The Hypervisible Man: Obama as the First Black, Mixed-Race, Asian American and now Gay President

“I have always sensed that he [Obama] intuitively understands gays and our predicament—because it so mirrors his own. And he knows how the love and sacrifice of marriage can heal, integrate, and rebuild a soul. The point of the gay-rights movement, after all, is not about helping people be gay. It is about creating the space for people to be themselves. This has been Obama’s life’s work. And he just enlarged the space in this world for so many others, trapped in different cages of identity, yearning to be released and returned to the families they love and the dignity they deserve.”  -Andrew Sullivan, "The First Gay President" Newsweek

I admit, I've missed quite a bit being oceans and continents away from the US of A. But one watershed moment managed to reach my little apartment in Udaipur last week as I was sipping my morning chai. Front page of the Times of India was Obama's declaration of support for marriage equality. Between you and I, I was always of the camp that believed Obama's previous stance was no more than a mere (albeit calculated and predictable) front to protect his political hide as the over-hyped newbie presidential candidate. Seems my sentiments were shared by Andrew Sullivan in his cover article in this week's edition of Newsweek, which featured the above image and the headline "The First Gay President."

Reading Sullivan's article, I remembered a talk I attended at Oberlin College for Asian Pacific American Month in 2010 where the speaker's last slide was entitled "The First Asian-American President" beneath two photographs of Obama, one as a child in Indonesia and one hugging his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng at his high school graduation in Hawaii. The speaker insisted that Obama's early childhood spent in Indonesia with  his mother and stepfather, his youth spent in Hawaii, his identity as a hyphen American, and immigrant son made his experience akin to that of many Asian-Americans and thus earned him the title "First Asian-American President." And in those terms it totally made sense. Obama could be Asian-American. Obama's identity lends itself quite easily to repeated acts of reading and (re)interpretation. Though he's self-identified as African-American, many still call him "The First Multiracial President." Because it matters much less what Obama thinks of himself than what we the people think of him--what images we project onto his being.

In my course, I used Obama's story, his identity as a tool to understand how multiraciality contains multitudes and how a multiracial critique could be instrumental in breaking down monolithic notions of identity. So I encouraged students to talk about multiraciality as part of black identities, as part of Asian-American identities, Latin@, Native, White, adoptee and queer identities. If anything multiraciality benefits a great deal from a queer critique-- queering race. And there's increasingly more out there in Academe that works at the rich intersection. That being said, I still found myself a bit surprised to see such a bold act of race queering on the cover of a mainstream American publication such as Newsweek.

I don't know if Sullivan was quite sure that he was actively queering race as he compared Obama's racial exodus to the experiences of queer folk. And while I think using a queer critique as a tool is vital to destabilizing notions of identity, it's also crucial to understand that "gay" and "queer" are highly political and politicized words and not colorful labels you tag willy-nilly. So just as it was kinda cute to say Clinton was the "First Black President," (no one, least of all black folk, really believed that), so to, does Obama's new title only serve its true function as symbolism if not just mere sentiment.

The article linking Obama's racial identity to queer experiences does give me hope for a shift in the conversation not just regarding marriage equality but to that notion I'm often going on about: our identities are fluid, y'all. Full stop.

Whether Obama is reelected for a second term, whether he goes down in history as a saint or a villain, a triumph or a failure, one thing is for certain: Obama's legacy will be marked by his symbolic currency. It is a Obama's ability to quite literally absorb our nation's imaginings, our own distinct senses of belonging/and yet not belonging, into his words and onto his "mixed/queer" body and weave it back into his life story and identity that makes him most powerful. I'd like to see you try to do that, Mitt Romney.

The Newsweek cover image itself warrants a little playful analysis: our still disarmingly debonair, now-seasoned President, appearing a little grayer, brow now gently (though, I fear permanently) furrowed, gazing stoically off into some unknown distance. What I find most intriguing is that rainbow halo floating proudly in a glow above his head. Obama as saint, Obama as martyr-icon, potentially committing a yet to be determined act of political suicide/sacrifice?  The halo- perhaps a crown marking his coronation by the queer community?....

