If you’re socially identified as black in the United States, you spend an unhealthy portion of your daily life navigating violence, in some form or another. Your world is invaded, haunted by the specter of sub-humanity, and even the possibility of (yet again) being discriminated against, discounted, objectified or dismissed on account of your skin color is enough to trigger the trauma of being othered; of knowing that your country, your home, has yet to accept you, has yet to show you that it wants you alive and it wants you well. Added onto that, for mixed people, is the specific denial of their complicated lineage. Faced with that black/white binary, the choice is made for you by the color of your skin, the shape of your features, and the ignorance endemic to hegemony. You must be one or the other, you must be one with access to power or one who is kept from it. I can claim a mixed social identity and it may offer me some peace and healing— it may be a way for me to love myself—but the world I live in will not recognize a claim on mixed access to power. So what do I do? I don’t know. I can’t begin to say I have the answer, but this is the struggle central to, I think, every multiracial person’s life in America. My culture, my society has no language for what I am—either I have access to power or I don’t. We lack the dexterous sense of justice to envision a country with equal access to power, so how can my blood, that proxy for access, mix equally in my body? How do I give that missing language to myself, be oppositional to white supremacy, all while not adding to the trauma and difficulty of people who, like me, are on the wrong side of power differentials. What is the most common misperception people have about you, as a result of your multiracial identity? What is that like for you? It depends. White people don’t know I’m mixed, usually, so most of their misperceptions stem from an unconscious bias toward black people that’s been allowed to inculcate unchecked by any sort of critical examination combined with the ill-conceived notion that they have an unquestionable entitlement to judge, correct, and alter my existence as they see fit. Black people usually know I’m mixed, and they’ll have a wide range of reactions. Much less so now than when I was school-age, but the common one is general mistrust. I, on some level, represent a closeness to the oppressor. Fair or not, people will respond to me with that added layer of skepticism. But I never really begrudged that. I understand it. Ain’t easy out here. What kind of unique contributions do you think that multiracial folks can make to larger race relations dialogues? I think mixed people, along with transgender people, queer people, anyone who is transgressive merely by existing, are the dialectic in the dialogue, the disputation that destabilizes hegemonic values as solid ideas. To dismantle racism is to dismantle the concept of race as an immutable reality, while maintaining, and celebrating (most importantly), our differences. Like my girl Audre Lorde says: “When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I’m not excluding you from the joining—I’m broadening the joining.” We broaden the joining, we have intimate knowledge of how we are like and not like other people. We often exist in liminal spaces between binaries, and can offer insight on how to be human, how to forge an identity in such an unwelcoming and constantly shifting space. -- Quenton Baker
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:10:12 +0000
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