creatively. We can’t wait to see this film!

MXRS reviews Belle

The Mixed Roots Stories team saw the new movie Belle on May 23, 2014. Below are some of our reviews of the movie!

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“Belle is a must see for fans of excellent storytelling! The movie direction was deftly handled by Amma Asante while ably assisted by the editing of Victoria Boydell and Pia Di Ciaula. At no point did I experience a moment that took me out of the story. Thankfully, they had an excellent script to work from by Misan Sagay. Finally, I have to state that the performances by Gugu Mbatha-Rau and Tom Wilkinson were pitch perfect. I really believed I was a fly-on-the-wall listening to the conversations of a family at particularly tense moments in their lives.” — Mark R. Edwards (Co Curator)

“If there is one message to take away from Bell, it has to be through the rising action of her assaulting her own flesh in frustration. How many of us can relate to, at any point, feeling uncomfortable in our own skin? The practice of systematically devaluing a life because of a concept of Race or privilege – a concept most, at one point in our lives, did not understand; nor, the reasons people can chastise and ostracize others for it while they believe it is in good conscience. It is a frustration we hope to suffer less from as time goes on. From beginning to end, Belle imbeds a persistent thought that reminds us how far we’ve come and how far we have to go toward not just an equal, but an acceptant society.” — Jonathan Andrew (Creative Technologist)

“In my opinion, the most thought-provoking moments in Belle are those instances where Dido tries to find herself in literature or art and laments that she does not relate to what she sees. Even today this lack of representation is relevant! Just how many films, books, or TV shows are made with the ‘others’ of society in mind? Not too many. It wasn’t until Dido allowed her story to be told (through the work of the painter) that she finally found herself in art. The story of Belle is one in which a mixed individual is dying to get her story, her experiences, and her astute observations out in order to change public opinion. Belle manages to beautifully capture those moments of progress and joy along with the moments of frustration and desperation that come with standing up for what you know is right. Belle is a wonderfully crafted film and is a must-see for 2014!” — Moya Márquez (Social Media Specialist)

“From start to finish, Belle was filled, with the complexities, created by society, that individuals of mixed heritage often face. It was refreshing to finally see these complexities portrayed honestly on film. Amma Asante artistically and boldly directs an amazing cast in the telling of this story, based on a true story.  Though it is set in Britain, in 1769, I would argue that many of the themes of identity are relevant today for mixed individuals everywhere. I enjoyed seeing the bond of sisterhood presented between Dido (Belle) and Elizabeth, that was void of the social contamination of their racial differences; proving that family is not limited by blood. Belle demonstrates that people are people and all deserve to be treated with justice, fairness, and love no matter the color of their skin, or the lineage of their parents. It is about time that stories of mixed individuals are being told void of the stereotypes that have plagued the mixed race population in the past. It is my hope that future films will continue to tell stories with mixed race individuals, interracial couples/families, etc. Bravo, well done, and thank you!” — Chandra Crudup (Co Curator)

Have you seen Belle yet?  If not, this is one to see!  Share your thoughts about the movie on our Facebook and Twitter.

Skin. My Story Starter

Ten years ago this week, I was in the hospital with a rare acute allergic reaction called Stevens-Johnson Syndrome. I had been taking a mild antibiotic that had Sulfa in it…I am allergic to Sulfa based drugs, but did not know it. It started with flu like symptoms and a sensitive rash that turned into blisters. Once my rash and blistered covered body worsened, and my ulcerated mouth made eating a challenge, I was admitted to the hospital.  I spent eight days and seven nights in the hospital as the Sulfa burned through my skin.

Skin.

My skin has always been a perfect blend of my dad (who is Black) and my mom (who is White). I have always LOVED and embraced being mixed. As long as I can remember, I made it clear to everyone that I was both Black AND White. In the 4th grade I even spoke to a university class, with my parents, about being mixed.

