Aggregation: An issue of social justice

Posted October 4, 2009...Started July 17, 2009

I was at a diversity training a couple of weeks ago. The facilitator, in response to a faculty participant's resistance to the phrase "people of color", suggested that we accept such terms in their ambiguity as positive aggregations. His position was that these are not stereotypes or broad classifications (isn't that what an aggregation is) rather they are aggregations (no further explanation given). As an African National, I found it unsettling that he would accept and advocatge for a system that ignored or denied his nationality. If I understood his position, he would no longer be African royalty (something he is rightfully proud of); he would be aggregated black. That makes no sense to me...

The first reading I offer my students in my prejudice and discrimination class is about labeling. In the first three paragraphs the authors talk about aggregation as a form of labeling - labeling in this article is portrayed as a kind of harm. The paragraph about aggregation goes on to talk about African-American and Hispanic categories being a harmful aggregation of many places of origin and histories of people.

Yesterday during our Alumni Weekend which was carefully scheduled so that current students had the chance to interact with alum, one of our Asian Pacific Student Union members was talking about her experiences on our campus. We had all been talking about racist or racialized encounters we had all experienced during our time here. Alum, staff and students were being very open and emotions were raw. This young woman had not spoken all day so when she raised her hand I jumped to acknowledge her. Like a lot of our stories, this student had experienced a white student who approached her and made fun of her by calling her Chinese. Part of her sadness came from the fact that the white student was with his black roommate who thought making fun of her was not only acceptable, he participated. "Instead of realizing I was experiencing what he (the student of color) experiences on this campus, he just made fun of me too". My student was more deeply upset, however, by this miscategorization of her race/ethnicity which she took as intentional. She went on to tell us how painful it is that America and our college not only wants to aggregate all Asians, South Asians and Pacific Islander's into one category; but that they want to aggregate them in to one category called Chinese. What stands out to me most is that at the end of her statement she said: "This causes me pain". And I thought, yeah it is painful when some one reassigns your identity. It is painful when someone tells you that you cannot be who you KNOW you are.

Through this student's story, a framework presents itself for me to better articulate some recent thinking around the right of self-identification as a matter of social justice. My assertion is that when a person is denied the right to self-identify (race, gender, orientation, nationality, etc.) they suffer a real harm. My guess is, once I have had the chance to spend some real time with this, I will find that identities that are "non-normative" or "non-binary" are cumulative identity structures. By that I mean, these are not identities that individuals come to through inheritance; rather, these are identities mediated by lived experience, politics, and social theory (in a non-academic sense). Denying these identities is akin to denying a persons experience, awareness of self, intelligence, and individual/familial history as valid. And, in defense of these identities, I would suggest that they are better thought out than those identities that seem accepting of aggregated categories and more important the PROCESS of aggregation. The process of aggregation is a process of negation, deletion, and erasure. We know in other historical and social contexts that processes and practices of negation, deletion and erasure have certainly been located as issues of social justice.

On a local level, these aggregated categories are the reason my students are unable to identify my performance of blackness AS black or African-American. I believe once an identy accepts it's aggregation, that category is immediately mediated by ones own performance of that category/race/ethnicity. My student's experience suggests that on our campus Asian-American has become Chinese. Similarly, for my students of color African-American has become urban New York City and other people of color who do not share that culture do not fit into that aggregated category. The conflict and harm come in when an identity that shares that aggregated category, or is forced to, frames it differently as mediated by their own cultural differences. This conflict has played itself out in my student interactions by students telling me that I am not black. At the same time, the government tells me there is not such thing as mixed race. I am clearly not white. What does that leave me? Where does an identity like mine fit in? Where does my non-chinese student fit in? Aggregation limits who we can be, rather it limits who other people will allow us to be. That is harm.

I have a lot of things to say about this, most of which I have not yet been able to think through. As this thinking evolves one of the things I want to flesh out is how I believe the aggregation of blackness helped formulate my mixed race identity. Aggregation seperates me from my family, from my mother, sister and daughter. They become white and I become black, we become culturally/ethnically/racially different and unrelated. If I were seperated from my family in another way, as I was through my transracial adoption, people perceive (and have legislated against) that kind of seperation as a harm. The Heritage Act of 1970 made the argument that transracial adoption severed a child from their heritage. This severing was considered not only a harm, but an issue of social justice. What I am suggesting is that aggregation generates the same severing, the same harm, especially for bi-cultural/bi-racial people.

I think I am done with this for right now. I would really enjoy hearing other people's opinon on aggregation. More sooon...

More Than Just My Browness

Post finished June 6, 2009...

So my organizational skills really stink! I keep swearing that I will blog daily, and I don't. An interesting result of my self-examination has produced two posibilities. First, at the beginning of my academic pursuits a particularly evil and jealous little woman told me that she "didn't care how smart" I was. She declared, "You're an organizational disaster". While that accusation is wholly untrue, there are moments. Second, because I have dedicated this blog to mixed race, it is really not part of my every day in a blogable way. So when life takes over, mothering, marriage, performing and exhaustion; blogging falls by the wayside. I have decided today, that is not a bad thing.

