Welcome back to the Outside of the Constructs panel on Interracial Dating.

Our panelists are: Cecelia, friend of the blog and blogger at Anishinaabekwe; Julie, friend of Cecelia; Brandann, friend of the blog and occassional contributor; Lyza, friend of Cecelia; Andrew, blogger at KABOBFest; May, blogger at KABOBfest;Fatemeh, Racialious crew and Editor of Muslimah Media Watch; El, long time friend of the blog; andRichard, friend of Cecelia.

Cecelia: I have been fortunate to be in spaces where I have not had odd reactions towards me and my partners. Generally, people have been interested in my Ojibway/Anishinaabe heritage in a very respectful way. Friends of the past and current friends have been very mindful and culturally sensitive towards me and my partners. In some cases where there have been comments made about me or my partner we were quick to stop the assault before it got bad.

White partners weren’t perceived as good because generally these folks [as individuals] were no good. They often did not take ownership for their various privileges even though they said they would attempt to. Where as minority partners were seen as good because they were good people. No partners were considered as off limits.

Julie: When with white males, I would get the side-eye from other asians (they would be wary of me) but would get the approving nod from all whites, or other white/asian couples. Reactions from non-asian PoCs were along the lines of: “asian girl with white male, nothing new”. When cozy with other PoCs, I would be considered less than, different by anyone with oppressive tendencies, be they marginalized or not, and targeted.

White partners meant that I was less targeted for outright racist comments (but there was no end to the subtle ones). PoC partners meant that we were both targets (let the bulls out!), or that we were ‘so cute’ (let the condescension begin…).

White partners earned me the honorary white badge but since it’s not what I wanted, it didn’t matter. I preferred the approval of my asian peers. With asians, it was ok to be a PoC, and by extension, all marginalized bodies became visible. With whites, it was never ok to be unapologetically PoC/handicapped/marginalized except to provide exotic flavor.

Forbidden to date lesbian and very forbidden to be trans.

Brandann: We’re a military family, and I think that adds an extra layer of stereotype, if you’ll bear with me for a moment. One of the most common interracial couples among military families, at least in our circles, is White Man/Asian Woman, which carries so many ugly stereotypes that it has basically become a trope, in my mind. We are read as the opposite of that, since I am read as white, much to my irritation.

Among the military I think there is a construct of gender and masculinity that does not exist outside in the civilian world, and often Asian men become shunted into a very narrow box of this stereotype. I think “white” is certainly seen as superior, even with all the military’s efforts to be racially sensitive, and despite the fact that Asian men are the largest and fastest growing demographic in the military. A white woman and Asian man flip the stereotype and I’ve noticed a lot of people have, in my opinion, a difficult time accepting this.

May: I have been told that one of the biggest cultural taboos in regards to dating in the Arab American community is that of a relationship between an Arab female and a black male. Someone has even told me, “good luck trying to find an Arab guy who will marry you if you have been with a black man.” To further enforce the point, I know an Arab American female who “admitted” to dating a black male and made recipients of that information swear to keep the information mums lest it hurt her future marriage prospects. Although marrying someone who is white is also frowned upon, it is not on the same grounds for familial or cultural excommunication.

Andrew: Like I mentioned before, white women have always seemed “off limits” to me, other Arab men, and men of color more generally. I have also been told – and have witnessed firsthand – that the biggest cultural taboo an Arab woman could make is to hook up with and/or date a black man. Once, my friend told me that although she feels more attracted to black men than she does Arab men, she would never consider getting into a relationship with a brother simply because she is afraid of her family and her community. She admitted that while her parents may eventually capitulate and accept an interracial relationship with a black man, her community would be so judgmental and malicious that her family would have no choice but to either disown her leave the community.

Such attitudes are especially prevalent in Dearborn and Detroit, where tension between blacks and Arabs is often high. I have also heard of Arab men attacking black men that have dated Arab women, although I cannot say that these stories are totally true.

El: Within Persian culture, the most acceptable non-Persian mate would be a white person. After that, it probably goes east Asian, Latino, and lastly, black (probably the most “off-limits” or “forbidden”). Outside of that context, when people do have reactions to my partners and I, it’s been on the “good for you” tip (which can be a little weird in of itself – I mean, we are dating individuals, not entire races, right?). On the other end, I’m hyper-self aware and I know how folks perceive white women dating black men. And because I’m not white but brown (and often get mistaken as Latina), I feel as if folks critical of white female-black male relationships are also critical of my relationships, just not to the same degree.

Richard: My experiences in not dating interracially were definitely not intentional, although not entirely avoided either. Growing up in NYC I was absolutely exposed to the gamut of colors and backgrounds and my earliest childhood crushes were all non Asian as there were so few cultural peers in my small private school. I could also definitely be described as having an extended awkward streak so it wasn’t until senior year in HS that I was able to catch the eye of a paramour. This happened to coincide with the advancing Asian-American Pride movement of the late 90’s; therefore, my friends and acquaintances all inevitably were Asian so my social life was reflected as such. Post college I continued meeting a majority of my friends through Asian Awareness clubs and participating in the ongoing efforts at bringing solidarity to the cause, this kept me firmly entrenched in a yellow hued conclave. My passions, hobbies, activities and tastes were all formed with this predilection so it was inevitable that my deepest and most meaningful connections were made most easily with other Asians.