Frankly, I think Obama's not in any real danger at this point. A little recklessness would do him a world of good. If anything, that glowing halo will serve the newly sainted/crowned Obama well in the upcoming election, helping him cement the support of the increasingly apathetic millenials who are credited for his sweeping 2008 win, and of course the mainstream gay community whose monetary backing is crucial. But let's not talk politics. For perhaps most significantly, once again, his words, his actions, his body, have changed the national conversation. Obama as symbol, Obama as icon, Obama as chameleon, Obama as both perpetual canvas and national mirror will long outlive Obama as politician...Obama as mere president.

From Newsweek, "The First Gay President" May 21, 2012

"[T]here is something on this subject [marriage equality] with Obama that goes deeper in my view than cold, calculating politics and a commitment to civil rights. The core gay experience throughout history has been displacement, a sense of belonging and yet not belonging. Gays are born mostly into heterosexual families and discover as they grow up that, for some reason, they will never be able to have a marriage like their parents’ or their siblings’. They know this before they can tell anyone else, even their parents. This sense of subtle alienation—of loving your own family while feeling excluded from it—is something all gay children learn. They sense something inchoate, a separateness from their peers, a subtle estrangement from their families, the first sharp pangs of shame. And then, at some point, they find out what it all means. In the past, they often would retreat and withdraw, holding a secret they couldn’t even share with their parents—living as an insider outsider.

“And this, in a different way, is Obama’s life story as well. He was a black kid brought up by white grandparents and a white single mother in Hawaii and Indonesia, where his color really made no difference. He discovered his otherness when reading an old issue of Life magazine, which had a feature on African-Americans who had undergone an irreversible bleaching treatment to make them look white—because they believed being white was the only way to be happy. . . .

“Barack Obama had to come out of a different closet. He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family. . . .

“This is the gay experience: the discovery in adulthood of a community not like your own home and the struggle to belong in both places, without displacement, without alienation. It is easier today than ever. But it is never truly without emotional scar tissue. Obama learned to be black the way gays learn to be gay. . . ."

And Either I’m Nobody, Or I’m A Nation

Climbing into a rickshaw or walking through the busy streets of Udaipur, Rajasthan, I see an expression I never knew I longed for. 

My poor Hindi, my all too eager smile, and my unsure footsteps in this unknown city belie my foreignness. But, perhaps, in all other ways my face, my color can easily be lost in the interminable swirl of browns and thick blur of vivid all around me.

I arrived in India two weeks ago, the end (or perhaps just the beginning) of a deeply personal journey I began over three years ago to figure out what it meant (if anything) for me to be Indian. What does it mean, when I had been raised African and Afro-Costa Rican; when my memories are wrapped up in the black and brown faces of my family and their stories of “back home”;  when even my very politics are steeped in blackness and latindad and when language and culture anchor and bind me to proud histories that trace the routes of slavery and migration from Africa, to the Caribbean, Central and North America?

It seems fitting then, that the Universe took her poetic license and fashioned the Dominican Republic--really the Caribbean--as the cuna, the cradle of my multitudes. My creation story, my own brief and wondrous life began in the “Ground Zero of the New World.” There begins my myth threaded into the countless other magic fictions born there  everyday.

India too, like Africa, feels like an ancestral place to my very being. Something about its haze, its smell, its taste, its movement is reminiscent of the other "back homes" etched in my rememory. In Hindi, 'to remember' and 'to miss' (as in I miss you), are the same word... And I miss what I cannot remember.

Some days India feels like a coming home, a place of rest. Maybe it’s all the Octavia Butler sci-fi I’ve been reading, but thousands of feet in the air, tossing in my seat on my Air India flight, listening to "Shiva Mantra" and "Aisa Des Hai Mera"  on repeat, I had a fever dream, a dozy hallucination that had me wondering if land, earth, tierra... had flesh memories. If the minute I stepped on Indian soil, she would know me. Understand me, if only in theory, as one of her own. Perhaps it's the same way we Africans in the diaspora long for the continent, long for recognition, familiarity. I wanted it to be a fiercely intimate pact between us that, “You are a part of me, and yes, I am a part of you.”-- A mutual agreement, a validation. Something I have no need to defend to anyone, Indian, African, Latin@ or otherwise. 

