Newly Minted

Newly Minted
Right after I was hooded

Friday, May 15, 2009

Who's Orange?

I realize I am several days behind, but keeping up with the Obama bashing took a back seat to senior proms, graduation and entitled students. That said, did our president REALLY make a comment about another man's skin color? I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it. The clip that left me breathless; our mixed race president stating that John Boehner's skin color was one "that does not appear in the natural world". I had to ask my husband what that meant exactly. My husband burst out laughing and said "the man is orange".

When my daughter was born, my childhood friend - also a person of mixed race who recently declined participating in my scholarly work as she refuses to be identified by race - which is fine and only relevant because her obsession with skin color, informed me that my daughter was orange. My daughter was born with a shock of jet black hair and while not orange, she had a now absent color in her skin. Both my boys were born extremely fair, my middle son was pink, so her skin color wasn't even an honorable mention in my examination of the new baby. My girlfriend, who refuses to be identified by race, wouldn't let it go. I finally got mad at her and confronted her about it. She said, well not Elmo orange (I am pretty sure Elmo is red) but orange like white people (thought they were pink). I never ever thought of white people as orange but apparently America does. My husband didn't think it was an odd color assignment for Boehner's skin, even though after extensive image googling I just don't see it. Anyway...

Skin gradation is a big part of my thinking about race, interrace, and post racial categorizations. Skin color is intimately related to how race is and has been socially organized. Evidence of this is easily found in how questions of race are handled in the South, Latin and Caribbean Americas. Some censuses have reported upwards of 23 categories of "race" which are all directly related to skin gradation. While logically we can imagine skin gradation as a principal way of identifying and categorizing "different" races; it is also particularly impactful inside communities of color. In my experience, having been raised in a white community with no access at all to people of color, skin gradation - at least as a tool of separation - is remarkably absent. In my home community, I was black because everyone else was white.

Before my orange daughter was born, my first experience with hierarchies of skin color occurred when I was about 27 years old. I had decided to get my hair done by a "black hair stylist" as we finally had one in our community. I had spent my life fighting with my hair, pulling it back and breaking it off. I had discovered, through media exposure, weaves...and I was going to get one. I was a general manager of a retail chain and was driving from store to store so I stopped to find out how to get my hair done. I was so excited. When I entered the proprietor left the client she was working on to greet me. The client in the chair lost her mind. She yelled "don't you stop working on me to talk to that yellow white bitch". I was used to being called white, but yellow? While the proprietor was nice and waited on me and gave me information, i was humiliated, and I left rejected and never went back. That afternoon one of our tenants was leaving her apartment and I relayed the experience to her. After laughing about how white I was, a regular occurrence for my neighbor, she explained the situation to me. She told me I was yellow, but not high yellow, and proceeded to map out the skin color landscape in the black community. Amazing. I asked if she would go to the hair stylist with me and she said "I'm not going to speak nigger for you". It was two years until I had my hair, at 29, professionally done for the first time in my life. What I had learned was that I didn't belong to the black community any more than I did the white community. I realized that day that there was a language and codes, like skin gradation, that I not only didn't understand but really had no access too. I was an outsider; yellowed in my brownness and isolated in my blackness by my whiteness.

I am sexy caramel, according to one of my favorite students. I like it far more than yellow. My daughter is white, according to her brother. And, John Boehner is orange according to our president. What I am most interested in are the politics connected to these external assignments of skin gradation. Outside of my student, who is obsessed with locating skin color as if it were her job, I haven't encountered anyone who has assigned their own skin color unless externally provoked. Reflecting on my own racial identity and its relationship to skin color, I am aware of both of those things - racial identity and skin color - as having been in contrast to another identity and skin color. I was black to my family and communities whiteness and I became brown in response to the black community. Okay I became yellow but I REFUSE to accept that. So sexy caramel it is...

A final thought for today on skin color. I am sure I will revisit it many times. Heck, its summer, I can explain to people for the 39th year in a row that YES, I DO tan... That aside, skin color, or the way one identifies with a racial identity that is possibly linked to or derived from a skin color can be useful when one chooses to use it politically. I found that once I started to identify as brown, a choice that was simultaneous with identifying as mixed race, my community started to include more people of color. My brownness cannot be challenged based on the simple fact that I am in fact brown. Brownness also connects me to others who are brown, South Asians, African-Americans, Latinas, Africans, indigenous people, and Texans... You get the picture. After a speech I gave this semester several students and faculty approached me and revealed that they also identified as brown and that they were also mixed race.