As I got older, I recognized that my skin changed with the seasons. In the winter, I was lighter. In the summer, I was darker. My ever changing color always makes picking out the “perfect shade” of make up a challenge! In the summers, I would try and get enough sun to last as long into the winter as possible.  This was mostly because I felt I looked healthier with darker skin.  I know that sounds silly, but it’s just how I felt, and still feel sometimes. My skin has always ignited discussion from others. I have usually taken advantage of their curiosity by answering their questions, sharing my mixed story, and educating them about what it means for me to be mixed.

Changing Shades.

As I sat in the hospital, a few weeks before graduating with my Bachelors of Social Work from Azusa Pacific University, watching my skin literally flake off my body, I had a lot of questions for the doctors about what the final results would be. At this point, the skin that had fallen off was leaving very raw, fresh, pale pink, and sensitive skin. There were spots of this new skin surrounded by darker, unblistered, and unaffected skin. One day the infectious disease doctor came in for his daily visit.

 

Me: “What am I going to end up looking like?”

Doctor: “What do you mean?”

Me: “Am I going to look like Michael Jackson?”

(I know this might make me sound vain…and maybe it was a little…but I had stopped looking at my reflection. I no longer recognized myself in the mirror, and was having a difficult time remembering what “normal skin” felt like. I was beginning to realize that I might never look like my old self again.)

Doctor: “Well its hard to tell. We don’t really know.” (Looks at my mom) “You will probably end up being about her complexion.”

(My heart sank. Not because my mom isn’t beautiful, but because I LOVED my mixed skin. That is who I am, mixed.  If it is washed away…than who would I be? I was speechless.)

My mom pulled out my senior picture to show the doctor.

Mom: “This is what she normally looks like.”

It was written all over the doctor’s face. He did not realize that I was mixed. I had been in the hospital for at least three or four days, and the doctor didn’t know I was mixed!

Doctor: “Oh, well, uh, we will just have to wait and see. Time will tell.”

 

WHAT!?!  You are the doctor! You can’t tell me what is going to happen! As I was quickly learning, no one really knew the exact outcome of Stevens-Johnson. They didn’t even know what was the best way to treat it or prevent it from getting worse. Nurses from all over the hospital came to visit me. They had worked there for 10 years and had never seen a case. The only thing the doctors could tell me is that it has to run its course as it works through my system and out through my skin.

The doctor left and I was left in epidermis limbo. I was forced to start the process of coming to terms with my current changing color of skin.

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Picture taken May 1, 2004. This was Day 7 in the hospital.

As my skin continued to flake off, my face was light, and like new baby skin. My arms and chest and back were spotted. Slowly the light spots gained pigment.  I was hopeful that my skin would even out. However, the light spots continued to darken, eventually hyper-pigmentating. Now I had my color back, but I was spotted. After about nine months, lots of prayer, and a series of microdermabrasion treatments with my Dermatologist, my skin evened out. I still have a few lingering scars, but only I see them.

As I reflect back on the experience, I am thankful, and feel blessed, that my mixed skin was restored, but if it hadn’t been…I still would have been mixed, for mixed blood runs through my veins. My worry was never that I might be different, or having to come to terms with an altered appearance. I think my worry was that if my skin was lighter, spotted, or looked like Michael Jackson, that it would no longer be a catalyst for conversations where I could educate others about my mixedness. For someone who has always felt comfortable with my mixed identity, the thought of that being stripped away was scary. I realize now, more than ever, that being mixed, for me, is more than skin deep. My skin would have still been a discussion starter…but for a new purpose…surviving Steven Johnson. Now my skin tells an even more complex story, not only one of my mixed heritage, but of surviving Stevens-Johnson Syndrome. Who I am is obviously more than skin deep, but skin, for me… is a story starter.

Gadget Girl: The Art of Being Invisible

Gadget Girl: The Art of Being Invisible is a young adult book that features a biracial (Japanese/Caucasian) teen with cerebral palsy who dreams of being a manga artist. Author, Suzanne Kamata was named the Asian/Pacific Americans Librarian Assocation (APALA) Young Adult Honor Book for 2013.  Congrats Suzanne! Thanks for sharing your Story!

You can get the book HEREgadget-girl_.

 

Contact Suzanne Kamata on Facebook and Twitter

https://www.facebook.com/#!/SuzanneKamata

@shikokusue