Home and nation, culture and race, history and destiny, truth and myth.... questions yet unformed, answers still hidden and scattered across the world.

My story Osiris. And I, I could be Isis.

* Inspired by Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Derek Walcott's poem at the beginning of the novel

Oberlin College's Multiracial Student Resource Pamphlet

Here's the Oberlin Multiracial Student Resources pamphlet I put together this past summer.

A few things didn't make it into the final version. This section came out of a discussion with the students from the ExCo. I've included them below:

A Mixed Toolbox 

MIXED ME: Empowering Multiracial Identities

“To thine own self...”: Self-identifying:  Develop confidence in identifying yourself and demand that others respect your identity.

“The more you knowwww”- Education: Explore your own background as well as resources, writing, scholarship dealing with multiracial experiences, histories of people of color and issues of social, economic and racial justice.

Power To the People: Developing Critical Consciousness: Understand the role of power & privilege and systemic structures on your identity and how it relates to that of other historically marginalized or underrepresented groups. 

In Solidarity: Be An Ally: Support other multiracial people, but also other historically underrepresented and marginalized groups.

BEING A MIXED ALLY 

Understand that the question “What are you?” can be a very sensitive one for multiracial people.

Be conscious of how simple remarks or even compliments can “other” or “exotify” multiracial people.

Be mindful not to homogenize mixed experiences and identities. Multiracial identities are diverse and complex. They may  be distinct from other identities and experiences, but there are also many commonalities and shared histories.

Recognize that multiracial people indeed exist and include multiraciality in discussions on race and multicultural activities and events.

Respect everyone’s process. Respect that individuals have the right to self-identify and that policing mixed identities or ignoring them altogether can be alienating to multiracial people.

Take time to explore and read up on multiracial issues. Yet perhaps most importantly, take time to explore your own identities and the spaces you occupy in the social system as it relates to power and privilege.

* Please see the MRC’s Privilege, Allyship & Safe Space Resource pamphlet for more information and definitions.

Mixed Dreams Guest: Rita Kamani-Renedo

On a New York-based, historically situated Multi Narrative

by Rita Kamani-Renedo 

On Monday, September 26th, I traveled to Brooklyn after work to attend an event at the Brooklyn Historical Society called “Who Are You? A discussion about mixed heritage.” I didn’t know what to expect but I was ecstatic (well, as ecstatic as one can be on a Monday after a full day of work). My “multi” friends and I had long contemplated the need for a conversation about multiraciality and mixed-heritage that is situated within New York’s unique historical context—a fabric that is woven from narratives of immigration, urban decay and plight, gentrification, racial altercations, ethnic enclaves, and post-9/11 politics. Many conversations that I have been a part of have assumed that multiracial means “White and something else.” Those of us who are the products of two people of color or two (or more) distinct immigrant identities have sometimes felt that conversations around racial mixing have excluded our experiences, and there was always something about a New York-focused discourse that seemed would embrace our experiences much more. We “East Coasters” have often lamented the lack of public dialogues, artistic projects or action campaigns around mixed issues in places like New York or Washington when we look west towards California and the Pacific Northwest, where organizations like the Mavin Foundation, the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival and the Association of MultiEthnic Americans seem be constantly reshaping public dialogue on issues of multiraciality. But the West Coast’s history of racial mixing is uniquely shaped by its histories of expansionist policies, the encounters/destruction of the region’s Native American, Spanish, French and Anglo inhabitants, immigration through Angel Island, the Gold Rush and the construction of railroads that brought thousands of Chinese workers to the region, and of course, the region’s geographic proximity to Asia, Mexico and Central America. The demographic, racial, and cultural landscapes of the region’s urban centers have also transformed racial and ethnic identities in ways that are vastly different from the ways that identities and histories have crossed borders in New York. Thus, a conversation that considers New York’s distinct historical, economic, ethnic, racial and cultural terrain is necessary, now more than ever.

