Going Back Like Babies and Pacifiers; Why I Love Mariah

Reading these threads, the feeling I had was similar to reading criticism of myself; it was as if I had written a post that was really badly received. But this is some high level cognitive mash-up: my beloved Racialicious community was talking about Mariah, not me.

The strange part of it is, what irked some commenters on the Cannon/Eminem thread the most, was that they felt MC played up some kind of tragic mulatto myth, and that she (or her husband) seemed unwilling to recognise how much white privilege had benefitted MC’s career. Strange, because that’s often the beef I have myself with mixed race folks.

When the Racialicious team converses about mixed race issues, often it is my fellows like Latoya and Andrea who express sympathy and patience towards mixed race folks’ complaints that they have been ostracised by their communities of colour for a lack of authenticity. It’s usually me who yells “Suck it up baby! What about that white privilege you got??” I quickly lose patience with any story about a community of colour terrorising half-whiteys — if that story doesn’t also include the mixed race person admitting the privilege that comes with the pain.

Yet I have never felt that Mariah plays up any part of her ethnic heritage, except to patiently attempt to explain, again and again, who her people are, and to mention in a very low-drama way, that her experience of biraciality has been a painful one.

Sometimes, the reason why we are smitten with celebrities is because we see facets of our own struggles in their lives. Or perhaps more accurately, we project our own troubles onto the vague details of celebrity lives, and then imagine that just the two of us are secret allies in the war of life.

(Sidebar: this also explains why people are still torn up over Jennifer Aniston and Brangelina: I’ll bet you that at least half the people who follow the (non) scandal breathlessly have either been left by a partner for another person, or left a partner for another person.)

In the early to mid 90′s when I was growing up in Singapore, the radio stations seemed to play a Mariah hit every half hour. We were inundated with stories of her divaishness (for example, how she refuses to have the left side of her face photographed). Every magazine seemed to feature her frolicking in denim cut-offs. I didn’t pay much attention to her, but she was still, simply by flooding the airwaves, the soundtrack to my adolescence. Even now I know every single lyric to the sicktatingly sweet MC/Boyz II Men duet “One Sweet Day,” often bursting out in unison with the radio, usually against my will.

As I sludged into my late teens, I made a big show of only listening to Fiona Apple and Ani Difranco. But I secretly knew all the words to “Always Be My Baby.” And then I moved to Canada, launched myself into the white indie rock hipster scene, and promptly forgot Mimi.

I’m Singaporean-Chinese and English-Irish, and growing up in Singapore everyone always told me I was white. Due to Singapore’s justifiable post-colonial hangover, I was often mocked for my whiteness. So when I moved to Canada it seemed only natural that I only hang out with white kids. And so when I got political, I got political alongside my white friends; I become a pseudo-vegan eco-feminist, and protested the way they protested.

But the problem for me with white radical culture, is that it is a response generally to a middle-class suburban experience. In protesting the system in the way that my white friends protested the system, I was responding to an experience I had never had. (See Latoya’s explanation for why she doesn’t relate to Liz Phair.) I felt myself slipping further and further away from who I was, until by the time I was in my mid-20s I really wasn’t sure who I was at all.

And then in a hail of pink feathers and high ‘C’s, Mariah showed me the way. In 2005 with her massive comeback, she was all over the radio once again – enough even to reach me, who never listened to commercial radio at that point. Part of the magic of Mimi is her sheer global reach: sure I could’ve been inspired by a more serious mixed cultural figure, like Grace Lee Boggs, but growing up I had no access to someone like that.

This is how Mariah found me: on a boat ride from the remote island in the Pacific where my partner was learning organic biodynamic farming techniques, a friend helped us pass the time by playing “We Belong Together” (with zero irony) on her ukulele. I was amazed by the genuine sorrow and depth of emotion in the lyrics.

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