There are always gifts in the things I do not finish. I was going through unpublished posts and found this entry from January 2010:

I walk into a grant writing meeting today and an esteemed colleague (and I mean that I adore and respect this woman) says to me: "Oh, you looks so beautiful with your hair up. You have cheek bones and eyes. And it is not a big fizzy mess." For those of you who are not following the subtext of this conversation, here is what I heard: You are normally a hideous black mess when you wear your hair natural. I am so distracted by your natural hair that I just realized you have the same basic bone structure every other human being has. Afros are unkempt hot messes that are not appropriate nor attractive. Thank you for doing something with your self.

Sigh... I went to the bathroom where all good brown girls go to cry. I think at times I forget what I look like to other people. Frankly, I don't look at myself very often. Maybe I am avoiding seeing myself in the mirror.

One thing did happen THIS TIME that was different. Before I left the bathroom to go cry I said something like "I just started being comfortable enough to wear my hair natural and down. It is new for me and I am very happy with it." I was happy with it.

Interestingly enough, this is the key to the anxiety I have been having since before Thanksgiving thursday. I got my hair done. I got a fun, flippy weave because I decided to have my braids cut out of my hair. I had dreads because my hair grew like crazy after my surgery... Anyway... I should be able to make choices like this without feeling bad. But, I FEEL bad.

Before I got my hair done I asked a favorite colleague what I should have done. My colleague said "I have NO idea, but I am really tired of those braids, if I am being honest". Thank you for being honest, now. And did anyone think I didn't know the braids were grown out? OK....

Then of course, I am overwhelmed by the change in my hair and feeling very self concious. My husband keeps telling me I don't look like myself. My daughter's little friend says I look like Beyonce and my mother in law wants to know "what I did to my hair". Funny thing is, except for my husband, they all thought it was MY hair, and it still wasn't right.

I had gotten my hair done because I have a job interview tomorrow and what I realize is that I have created a situation where my colleagues (I am interviewing for my own job... state regulations... blah blah) will be so damn distracted by my hair that they won't hear a thing I have to say. One could argue that anyone who had their hair changed the day before an interview would have these fears or that anyone who changes their hair would experience this kind of feedback. My colleague changed her hair and everyone told her it was stunning, no one tried to touch it, and life went on. I promise you that will not be the case here.

So not only do I have interview anxiety, I have black hair anxiety as well. I have to sign off now as I am off to the theatre... Where NO ONE cares what my hair looks like. Thank god for performers egos that dwarf my own, it keeps me sane.

More soon...

Re-Emerging, Re-Creating and Re-framing

Well Hello! I have been away since April 2010. In that time I turned 40, had a hysterectomy, lost a committee member, gained a committee member, applied for a career job, and have been dragging along this dissertation. I am sure I might have missed a few things in there somewhere. It was a neat experience to come back and read what I had written, and really like it. I came back for the purpose of cutting and pasting the work here into the final draft of my dissertation. I have decided to revive the blog instead. Thank you so much for your patience these last couple years. On ward we go...

I was working on one of my chapters for a conference presentation in October. I was presenting with faculty from the department, all faculty of color, and I had that familiar fear... All black faculty...this isn't going to fly. My fears were unrealized and there were even two classmates from my program there, who are often quite ferocious, that gave loving attention and feedback. I walked away from the experience feeling like a scholar! I also walked away feeling like my work is at a point where it has a shape of its own that is no longer reliant on my own identity. I also feel like I have stepped out of the defensive posture that I went into the dissertation with. The audience was deeply engaged and I was able to handle questions with ease. I really understood the questions this time and I was not startled or upset by the ones I didn't have full answers for.