This is precisely the vision of the folks at the Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) who have initiated the Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations (CBBG) public programming and oral history project. This initiative seeks to provide a forum for dialogue around “mixed-heritage families, race, ethnicity, cultural and identity, infused with historical perspective.” Such an historical perspective will allow the project’s participants to explore the stories of mixed-heritage individuals and communities who have been shaped and who have shaped Brooklyn’s own racial history. Upcoming events will examine the 1991 Crown Heights Riots, Spike Lee’s iconic Jungle Fever, and Kip Fulbeck’s The Hapa Project. This conversation is bound to draw upon Brooklyn’s rich cultural mélange—Jews, Poles, Haitians, Russians, Dominicans, Italians, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, West Indians, Mexicans, Chinese, not to mention the hipsters, the hip-hop-ers, the musicians, writers, artists and activists who call Brooklyn home. I am gradually learning more about the CBBG, and last night’s event helped me to understand more about the vision and scope of this exciting project.

The evening began with an introduction by Jen Chau, the Founder and Executive Director of Swirl. Jen’s comments (which started with a personal anecdote about the time a 2000 Census workers curiously asked Jen what country “Biracial” is) were followed by brief presentations by Judith Sloan, co-author and co-creator of Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America, Suleiman Osman, author of The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification, Race and the Search for Authenticity in Post-War New York, and Katrina Grigg-Saito, creator of the documentary and installation, FishBird. All three of the panelists focused on the historical context and the geographic complexities of multiraciality. Katrina Grigg-Saito’s project actually emerged when she heard a woman in the UK say, in reference to mixed-race people, “a fish can love a bird but where would they live?” This question really touches upon one of the central questions explored at Monday’s event and one that I have long pondered – what does location have to do with one’s experience as a person of mixed-heritage? This really begs two more sub questions that I am exploring in this post and will continue to throughout this project. First, if there is a need for conversation around mixed-heritage that is situated within a particular geographic and historical context—Brooklyn, to be exact—what will that conversation look like? Second, for those of us who identify as mixed-heritage, how does our geographic location—and all the cultural, racial, economic, political and social implications it bears—impact or shape our experiences? Are there certain places—cities or countries, perhaps—that can feel more like “home” to mixed-heritage folks?

This last question takes me back to one mixed dreamer’s recent post about the concrete jungle itself. As Nicole so eloquently said, “In New York, my identity and all that I am seems to make sense. The ‘uniqueness’ of my own life is but a thread in the fabric, part of the millions of interwoven identities and narratives of migration, change, process and formation that make the city a home for the transient, a place for the liminal, those existing here and there and yet all the while staking claim and setting roots deep in the here.” If you haven’t yet, check out Nicole’s reflections on space, place, race and how “region and geography play such a critical role in identity formation”. She refers to how the city’s histories of migration, movement, and conflict have brought together Blackness and Latinidad in ways that have not been possible in other parts of the United States. The city’s Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Trinidadians, Jamaicans, Guyanese, Haitians, and so many more embody Afro-latinidad and reaffirm the multi identities that emerged from the mixing of people across continents, cultures, and colors.

This makes me think about my own unique history. When I tell people I was born in Queens, we often make jokes – “Where else would an Indian man from Ethiopia and a Chilean woman meet and make a baby?” Queens—the most diverse county in the United States of America. Ride the 7 train and in addition to passing the historic and extraordinary tattooed walls of 5Pointz, you’ll pass through Pakistan, Ecuador, Colombia, Russia, China, India, Turkey, Bangladesh…all without a passport! Now, I’m the last person to feed you the “melting pot” story that so many New York-lovers sing and dance. There are lines, borders, walls, boundaries, all throughout New York. I live on a block that is primarily Dominican. You cross the street and move away from Broadway towards Amsterdam, and you’re on a block that is almost exclusively African American or African. One block in Jackson Heights will have you speaking Spanish and eating arepas, while on the next one smells of curry and sounds of Amitabh Bachchan overwhelm your senses. And while gentrification might be pushing these lines in one direction or another, the stark differences and inequalities can still be found. My love of Queens does not equate to any kind of claim that all the Colombians and Russians and Chinese and Pakistanis are getting together and making Col-Rus-Chin-stanis (I tried). It’s not that simple, and that’s not what “multi” is about. But, there’s GOTTA be something about the geographic intimacy of so many different nationalities that allows for the unique coming together of histories and identities that otherwise may never interact.