When my middle son was in kindergarten at a catholic school, I got a phone call. I don't think I realized the significance of the moment until right now. The art teacher called to report that my son had been insubordinate. Quite a feat at five. She had asked them to draw a self portrait. She was livid that my son refused to color his self portrait with the crayon she provided for him, the brown crayon. He put his head down on his desk and refused to color at all. I asked her what color he wanted to use. She said "I don't know why that matters but peach, he wanted to color his picture peach".

So, maybe my children ARE orange. You learn something new everyday.

More soon...

Thursday, May 14, 2009

My Child Is Asian?

To all the beautiful people in my life that identify as Asian, I am so sorry but I have failed you...So I think my eight year old might be a racist? I am only half kidding.

My eight year old daughter and her 16 year old brother have a recurring argument. He calls her a little white girl and then she says "I am NOT white I am biracial...your just mad because your ASIAN." Really?

I am particularly concerned about the racial infighting between my offspring. I recognize that the boys are jealous of Morgan's aesthetic. I think they are also trying to make sure she doesn't claim whiteness by negatively engaging her in this way. When I try to ask them about it, they simply shrug and walk away. Interestingly, there isn't a huge difference in the actual color of their skin. The boys, however, would never be "mistaken" for white. All three of them self-identify as mixed race; but I think internally they feel their racial identities are not the same or perhaps not equal. Again I realize that these are observations that come from the amount of time I spend thinking about race both as a scholar and as a parent, but what the hell?

I can remember a time when the boys were younger when the older one identified the younger one as being "whiter". The 16 year old has softer hair probably from his Italian ancestry. The 18 year old is me, with fairer skin and a far worse attitude. My 8 year old seems to be a direct descendant of my mother in law. Regardless, I am their mother and my husband their father, doesn't or shouldn't this make us all the same?

So back to being Asian for a minute. On the first day of class this semester, one of my students announced that there were only two races: Black and White. I asked him where indigenous people fell; he said black. Then I asked him where he located Asian people; he said white. I am sure this says something about me; but I understood his location of indigenous populations. I totally didn't understand how Asians could be considered white. I don't even know how to start thinking about a question that could possibly produce an answer to that question. What was truly odd about the whole thing is that this was around the same time that my daughter started calling her brother Asian. Did I miss some media phenomenon concerning the Asian identity?

My husband says they are just being siblings and fighting. I get that, kind of. My sister used to call me adopted which would send me running to my mother in tears. What my sister actually would say was that she was going to look for my receipt so they could send me back; something I felt was a distinct possibility. I would retaliate by calling her fat. Clearly these are equal things. Despite how cruel we both were, the insults made sense or at least were relevant to who we were. My daughter pulling Asian out of nowhere really concerns me. It suggests to me that a) she clearly is prioritizing being Asian as being less valuable than being white or mixed race; and b) my eight year old understands or is imitating some kind of performance of racial trumphing. I hate that she is devaluing Asians. I hate to think she is learning this at home either through her exchange with her brothers or somehow from my husband and I. Lastly, I don't understand why she is choosing something that doesn't relate to her brother in any way; certainly she has a billion other things she could swing back with. How did she come up with Asian.

Between the two situations I started to wonder about how we locate Asians on the racial landscape in America. Are there particular populations that are so peripheral to our own location that we don't consider them? I think about theorists who talk about reflected identities or knowing the self by recognizing the other. In my student's case, the other is white not Asian and he doesn't see himself reflected or contrasted with or against an Asian identity. In my daughter's case there is a clear devaluing of an Asian identity. Somehow her sense of "being Asian" seems more insulting to her own identity than her brothers' accusations of being white. Sadly, both identities are objectionable to her. The good news is that people who identify with those identities, white and Asian, are a big and welcome part of her life. She never even mentions race outside our house. Thank God, who knows who would be Asian then.

Not willing to allow my daughter to behave this way and having gained NO ground with her brothers, I engage her regularly about this. Her eight year old sensibility INSISTS that her brother is Asian. I started to believe that she really thought he WAS Asian until yesterday. The 18 year old irritated her and I told her to ignore him. My child looked me dead in the face and said "it doesn't matter, he's Asian too". Really? Do I start punishing her for this. I gave her a long lecture about how inappropriate her saying this is and she defended herself by saying "well, he calls me white".

Nothing gained... Finally I wonder if the way i reacted by the first time I heard it made Asian the insult that it has become in my house. Perhaps if I had ignored it, it would not have become useful. I am pretty sure I am guilty of a similar error when the boys started calling their sister white. Perhaps yelling "SHE IS NOT! DON'T CALL HER THAT!" was the wrong choice. I simply don't know what to do. And, so I write...

More soon...