Two questions stand out the most to me: first, from a woman who appeared to be in her 70's, "well if you are light you white, right?" (Wrong) and the second from a classmate which was something like "what IS mixed race? Aren't we all mixed race in some way or another" (Yes...but). The first question was easy to answer and just validated my own sense of myself as an academic. My response was "this is a contextual and generational understanding of mixed race as being tied to aesthetic and social location rather than identity and lived experience". My research focuses on the millenial generations understanding of race and there are significant differences between how they understand and engage race and identity politics compared to their parents and their grandparents. The second question was more helpful to what I am currently grappling with in my work. If we want to invoke biology, genetics and psuedo-scientific engagements of race then yes, we are all mixed race. But we have seen how this notion has played out, or not, with the "new found" information about genetic sameness between racial groups. Race remains a major performer in social heiarchy and identity formation. What is most important to my work is not this understanding of mixed race as a biological or genetic reality, rather the lived experience and identity formation of mixed race individuals and families that have particular characteristics that are shared with other individuals and families that identify as mixed race. My qualitative research suggests that these similarities occur regardless of which foundational mono-races a mixed race individual or family claim. Often, my research participants report that they "have more in common with her than I do my black cousins, and she's asian, but we experience the same things because we are mixed race."

Up until this conversation I had been talking about mixed race identity in my work as an emerging identity. What I realized was that, at best, mixed race is re-emerging; and that re-emergence is in discourse and political location mainly. What I am suggessting is that mixed race, espeically as a co-mediated socio-racial location, has existed as long as race has. Really, mixed race didn't come along "after" or "because of", it was there at the inception of the hierarchy that is race. There has always been us, them and the mix of the two. That said, what might be emerging, and perhaps better talked about as re-emerging, re-creating, or re-framing, is the political and politics of a mixed race identity. While mixed race people have always existed, I have been able to loosely track the emergence, suppression, and re-emergence of the naming of mixed race people as mixed race. I am trying to be careful to not locate mixed race people or identity as this new thing that I discovered. I don't want my work to be a tool that allows people to ignore the history of mixed race people and identity, and most importantly, families. The mixed race identity I am framing or re-framing, is from the millenial generation's lived experience of mixed race as a relational, familial, and intimate choices.

More soon....

Where IS the African American part of my family?

At 12:04 am this morning someone bravely... anonymously of course, posted "where is your african american part of the family in the family picture." on my blog. It was a response to the 2010 entry and I don't understand the correlation there. But I thought I would respond in a post instead of have it buried so many posts down that readers couldn't enjoy it as much as I am.

I will resist sharing the assumptions I have about this poster. You can make your own. My readers are quite astute. I will say however that this post and the way it was posted are the very validation I give for a mixed race identity. So thank you anonymous midnight poster for making my point clear. The interviews that I have done for my documentary and my dissertation always hold some element of this social reaction. Most if not all of my interviewees reported having experienced this accusation from members of the black community in particular. I did have several participants who were Asian/South Asian who also experienced this kind of defensive social response. I have some sense of where this kind of defensive response comes from; but I don't feel like defending bad behavior right now. I personally get tired of defending my social and intimate realities.

My mixed race identity was not automatic; it has been an evolutionary process that began with this kind of social interaction. This challenge of my blackness is a large part of my self-realization that I was something outside of or in addition to being black. My understanding of black identity suggested that I experienced something different than those who considered themselves mono-racially black. My understanding of myself as a mixed race person came from other black people and the way THEY framed my social and intimate locations. My whole life I have been accused of not being black enough, not wanting to be black, and denying blackness. NEWS FLASH! I cannot avoid, deny, or wish away my blackness and I have no desire to. I also do not have to avoid, deny or wish away my whiteness and my white family. MY FAMILY IS WHITE. My family is white because they chose to BE my family. My mixed race identity comes out of those two places: the social - people challenging my identity, much like the anonymous midnight poster who is suggesting I am hiding the black folk; and the intimate - the reality that the family that raised me is white.

What the anonymous midnight poster failed to notice is there ARE other people of color in the picture. I am assuming that the poster is talking about the big family picture at my daughter's first communion. There are actually five people of color in the picture (I moved the picture up so we can play my favorite mixed race came...count the quarters...or one of these things is not like the others). I will resist enumerating the racial composition of those people of color but I will say that several of them identify as black. I do apologize to the anonymous (and omnipotent) midnight poster for my family not being dark enough for easy aesthetic socio-racial location. Some people are just limited, and bigoted.

