Wopajo

Feminist circles were difficult to figure out for me when I began navigating conversations on race, because race didn’t make sense to me for the longest time, and this was the first place that I was even allowed to have race discussions, but they were always about someone else’s race. I didn’t fit into racial discussions because I wasn’t really White. I knew that, and yet, I had heard my whole life that I had to accept that I was. I wasn’t Black, and Blackness was the crux of racial discussion in the feminist blogosphere (there are very good reasons for this, don’t misunderstand me), or so it seemed to me. Discussion on race on most big feminist blogs seem to be a binary; Black or White and little else. About the only thing I was picking up was that mainstream feminism was focused on talking about race, but not really to anyone for whom it was actually about, and certainly not anyone outside that binary.

So, where did a body like mine fit? I wasn’t Black or White. Did I even exist? Or was I supposed to sit down and shut up and just nod when people told me I was White? Didn’t I get to decide how I identified? Except that growing up near a Reservation you learn early on that the White community doesn’t really want you either, so where do you go? From what I understand, people of mixed race heritage who present as Black and are not of White ancestry have this same conundrum. I could be wrong, though, because that is not my experience on which to speak.

It only got worse the more I delved in. I quickly became frustrated in discussions that were meant to privilege bodies that were neither White nor Black. The discussion always seemed to be railroaded back to one or the other, leading me to conclude that if you weren’t one or the other, or at least passing for one or looking like the other, then you had best pass in your Person of Color Status Card, because your voice was not welcomed. If you identify as Non-White, everyone assumes you must be Black. Even Brown is a start, such as South Asian or Latin@… but you had best be prepared to assert your Brownness at every opportunity lest anyone forget that you are that Strange Other. The part of me that is Native begins to disappear as I try to engage. I find no comfort in non-U.S.ian communities, such as trying to find camaraderie with Indigenous people from Down Under, and instead find that my allies are further alienated by assumptions that they must be not only Black or White, but from the U.S. as well. Yes, even in numbers we find that the world must be centered on the U.S. and its center of the Universe complex.

My own blog isn’t safe, either, as anyone who reads my words feel free to tell me that I am expecting too much of others, that I must just accept that the perceptions of the world are the truth. That I am 90% European and that I must get over it. I say that I have a right to grasp ahold of my heritage and cling tightly. I am not ready to tell my family that we are all doing it wrong. (Well, maybe about the nickname…)

The world isn’t full of dichotomies and binaries, no matter how much we want to shove everything into an either/or container. Girl/boy, male/female, Black/White, gay/straight… life just doesn’t fit that easily into checked boxes. People are designed on a spectrum, literally and figuratively, with variances and individualities. The color of my skin or eyes doesn’t give away my racial identity, at least not in a stereotypical way. A photograph of me isn’t telling, and I would argue that this is true of many people, bi-racial, mixed-race and otherwise. My hair and features, unusual for even a Northern tribe, lighter than most commonly iconic tribes, other me from almost every one I know. I don’t know where I fit. I don’t know how to talk about race, because I have never been allowed to fit into one.

(Image Credit: Suave)

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