So... I am not new to conversations about wholeness and identity. I get that my race is not my whole identity. But I will say that because my socio-racial location, scholarship, and my job are all wrapped up in race and critical race theory; race often feels central to my identity. I don't think that it is, which is really really interesting to me and a little bit of a relief. When I interviewed from my new job, one of the things I asked the folks in the interview was whether they were hiring me because they thought I had something extraordinary to contribute to the institution or because they have always had a black person in the positon. It was really important to me that I was being hired for me and what I was bringing to the table not because I was black. I am more than a demographic. I am more than a particular race or gender. I am an amazing person.

This is not a new position for me. When I was a young girl, elementary school aged, I tried out for cheerleading with my catholic youth organization team. I made it. On the way out of the gym, elated, I overheard a mother say something like "she only made it because she is black". I was the only black child there so there was no mistaking who she was talking about. I was crushed. Here is the downside to transracial adoptions without cultural support; I had noone to process this moment with. I was ashamed and embarrased and I didn't tell my mother; I dropped off the team instead. I remember an overwhelming sense that I didn't want to be on the team just because I was black and they had to take me. I didn't understand affirmative action. I understood discrimination. I understood being a token. I understood not being seen.

Throughout my life I have avoided what felt like privileged spaces reserved for tolerable blacks. I really don't have an academic articulation or even a position about affirmative action. But, I can tell you what the application of affirmative action feels like on my body. It feels like privilege and maybe in my case it is. I know that without affirmative action initiatives I wouldn't have any access to these spaces, but there is something about my family, friends, and in particular my sister not having access in the same way that makes it feel like privilege. I never understood why I could go to school and receive one kind of aid and she couldn't get any.

My sister and I are 11 months apart. We were raised like twins, I don't know how old we were when my grandmother stopped dressing us alike. Because of that, the differences between us were very very apparant. Until the end of graduate school, with my fellowship which is for underrepresented populations and allegedly not race based, I never took money allocated for black or brown peoples. The way I understand this choice not to take racialized money is that I feel that, in comparison to other black people in America, I have had more access and privilege through my white family. I was raised and nurtured in the dominant codes of this society that are mandatory for mobility and access. I feel like that money and those spaces were reserved for particular experiences that I have not had.

I had a classmate in graduate school who had the same fellowship as I did. She finished her dissertation yesterday! I am so very proud of her!!!! Go Shay!!!!! She actually received her fellowship first. In a conversation, in which she was trying to get me to fight for a fellowship of my own, she revealed to me that her underrepresentation stemmed from her native americanness. I also, allegedly, have a maternal grandmother who was a south west native american who resided on a reservation. My classmate was taking me to task for not using my native americanness to get funding. I refused. I refused because, like my blackness, I felt like I had not had a lived experience that qualified as "native american". I find this a responsible behavior around racialized initiatives. I get a lot of criticism from my feminist and critical race cohort because I keep suggesting that we, the academics, really need to pay attention to our privilege. The conversation goes something like - we are privilieged just by virtue of being in the academy. To which they respond - we are oppressed people of color. Period. I think there is a middle ground, imagine that - I see a middle ground - where we move between those oppressed and privilege spaces. Maybe that will be my next dissertation. Maybe one dissertation will be enough.

I don't know if this is related to my mixed raceness or not. I have no other me to compare the possibilties to. I do know that my socio-racial location is part of me, but not all of me. I will honor that distinction, and live that distinction, for the rest of my life.

Black/White Mixed Race: Intimate Realities

I am thinking about mixed race as an intimate reality; as an identity that is inherited, rather than an identity that has been chosen as a route of socio-racial escape. This conversation comes in direct response to those that argue that the mixed race identity in 2009 is nothing more than a way to avoid or escape blackness. My traditionally flippant answer is that I am not escaping anything, just watch me get followed through a retail store. But the real answer would be that blackness is a part of my mixed race identity that is undeniable. My identity is one of inclusiveness; one that honors both of my biological parents, my adoptive family, my husband and children. A mixed race identity is the most accurate representation of my cultural and lived experiences. I share many experiences with those who chose a stringently monoracial identity both in my blackness and in my cultural whiteness. Moving from one cultural or socio-racial space to another is a different movement than the implication of "passing". One of my students said "I am black when I need to be black and white when I need to be white". His use of the word "need" instead of "want" illustrates the distinction I am trying to make in my assertion that mixed race identity is an inherent identity rather than divisive one.

Of course my argument pushes up against the theoretical and social spaces that suggest that a mixed race identity only problematizes ideas of racial dominance and purity for both sides of the black/white binary. Some of my students this semester made a very strong argument that adding a mixed race identity only strengthens the dangerous ideas of race as a whole. While both of these are arguments have their merits, I am still stuck because I know that race and mixed race are more real than those arguments suggest. I also know that if I were to chose a monoracial identity, it would not be challenged - as long as it was the right one. Thus, if a mono racial identity is allowable and "real", how can the reality of mixed race not be real? For me, there is a distinction to be made between "real" and "allowable". Just because mixed race has been deemed not allowable and/or politically destructive to the black community, with the mixed race identity located as an escape hatch for light skinned black; it doesn't diminish the reality, in the same way that monorace is real, of mixed race.