Perhaps this hunch is what always drew me to New York growing up. I was born here but sadly, not raised. It wasn’t until my late teens and early twenties that I started spending time here and eventually moved back to the city of my birth. It was then that I realized there was something that felt like home about this fast-paced, walk-fast, look-straight-ahead, hustle-and-bustle, belly-of-the-beast world. Despite the city’s vastness and the fact that to visit a friend I sometimes have to travel 1.5 hours on a train, I have gained a sense of community here that I could never create in any other cosmopolitan center. Perhaps it’s because, as Staceyann Chin so beautifully explains, “I fit in because there was no criterion for belonging.” I believe that in New York City, you can be many things at once. Perhaps the boxes are not as rigid or people don’t expect you to fit into them so much. Or maybe, you just get to pick many and move throughout them as you please. As Staceyann Chin, a Black, Chinese, queer feminist from Jamaica, said about her beloved Brooklyn, “These noisy streets offer ample room, and by extension time, to hate Jamaica, to fall in love with Jamaica, and finally, to find the medium through which I can separate the impossible from the possible and become my most comfortable self.” I believe that in being in New York, you can still continue to be in other places, other countries, other worlds. Perhaps I am my most comfortable self when I can carry my histories within me and know that around me, identities that are as disparate as my own are colliding and changing every day around me.

Notes on A Work in Progress

This past summer I've been in hibernation--hard at work on what I've dubbed a "multifesto." My hope is to finish it up by October and publish the full text electronically on issuu.com for your downloading pleasure. The "multifesto" is constructed as my blog meets topics from the Oberlin ExCo course meets my inner thoughts on multiraciality in the U.S.  Since I'll be on hiatus for a number of months working in India beginning this fall, I wanted to leave something substantial behind while I'm gone.

Below is a sneak peek of the work in progress with just a few of of the more or less finished pages. The multifesto is a combination of short essays and resources. So far, the publication is over sixty pages of what I'm hoping is some pretty good stuff. So feel free to take a look!

Made in New York

It's been stick to the pavement, fry an egg on your dashboard, Afreeecahh hot in New York City for the past week. Last night I ventured out of my self-imposed hibernation in the air conditioned indoors to visit a close friend and fellow mixed dreamer, educator and activist, Rita. Walking down Amsterdam Ave toward Broadway last night, merengue blasting from open parked cars, folks perched on their respective stoops and street corners, humid air smelling vaguely of something rank, fried and sweet all at the same time, fire hydrants raining down the streets and kids, men, women--young and old jumping into the spray, I got that feeling I always get when I'm back home, feet slapping quickly against the pavement, moving, always moving... That feeling that I am part of the mass of bodies in movement, the steaming concrete (which itself seems to breathe), the hard lines and rough edges above and below me, the gritty air and the unrelenting syncopated rhythm of the city. Among the many things Rita and I talked about during my visit was exactly why New York made us feel this way. Why NY feels more like "home" than any other place?

If there were a map of NYC and we were all dots on it, all the dots would be moving and buzzing around. We're a city of transience. I just don't think that happens everywhere else. -Rita Kaman

For the mixed and multicultural, finding place and belonging can be a struggle- no big there. Though I mostly grew up in the suburbs of Staten Island (the forgotten borough of NYC), I remember being surrounded by Latino, African, South Asian and Caribbean folk in Jamaica, Queens and even later in Staten Island growing up in predominantly white spaces, but where white identity was tied to great pride in being Italian, Irish, Russian, Armenian etc. I went away to college, have traveled extensively both at home and abroad and it's more than just the fact that I grew up here. In New York, my identity and all that I am seems to make sense. The "uniqueness" of my own life but a thread in the fabric, part of the millions of interwoven identities and narratives of migration, change, process and formation that make the city a home for the transient, a place for the liminal, those existing here and there and yet all the while staking claim and setting roots deep in the here. 