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Examining The Year in a Mixed Race Professor's Life

First I am sorry for my neglect. I apparently lose all sense of time and space during the end of the semester. I also seem to lack an awareness of the connection between my assigning papers and exams and my correcting papers and exams. That said, it has been an amazing year, academically. I have no friends left but... I have just completed my first year as a faculty member at a State College. I am inspired to finish that dissertation. And it is summer here on the east coast - okay, that is optimistic. It is a healthy, hearty, warm, fragrant, exceptional spring. I am going to hoe out my office and start writing. I promise to blog every day. I promise to have my dissertation ready for aggressive critical committee review by the start of the fall semester. And finally, I promise to keep building our mixed race community.

Yesterday while I was turning back papers and exams in my office, one of my seniors sat with me. He seemed stuck in the chair, after five years, his life is changing radically. Honestly, he had no where else to go. Regardless, I feel honored that he chose to spend some time reflecting with me. We were discussing our "Examining Mixed Race Identity" class. One thing he said really stood out to me. He said something like "it was interesting how this class was able to come to a constructive conversation about race and race relations through the conversation about mixed race". Light bulb!

I have been thinking about the "bridging the gap" myth/mission/possibility that comes with mixed raceness. While I resent my recent appointment to "spokesman for Obama" as well as the ambassadorship for all people of color, I still think there is something about mixed raceness that creates spaces of possibility that monoraceness does not. What I know about myself is that I have become particularly averse to my duties as a bridge, rainbow, translator for my brown and white brethren. But, I have become very hopeful about conversations about mixed race as creating a space where people can think not only about race but about the implications of race. What we saw in our class was a growing connection between race, monorace in particular, and our being a part of the perpetuation of monoracial ideologies. By "our" I mean race scholars, students, etc. This realization was not only relegated to the mixed race students. Our white and black students also seemed to become very connected to their participation in the performance of race. Over the semester we watched the meaning of race shift from important to meaningless to a rethought understanding of self and other. Pretty awesome for a 200 level class. I am excited to see if this conversation reproduces itself next semester.

On the home front things are less inspiring. My middle child is going through something that I can only identify as the mixed race child's coming of age. I can see him trying to find himself, locate himself, on the racial landscape. His journey is slightly misguided and antagonistic. His brother went through some similar things, but I don't remember him being so confrontational. My son sees race and racism EVERYWHERE. On mother's day he whispered to his brother during mass something like "the old white folks are angry that the black family is in the front row". While I totally believe he is experiencing race and racism in a new and seemingly overwhelming way, I am saddened that he can't locate "racists" instead of "racism". Racism is everywhere and he needs to learn to negotiate it just like I did. Racists are a totally different story and should not be tolerated, but I don't think he appreciates that he is labeling an entire group "whites" as racists. And like my experience at his age, the "blacks" don't accept him either, but he doesn't know what to call that because in that context, "racist" doesn't make sense. It was through this experience and process of trying to find a space that I found my mixed race identity and I am hoping that this happens for him and soon.

Sadly, our community has become increasingly overt with the kind of racism that comes with economic decline. This only serves to make my son's journey that much more difficult. Perhaps we are also feeling the impact of having a man of color as president... My eight year old comes home with frequent stories of classmates who talk about Obama in the most hateful ways. One child punched the Obama book my daughter bought for her classroom. Her school didn't celebrate black history month... Regardless, my children have never been anything but loved and accepted by the majority of people in our community. He is a star athlete, very popular, and considered a leader amongst his peers. I don't know how to help him process and balance what I know he is experiencing and a sense of self and community. I want him to grow into a person who holds himself accountable for his life; not someone who blames everyone else for his shortcomings. My older son never really went through what my younger son reports. My younger son gets called nigger on the sports field and from the stands. I don't think it happens "all the time" but when it does people really minimize it. I try to help him understand people's discomfort or disconnect with his complaints while validating his experience. I am apparently doing it all wrong. All I seem to have done is reinforce his sense that everyone is racist. My husband really holds me as the cause of my children's feelings about race and racism. I don't know how to get him to understand that what they experience is different than what he or I experience and it is our job to acknowledge that. I think he is often left feeling like the white guy in a den of black militants...he regularly renounces his whiteness.

I am sure that other families have troubled teens, but I don't think that those families have children who use race as a weapon. The other day the 16 year old called his father a "white piece of shit". My husband is devastated. I feel like I am raising a little racist... I keep trying to get my children to talk about what "white" is? I keep reminding myself that I was never a black male... But, I just don't get it. Not entirely, more than my husband, but not entirely. My eldest cannot get a job and I know it is because of his giant afro. I try to explain that to him and he says it shouldn't matter. How do I tell him he is wrong? It SHOULDN'T matter. But it does...

more soon...