skin

“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.

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 5^th 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 18^th 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

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 16^th 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)

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 4^th 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.

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.