In diverse places like SoCal, I often feel uneasy with just how vast and yet disconnected all the parts of the city are (I call the NYC subway the Great Equalizer). I guess on a more personal note I'm uneasy with how Caribbean identities, black identities don't often fit into conceptions of latinidad, or how latinidad doesn't quite fit into understandings of blackness out west. And it makes sense Cali, has had a different history. That simple understanding of the mixed nature of latinidad and blackness is something that I see reflected in my own family, but also all around me in NY with Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Trinidadians, Jamaicans, Bajans, Guyanese etc. Even within the African American history of New York you see that intersection in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Harlem and Washington Heights, decades of living, loving, struggling and yes even conflict between African American, Caribbean and Latino folk have left a distinct mark on race relations in the city. The city is segregated and divided along racial and class lines like all cities and the gentrification of historically black neighborhoods has already changed the face of communities across the city.
So let's not get it twisted. This is not just an I Love NY and there's no place on earth like it ramble. The specters of violence, racism, post 9-11 trauma, Islamophobia, xenophobia, police brutality, racialized and sexualized violence, gentrification, poverty, hunger, homelessness and straight-up down and dirty NY crime as old as the city itself continue to loom large.  And no, this is no multicultural utopia or mixed-race mecca. But it is my home. 

My love of NY and reflecting on how my life here has provided challenges but also valuable opportunities to navigate and understand my own identity and that of those around me, I got to thinking about how region and geography play such a critical role in identity formation. A great deal of scholarship and discussions around mixed issues has historically had a West Coast leaning. And indeed, the multiracial movement and much of the major organizations, events, scholars and activists are based in California. This leaning can tend to privilege a specific set of experiences, identities and even socioeconomic issues. But my time working at Oberlin-- OHIO, of all places, where I saw more mixed people, couples and families in two years than I had in 22 years of living in New York or living in Europe (a veritable Petri dish of multiculturalism and immigration in the 21st century) challenged me to think about the different forms mixed identity and multiculturalism writ large take on nationally and transnationally. In addition, being a part of the Other Tongues Anthology and reading the experiences of women from both Canada and the U.S. also prompted me to ask how does the conversation around these issues change? What do things look like from the distinct places in which we stand?  What makes home? What creates a sense of place and belonging?

 It still amazes me that when I am away from New York, the angles of me cry out for the subways, the impolite service industry and the streets teeming with cultural insanities.-Staceyann Chin from "No One Cared If I Kissed Girls" in Other Side of Paradise

Generation Mix? A Statement of Purpose

Call it a quarter-life crisis. A change in the winds, perhaps. Maybe it's my sad stack of rejection letters from graduate schools. Whatever the case may be, of late,  I've been having a bit of an intellectual, (even vaguely political) existential crisis when it comes to "mixed-race" issues. So, almost two years since I embarked on my self-proclaimed crusade toward a radical engagement with mixed issues, it's about that time to remind myself of the basics that started it all.

First off let me state: I'm a product of my times. I'm a millenial. We try hard to hang on to those foggy late 80s early 90s memories, pretending we weren't drooling Gerber mush over our bibs the night the Berlin Wall came down-- all in vain attempts to separate ourselves from our younger text-happy, equally tech-junky, mass media dependent, Disney Channel-fed, over-stimulated siblings born after 1990. We're all the same. Part of the newly christened "Boomerang Generation" of wandering twentysomethings who were raised partly, in the boomtown years of Clinton, but who really came of age under the dumbing apathy and silencing control of Bush Jr. We've gotten a pretty bad rep for being coddled, apolitical, just a touch nihilistic and downright lazy (Look! in our defense, try graduating from college right at the start of one of the greatest recessions in our country's history!)

And yet, we were the generation credited as most responsible for getting the first black president in the White House. We're the generation with the largest number of college graduates in the nation's history-- though we're now making history as much for being degreed as we are for being indebted and jobless. We're among the first children of the Internet age, though we vaguely remember early life without it. We're the "Ism" kids-- growing up amidst more (inter)national and societal ideological shifts and trends than we could imagine.

I myself was spoon-fed a good amount of liberalism... I blame that mostly on my New York roots and liberal arts education. The most activist and progressive among us have a nostalgic leaning towards revolutionary iconography of the 60s and 70s-- because if truth be told, we have few contemporary heroes... We were born at the height of multicultural politics only to currently find ourselves right on the cusp of colorblindness and post-raciality. We've been called Generation Mix- with a growing number of us choosing to claim multiple racial and ethnic identities. All of these things among many others have informed the type of young adult I've become and (most relevant to this conversation) how I see myself as a woman of color, as a mixed person in the U.S.....It's to my generation and those that follow that I often find myself speaking.

