Biracial and Multiracial Americans

"No mom, you're more Indian than I am" was my retort every time my mom reminded me I was half Indian.  I really didn't need a reminder of what is like to be brown in white supremacist society but I also thought as far as Indian culture and religion were concerned, my white mother was an expert on all things Indian.  I often wondered why she was so invested in my embrace of Indian culture. She only saw advantages to having beautiful brown skin, while I felt it was a marker of difference or otherness.  

In a recent article called Choose Your Own Identity in the New York Times Magazine author Bonnie Tsui reflected on the experiences of biracial and multiracial children.  She is a mother of two half-Chinese and half-white children of English, Dutch and Irish descent.  She recounts her difficulties trying to explain the concept of racial identity to her son.  When she asked her son if he was Chinese, he replied, "Your Chinese, but I am not."  His mother assumes he is more readily identifying with his white heritage than he is with his Asian heritage citing a Pew Research Report that says multiracial Asians were more likely to identify as being White than Asian.  (That same research report also points out that the majority of multiracial Americans have also been subjected to racial slurs and discrimination so identifying as white and having white privilege is not the same thing.)  However, the author concludes that in our post racial world that has seen an increase in mixed race Americans, her sons would be freer, than previous generations, to choose their own racial identity.

Sharon Chang believes Bonnie Tsui, the author of the "Choose Your Own Identity" piece, has jumped onto the post-racial bandwagon in her response entitled Multiracial Asian Families.  She points out that buried deep in the comments section of the NY times "Choose Your Own Identity" piece is a response from a mixed raced adult who is tired of hearing about monoracial adults (mainly mothers of biracial or mixed race children) speaking for them (or referring to the entire category as primarily children in the first place) when there has been a plethora of scholarly work by biracial and multiracial adults on this very topic. However, Chang's main critique of the NY Times piece was that it failed to address white supremacy, racism, and discrimination that continue to exist in our social institutions today and are not just a relic from the past.  This is an exceeding relevant critique.  The idea that everyone can choose their own racial identity is part of the subterfuge that is behind the declaration that the US is a color blind post-racial society.

What color-blindness does is it masks white privilege and the structural inequities that perpetuate racism.  The ideology behind this perspective is that the US is a level playing field because segregation and discrimination are thought to no longer affect the life chances of its citizens of color.  This color-blind ideology acknowledges race but disregards racial hierarchy in US social institutions.  Race is then reduced to symbols and culture that can be commodified, purchased, and shared.   Through popular TV shows and films racial harmony is depicted as "the norm" making white privilege largely invisible or by delineating it as arising from individual merit and not from years and years of institutional inequality. 

There is a big difference between choosing your race and having it imposed on you that not everyone understands.  Most white Americans experience ethnicity as a largely symbolic choice.  Symbolic ethnicity poses no real social cost to the individual who voluntarily chooses to construct their identity that way.  Symbolic identifications of ethnicity often involve leisure time activities that serve to reinforce the enjoyable aspects of being ethnic.  White people can maintain symbolic ethnicities like identifying with the Irish.  They don’t live in or work in Irish neighborhoods or marry other Irish people.  Being Irish doesn’t influence their lives in any other way unless they want it to.  In contrast a socially imposed racial or ethnic identity has a social cost in that affects your life chances for success in American society.  In this situation members of racial minorities have their ethnicity designated by others largely based on perceptions of their race or national origin regardless of whether they choose to identify themselves with their ancestors of color.

My experiences of being Indian American are largely predicated on my experiences within US social structures that uphold white supremacy and much less about having a choice to identify as Asian. It is not that I haven't embraced my Asian and white heritage it just that the world refuses to see me.

Mom and me at the Indian ashram (Siddha Yoga) in Los Angeles in the late 1970's.

To Take Up Space

First, I like to give a shout out to Florence Ortiz, Stephanie Alonso and the UCSC Kresge Multicultural Education Committee for giving me space and a voice at this year's Kresge Presents PRIDE festival. 

What I wanted to talk to you about today is the importance of taking up space and the importance of making your voices heard as a means of reaffirming our commitment to a truly inclusive queer community.

Having a space that allows us to celebrate our queer identity and culture is a tremendous accomplishment achieved by previous and present hard working communities of student and allied activists. However, as a queer woman of color who came of age in the 80's and who went to college in the early 90's, having inclusive space and activities on campus that reflected my lived experiences, seemed the stuff of day dreams and fantasies. And it wasn't so much because these spaces didn't exist but rather because of the interlocking systems of sexism, elitism and racism prevented me from accessing them and prevented others in the queer community from seeing the full value of my inclusion.

Growing up queer in a mixed race family of modest means I am intimately familiar with the particular inequities that cleave along the lines race, gender, class, and sexuality. 

I was a part of a mixed race family - a child of an American white mother and a South Asian Indian father.  Being part of a mixed race family is as Chito Childs reminds us a lot like the miner's canary revealing attitudes regarding race that might otherwise remain hidden.  One of my first realizations as a student in the California education system was that race permeated all aspects of my life. From the everyday microagressions behind the question "Where are you from?" or the declarations of "You speak English so well!" to the powerfully subtle ideological messages that linked academic achievement in school to whiteness, and through the countless media representations that routinely portrayed yellow face caricatures of Asian Americans, I began to learn my place in the hierarchy of the races that we have inherited from the systems of colonialism and capitalism.  The expansion of capitalism required the state to exert its power over individual bodies and so it came to the role of science to standardize the body as white and male and to pathologize all others.  Disciplinary knowledge in the fields of biology, psychology, and chemistry developed to help “the normal take precedence over the natural.”  Racism as a system of oppression still pervades our social institutions despite our color blind rhetoric.  It also leads many young people, myself included, to detest the color of their skin and to internalize the messages of white supremacy. I internalized the shame of not being white and it took me a long time to realize that I didn’t own that shame, that it wasn’t mine, and that it belonged to a larger social system of racial inequality.