If you combine butterscotch and honey, you have something that is a) not undoable, these two items are now forever inextricably combined; and b) something that is necessarily no longer butterscotch nor honey. I am buttersoney. I like to ask the "one-drop rule" contingency this question: if you wake up in the morning and one of your parents is black and one of your parents is white, what are you? I have never really received a good answer from those who argue against a mixed race identity. I have been told it is a stupid, useless question. Just as I am warned to be mindful of the history of mixed race, pointing to the negative relationships that mixed race has with racial construction in the Americas; I am suggesting the same mindfulness be applied to the reality of mixed race in the social construction of intimate relationships in 2009 and across historical periods as well. I am not suggesting that intimacy and history are unrelated. I am suggesting that intimacy and history are not given the same intellectual value in conversations about race and mixed race.

Allowing and nurturing a mixed race identity for my children has allowed my blond blue eyed daughter to have me as a mother. "Why is your mother a different color than you?" and "Why is your mother black and your father white?" are important questions for her as they were for me when I was a little girl. The mixed race identity is also our intimate reality and thus; these are questions for other people not us. More soon...

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...

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...

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...

This week in race relations and racialized conversations

I know I promised to write on Monday about my project defense. I haven't because it was really quite traumatic. I passed; so I have had trouble understanding why I am so upset. And I am upset. My committee had been given the DVD of my documentary to watch on their own. That may have been a mistake, I wish that I could have been there to translate... My chair LOVED the documentary and told me to leave it the way it was after the first draft, so I did. One committee member also loved it so much that she shared it with her family. The other two, not so much. The one said she loved the documentary but, as I processed it, it was not scholarly or not scholarly enough. The final committee member simply did not understand a) why the documentary was just a succession of pictures one after the other; and b) why I hadn't used more of myself in the documentary.

Fortunately my chair had suggested I present for 10-15 minutes before our discussion and their ultimate decision. It was natural for me to write what I was presenting and the words flowed easily. In that presentation I expressed my wish for my committee to have the black/white mixed race conversation which includes allegations that the mixed race identity was only fabricated to allow mixed race people to deny or avoid their blackness. I expressed a need to have that conversation one last time and then, together with my committee, we would move forward to the conversation I was most intersted in having in the remainder of my dissertation. Some things just cannot be wished for or led.

Our conversation beyond the niceities ended up devolving into a conversation that went something like: we think you should find another way to speak about mixed race that does not invoke identity. Then they used my own documentary against me suggesting that my collaborators were proving that there was not a mixed race identity because many of them talked about identifying as monoracial or passing back and forth between identifying as black and white based on the context of the space they were negotiating. These statements were made despite the fact that my colloborators qualified their statements by saying that they are forced to negotiate their identities in this way because their mixed race identity was rejected or denied.

For the remainder of my two hour defense I listened to my committee reject and deny mixed race identity and in the end they suggested that I read more black scholarship, although I had read this body of literature for my masters exam, and focus my mixed race conversation on or around blackness.

So again, I had to defend myself and my schlorship as not being anti-blackness or a rejection of blackness. One committee member suggested that I only focus on black/white mixed race as she knows of other mixed race students who are Japanese and Swedish (and the other I cannot remember) who were affluent and amazingly gorgeous (because biracial people are soooo damn good looking don't you know) that she was certain had COMPLETELY different experiences from the black/white biracial person. What DOES that mean? That we black/white mixed race people are poor and just not that good looking? I was so frustrated and angry. I felt like everything I had worked on for the last year had been dismissed and I was being reset in such a way that guaranteed my arriving at this very same moment again in a year.

I know my committee really cares about me and really wants to see me succeed. They are not shy about telling me how bright and capable they think I am. So this is not a blamefilled rant, rather a frustrated exploration of a moment that keeps reproducing itself. When and how will I ever get to move into the contemporary conversation about mixed race identity that I want to have. I don't think I even understand the barriers or the processing that produces this moment. One committee member suggested that I try writing with mixed race women all over the world which would "pull me out of" of my own situation. I processed her comment as an assumption that I feel the way I feel but other mixed race women don't and I needed to expose myself to other more balanced and sensible mentalities. Well... I have. For me this suggestion dismissed the collaborators in the documentary as they were not scholars or academics so their expereinces didn't matter. Also, my committee seemed to dismiss the body of literature by and about mixed race experiences and identity formations. Ultimately, they seemed to be dismissing me, my mixed raceness, and my scholarship because of my location as a mixed race person.

I am attempting to reconcile the entire experience by working through my prospectus. I have outlined my thinking by suggesting that the mixed race conversation has and does occupy two different histories or as I am calling them right now...Phases. I am trying desperately to frame two different periods that are loosely related generationally while keeping those two periods from undermining each other. More soon...