Mixed-Consciouness: In Search of a Political Education

Political education is crucial and yet, many of us are painfully deficient. For me political education is about developing a critical consciousness- a fancy word for a way of thinking and being and perhaps, most importantly understanding who we are and how we fit (and don't fit) into wider systems and structures of power, privelege and opression we are all a part of. Since mixed folk have historically never been recognized as legitimate social or political subjects in this country, figuring out who we are let alone how we fit into these systems can be a struggle to say the least.

So how do we politically educate and raise consciousness-- individually and collectively? Well, for me it starts with taking a look back into our pasts. Now, the type of reading and understanding of history I'm taking about it not this often random, ahistorical revisionist type that attempts to reclaim "mixed-race" people of the past and present: DuBois was mixed and so is Slash!!!Wooot!!!(though very cool, nonetheless). Our history is there, between the lines of  Indigenous histories, Black histories, colonial history,U.S. expansion, immigration, Asian-American history, Latina/o & Chicana/o histories,  U.S. military imperialism etc etc.-- we’re all there, we are and our ancestors are all part of these histories. Even me, with parents who didn’t come to this country until the early 70s. My history is nevertheless tied to immigrant histories and policies that made it possible for my parents to come here, my connection to Black, Latina/o and East Indian histories are rooted in my parent’s identities as part of the wider African and Indian diasporas and systems of global colonialism and imperialism that spread millions around the world over centuries and subjected them to the phenomenon of racialization.

I developed the "Mixed Dreams"  Experimental College course at Oberlin in a humble attempt to patch together a Mixed History 101 and to start to provide a “political education”--tools with which young mixed folk and transracial adoptees could explore who we are, where we’re coming from and how to feel empowered enough to locate ourselves in those histories and identities. I’ve also had students who identify as monoracial and my greatest hope is that we can use discussions on mixed identities, to also break open myths of monolithic identities, cultural & racial authenticity and purity. Isn’t being a 'hyphen American' in key ways also a “mixed” experience? Can we also discuss queer identities as parallel to if not linked to “mixed” experiences as well? What about issues of socioeconomic class and access. In the course, we speak very specifically about mostly “first generation mixed-race experiences post 1967 (acknowledging all the while the limitations of that)-- but we also use multiraciality as a lens through which we can engage with a wider range of issues concerning identity, belonging and perhaps most significantly social justice. In doing so, the discussion changes from some unique, community-specific discussion on our experiences that happens behind closed doors, into a wider, more powerful dialogue we can all deeply benefit from having.

Living on the Color Line: Fighting for Social Justice

Mixed folk's racial loyalties and politics are often under attack. There are quite a number of haters out there who for good reason, are wary of the multiracial wave and its implications on racial justice. The need to be recognized as multiracial on forms and in the general schema of American racial politics has been seen as an empty, individualistic desire that is not only pointless, but feared as destructive to the advancement of other "monoracial" communities of color. Those fears are not without some basis. But I am starting to get a tad defensive about people questioning just how “down” mixed people can be. It’s getting old. It’s true, as mixed people we live on the colorline, but just living there isn’t going to provide any buffer or change much if any of the tensions and violence that still continue to erupt on that line. I believe the only way we can truly start to be a part of changing the racial landscape and speaking some truth to power is by tapping into what Prof. G. Reginal Daniel  (Sociology, UC Santa Barbara) called the ‘greatest tool in our arsenal-- our anti-racist possibilities.’ For me that requires us to tell our stories (the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival is truly committed to that), critically and with sensitivity while educating ourselves and building that consciousness so that we can find the voice to say,  

I’m mixed and proud, my mixed identity is rooted in the legacies and struggles of people of color in this country and transnationally and I recognize the privileges that can effect the ways I move through this world in relation to white supremacy and power.  I won’t collude or be coopted by disguised white supremacy  and its insidious henchmen Multiculturalism, Colorblindness and Post-racialism. I’m no mixed-up, confused, tragic anything, nor am I some hybrid, superhuman. I’m family,  a legitimate member of various communities--I’m a partner, an ally, and I stand and act in solidarity.