In closing, I would like to answer the anonymous midnight poster. There are no aesthetically dark African American people IN my family that is why there aren't any IN the picture. I do want to share with my readers my initial reaction to this question and the feelings that it generated. I hope the anonymous midnight poster understands the pain that a response like theirs can cause. I hope the anonymous midnight poster understands the racism and bigotry that a person like myself experiences imbedded in questions framed like this question was framed. I do believe that this was a defensive question steeped in ahistorical assumptions about myself and people like me. If the anonymous midnight poster was interested in ME they wouldn't have posted anonymously and they would have asked a question that was curious not condeming. But here is the you seek answer anonymous midnight poster:

There are no African American's in the family picture because my biological mother ABANDONED ME AT BIRTH. Thank you for asking.

More soon...

Kip Fulbeck new book...

Go Kip Fulbeck!!!!! Kip has taken portraits of mixed race kids. His theoretical framework is similar to the one that I am working through. He is fabulous! Check it out!

http://www.mixedkids.com/

Diversity, Equity and a Whole Lot of Yelling...

My department hosted its first student conference on diversity, equity and social justice: “Imagining Communities without Walls”. One panel was made up of students of mine from last year and this year who are studying in my “Examining Mixed Race Identity” class. The students had decided the content of their panel entirely on their own. I do believe my influence was present in the way they chose to share their lived experiences through a narrative articulation. They started with part of my area project documentary that many of them had been part of. After the documentary and music montage of mixed race families, the students shared each of their own mixed race identity stories. On the panel were “mixed race”, “mono-racial”, and “transracial adoptee” representations. All of the students spoke of mixed race from a place of lived experience and intimacy. Clay, a young man who identifies as monoracial and white, spoke of how he has experienced his race shift as he nears his wedding day with a mixed race African American and Puerto Rican female student. Clay talked about how his love for her and his growing love for her family and theirs' of him has changed his relationship to whiteness. This closely mirrors the experiences my husband and his family have had as well as that of my adopted family. It is this intimacy that allows a white man (enter any other race and gender here) to let go of the binary social conditioning that separates, categorizes and perpetuates the hierarchies that we understand as the racial continuum of the west. It is found in loving a child so much that it hurts when they are the victims of racism and subordination.
I had not prepared my students well. I had not told my students of the vicious attacks I have experienced in the academy by the radical black scholars who find it necessary to not only subordinate my identity and lived experience, but to negate both entirely. I can remember my first graduate class when a class mate, an African female, told me my mother could not have possibly loved me because she was white. What I know now, and wish I had been strong enough to say then is, yes, yes she does. In fact, love in its purist form and often in its more problematic forms (dating, marriage, community) is transcendent. Not only is the intimate transcendent, it is transformative. Sadly, my students were attacked as well as called confused. One student burst into tears when her lived experience was negated and labeled confused. After the panel session that student told me she was not confused; she knew what love was and that the intimate reality of her mixed race-ness could not be taken from her.
The attack that day came from an academic colleague of mine from another institution. I felt blessed that she came down to our conference, but I experienced harm from the way she chastised and belittled my students. This colleague is an aesthetically white Latina female who has invoked a politically black identity. She and I have talked about how her journey was shaped and part of that journey to blackness was, which I chose not to throw in her face, through the intimate. This colleague also experienced, and my guess is that she still experiences, resistance to her invocation of a black identity. What I want to speak to in this moment is that even though I and my students accepted her blackness without question; she refused publically to accept ours. Even after I lovingly pointed out that her argument about historical realities was not invalid; it was simply incomplete, she continued to discipline and to demean my students who were trapped behind the panel table unable to get a word in edgewise. She kept saying “there is a confusion here”. She was correct but she failed to see that the confusion was hers.
I am proud of my students. I am proud that they decided to participate in their first conference and put their intimate realities out there for what turned out to be an inquisition. What my colleague doesn’t understand is that my students left more certain that what they are thinking and writing about has merit. Their certainty comes from the reality that what they experienced was simply a validation of what they have been experiencing their whole lives. My students and I learned more than anyone else in that room. We learned that when someone reacts with such fury, you may very well have discovered a truth – yours - and theirs. I would also offer that such a performance of negation also suggests that it is an intimate truth as those have proven in my life to be the most painful.

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.

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.