Audre Lorde often talks about “the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us” to point out that oppression is full of contradictions.  White supremacy is inside all of us and it is often difficult to confront.  We often identify with our oppression in one social category without recognizing our privilege or collusion with oppression in other social categories.  Once we realize that there are few pure victims or few pure oppressors within the multiple systems of social inequality that govern our lives, then we can see that we need a new way of thinking about oppression, inclusion and social change.  

I was raised by a single mother.  We were poor, and we moved around a lot and as soon as I turned twelve I was working to make ends meet, to keep the lights on, and to keep food in our refrigerator. I wasn't expected or encouraged to attend college but I was still able to pay for tuition at California State University, Los Angeles and support my mother from the money I made from my minimum wage job. But that was twenty years ago and since then rent and the cost of living as gone up but wages haven’t increased enough to keep pace. The simple fact that minimum wage jobs do not pay enough for people to afford tuition today and to simultaneously take care of themselves and family members indicates that the widening inequalities in our society that are fueled by neoliberal economic policies are systematically putting education out of reach for the most economically vulnerable members of our queer community.

When I attended college in the early 90's, the state of California was in the midst of its larger process of abandoning its commitment to affordable education opting instead to invest in building prisons that largely house black and brown bodies.  The increase in punitive laws that impact people of color who are poor are the result of government laws and policies that primarily serve the interests of the corporate elites.  NAFTA has allowed the business classes and capital to cross borders at will while at the same time increasing the penalties of such border crossings for low income workers.  Privately owned prisons and immigration detention centers make a huge profit from housing prisoners and undocumented detainees.  The increase in border patrol enforcement and government contracts creates an economic incentive to maintain racial profiling and the punitive laws that make private for profit prisons and detention centers possible.  At the same time school tuition has skyrocketed and paying for tuition from the funds made at a minimum wage job is no longer a reality and more and more of our students leave college deeply in debt.

Having felt marginalized by racism and classism throughout my academic career I remember being absolutely disheartened when I figured out I was gay because there was yet another system of exclusion in which I didn't fit into the dominate patriarchal narrative. Because there are dire consequences for not fitting into the dominate narrative. If you're heterosexual, you don't spend a lot of time thinking about holding your partner's hand when you are walking down a public street. You just do it because you want to express affection but when you're gay, lesbian, gender non-conforming or transgender it is generally something you think about because it is not safe out there. Even though we have had gay marriage passed on the federal level people are still getting physically assaulted close to home and killed on the street simply because their gender identity or sexual orientation is in contrast to the patriarchal norms of US society. 

Violence against queer people is often experienced at the intersection of multiple systems of oppression such as gender and sexuality.  As Meyer has pointed out in a study of queer people who have experienced violence, queer people recognize that in the US one's gender identity is often understood as indicative of one's sexuality. Conformist gender displays are associated with heterosexuality and nonconformist gender displays are associated with the queer community despite the reality of such arrangements. However not all queer people in Meyer's study felt that the violence they experienced could be reduced to just two aspects of their identity.  This was particularly relevant among queer people of color who highlight the role of racism as well as homophobia, transmisogny, and sexism as being a part of their daily experiences of harassment and violence. Queer people of color had the most difficulty determining if the violence they experienced was based on their sexuality, gender identity, or race. The fact that queer people of color find it more difficult to determine whether violence is an attack on their sexuality means that the hate crime statutes that we have on the books around sexual orientation primarily protects the interests of white gay men.

One of the ways we dehumanize any group is to deny them the reality of their experiences.  We need to do a better job of amplifying the voices of our transgender, queer, and bisexual students of color whose experiences and struggles often go unacknowledged.  Particularly now, in our current political climate where the middle class is shrinking, working class wages have stagnated and blue collar jobs have shifted overseas, has provoked anxiety among white voters on the right. When inequality grows our political parties become polarized.  And when our political policies become polarized people become angry because they feel the system is stacked against them.  What often happens is that the downwardly mobile economy is then blamed not on economic or political policies but on a certain group of people (queer and transgender individuals, undocumented immigrants or Muslims).  This is a time for the queer community to come together to make the voices of our queer and trans community members heard and for all us to take up public space. 

The backlash against gay marriage and the visibility of transgender personalities in our larger media venues has sparked a backlash against transgender and non-binary people that has led to such anti-transgender bathroom laws like North Carolina's HB2.  This law blocks transgender individuals from using bathrooms that match their gender identity.  Since its implementation in North Carolina this past March the national Trans Life Line, a crisis hotline for transgender people, has seen their call volume double.  As the Queer Trans Coalition reminded us last year, trans people and particularly trans women of color are extremely vulnerable to violence.  For trans people who are not cis-passing and for trans women of color the dangers are very real as they face unprecedented levels of violence and death and worsening rates of poverty and discrimination.  As an inclusive queer community on campus we need to point out the inadequacies of public policy, address the discrimination that exists to disenfranchise queer students of color, and to advocate and push for measures on campus and within the wider UC system that ensure the safety and well-being of every member of our community. We need to take up space and we need to make our voices heard.