Newly Minted

Newly Minted
Right after I was hooded

Friday, March 26, 2010

Oreos and Banana Splits

Yesterday I did a residence hall diversity training. We did an exercise where we wrote out our names and shared where we came from and what the history of our name is. I always start at Baby Girl and work through my marriage. I offer Mom, Bird, and Professor for nicknames. As we made our way around the room, a young woman of color ended her sharing by saying one of her nicknames is Oreo. Later in the training we shared one unique thing about ourselves. This same young woman shared that she was unique because she had a black father and a white mother. This student wore her mixed raceness like a heavy, wet sweater; wet to the point that the sleeves had come down over her hands and she could not move. This student's mixed raceness was not a blessing to her, she wasn't invoking it as her identity as much as succumbing to it. I spend a lot of time talking about mixed race identity as a liberating political, emotional and intimate choice; but there are individuals who feel put upon by their mixed raceness and it plagues them for the rest of their lives. My sense of it is that the way mixed race is subordinated, as well as the mixed race person, is what makes mixed race a prison for some. Often the community of color that helped produce a mixed race individual subordinates that person, othering and often isolating them. Mine and my children's experience with this could be summed up as never being “black enough”.

The positioning of mixed race is not and should not be a subordinate position. I am not only arguing that mixed race is a separate identity, lived experience, and intimate reality; I am arguing that mixed race is an equally weighted identity to those considered mono-racial. I am suggesting that mixed race is not half this, and half that. Mixed race is not a by-product or derivative of mono-race. Mixed-race has substance and weight of its own and must be ordered as a whole identity which pushes against the recipe narrative (1/2 this, 1/4 that, 1/16 the other) articulation of mixed race most commonly understood. Kip Fulbeck's 1991 video "Banana Splits" is a well produced articulation of the mixed race subordination my student was expressing. In "Banana Splits" Fulbeck pokes some fun at a system of racial subordination and racial understanding that would allow a person to be called or considered an oreo or a twinkie. I have given this student some reading, Fulbeck's "Hapa..." among them to help her understand that she is not having a singular experience. Mixed raceness and mixed race subordination is not restricted to her or to the african american mixed race person.

Of one thing I am certian, I prefer my Oreos to remain cookies ... not people.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Being...

What I remember most clearly from my conversations about race with my mother was her telling me not to worry so much about “being” black. My mother always told me that what was most important, now I know it was most important to her, was “being” a good person. My husband often suggests that I view everything, past and present, through this critical race lens. I have trouble getting him to understand that the critical race lens really only provides a language for the things I already know. Even as a child, my mother's shaping of “being” upset me. I experienced race, since I had no community of color to process with, in my belly. It is funny, both of our daughters get tummy aches. I know now that it is anxiety and so I can only guess that my processing of race, at three and five, and nine was with an anxiety so intense that I took it for granted. I understood my “being” as abnormal to the rest of the world. But my mother kept telling me that “being” different was not only acceptable but a gift to the world. My mother gave me Martin Luther King Jr. and through that I came to believe that world peace, rather racial peace, was my job and my job alone.

My mother was fond of talking about how all the races could and should live as one and she held up our family as the perfect example. While we were by no means perfect, we were a family and we were different races and race was not the thing that held us together or tore us apart. I was very aware that my mother and my sister experienced pain, much in the same way my husband experiences our children's pain, when my race and other people's reactions to my race impacted me negatively. I can remember people asking my mother if I was hers and the anger that question evoked in her and then the sadness I saw in her eyes. I often feel like the only time I knew my mother truly loved me was when she was defending my blackness.

There were inconsistencies, in reconcilable behaviors and speech that occurred around me every day. My mother could sit and tell me what an amazing person I was, or was going to be; how I was going to bring the races together one day, and then call someone on TV a nigger. My mother was a very biased and racist person, yet she held up people like MLK and myself as the ambassadors of world change. I can remember wincing as my step-father talked about “the damn Jews” and “the greasy Italians” and I can remember clearly thinking “what does he think about me”. And so, the very sense of racial harmony and justice that my mother had instilled in me became my burden.

I have a sister and brother I don't speak to and I am pretty sure they have no idea it is because of their racism. I could no longer tolerate their racist banter. The final straw was my brother's face book bumper sticker that read “Speak English or Go Home”. My sister had written on his wall “Yeah, that is what I am talking about”. I wrote under her comment “you are both racist asses” and defriended them. I don't think they have noticed. No, I am sure they noticed, but I don't think they have a clue what I was talking about. For my family, racism is against black people. No, racism was against me. There was never anything there that abstracted racism to the rest of the world nor connected it to other isms. I can remember my sister in grade school addressing racist speech with “hey, my sister is black”; instead of something more universal about blackness and black people. I was the only black person we knew. For my sister and brother, and probably my mother, I am still the only black person they know.