Growing up my parents always had the expectation that I would wed non-Asian and thus would remind me of that sporadically. Did this encourage my preferences in dating or socializing with non-Asians? Not particularly, as they also did a fantastic job of surrounding me with a good balance of Chinese influences in the face of an assimilating world. Food, language, entertainment, traditions and vacations all remained Asian in nature so my bias continued in that direction. I couldn’t say that it was either a conscious decision or not to date exclusively Asian, but that is how it happened. My natural tendencies, circumstances and circle of peers diverged and branched thus. I believe that ultimately if I had gotten along with and related better to a more diverse and varied group I would have dated outside of my race. It seemed to have been a perfect combination of nature and nurture that allowed me to explore and cultivate my own preferences as to whom and how I wanted to date.

Cecelia: I definitely only want to date Native men from here on out. I have known this since I was a teenager but dated inter-racially in my, teens, early and mid twenties. Now that I am looking for a partner I seek someone who embraces my Ojibway/Anishinaabe culture and life-ways that I embrace. This would be a traditional Anishinaabe man. In regards to colonialism/genocide the whole idea of getting rid of the “Indian” problem was for the blood quantum levels to dip until we were no more. It has just happened that we would marry out. Now we can marry in or partner in. Native people seek to be in community and therefore often date people from their community or other communities. I am speaking for rural reservation communities not urban Native communities. Urban Native communities are intermingling more with other cultures and populations. It has only been recently, within the past 20 years, where Native people have been able to take pride in their culture. Marrying out was a way to blend in more and often the only option due to factors such as urban relocation for jobs. But, regardless on your blood quantum or how much Native you are, you were still Native in a culture that made you feel shameful, guilty and invisible. Still not easy out there for us but I think that strengthening our communities can take place and therefore this means that our romantic, significant and lifelong partner relationships can be strengthened as well. We don’t have to hide or have shame in who we are as Native people. It all depends on the individual but I do know a lot of Native people who only want to be with a Native person. Again, strengthen the individual, strengthen partners, healthy relationships, healthy families, healthy communities, empowered communities, healed communities, stronger, more proud Native people, all tribes and from all directions.

Brandann: My personal experience as an indigenous woman has been that our tribes are very closely related to one another in our region. Even had I been living in the area more during my post-high school days, I would have been hard-pressed to find someone my age whom I was not related to who was also indigenous. I’ve viewed reservations as both a necessary evil and a tool of the Master, so to speak. They are opportunities for community building, but they also reek of colonization of Native people, to me. People shunted from their own land to scraps held out to them. Add to this the systematic whitewashing of “savages” by colonizers, and you have a situation where outmarrying was forced.

Outmarrying, though, was not avoidable to many people in my family, because of the close community ties. As much as I would have enjoyed the opportunity to exclusively date partners within my own race, the small area and strong family ties make this difficult, if not impossible. It niggles at me a bit, knowing that my heritage, at least visibly, is slowly wiped from the face of myself and my children, I know that it is the individual identity and not the quantum of your blood that marks your heritage.

Welcome to the Outside of the Constructs panel. This one is a little strange as compared to the others. Originally, this was to be the panel for Indigenous people, but then I expanded it to include people who are normally outside of U.S. racial constructs. But then, we didn’t get very much response originally, and I asked for help recruiting. Cecelia responded, but she invited a mess of folks – but who didn’t fit the original idea for this panel. I was going to move Lyza, Julie, and Richard’s responses – but then I realized their experiences probably fit a bit better here, since they were radically different from other responses on the White and Asian panels. So, it all worked out.

Our panelists are: Cecelia, friend of the blog; Julie, friend of Cecelia; Brandann, friend of the blog and occassional contributor; Lyza, friend of Cecelia; Andrew, blogger at KABOBFest; May, blogger at KABOBfest and Sawaha Sumra; Fatemeh, Racialious crew and Editor of Muslimah Media Watch; El, long time friend of the blog; and Richard, friend of Cecelia.

Cecelia: My parents are an interracial couple. My Dad is Ojibway/Anishinaabe (enrolled tribal member in the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community) and French and my Mother is various European heritages, the majority of her is Scandinavian (Norwegian and Swedish) and German. When my parents started dated my Mother’s Father said to her, “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Despite the one negative message from my Grandfather my parents tried their best, with all of the complications, family issues and life stresses, their overall message on their interracial dating was a positive one. My Dad grew up in Highland Park, MI which was what he called “mixed” and not diverse. He once described the neighborhood he grew up in by having “all the colors.” My Mother grew up in a working class, product of Ford and auto industry, mostly white inner ring suburb of Detroit. They moved to a more lower middle class neighborhood of an inner ring suburb and the compilation of their upbringings gave me a positive message about interracial dating, even despite our struggles as a family and individuals inside the family unit. Because of our various struggles from generational trauma, historical trauma and PTSD from being survivors of genocide on the Native side, I came to the conclusion that most relationships would be a struggle. This struggle can change as well heal. If our liberation and return to culture, language and traditions as Native people means feeling our ancestors pain then it may manifest in struggle within our family and therefore the interracial relationship of my parents.

My family on my Dad’s side is multi-racial, so mixing was already in the family and our family gatherings had all of us mingling which was most always a positive space for me. I am really thankful for my family being so awesome and open-minded! Some messages I received from my Dad (which he said weekly, if not daily): “the white man messed up everything,” and/or “don’t trust whitey.” Therefore, I wasn’t very trusting of white males in relationships, although I have had my share, I have retired dating white males because my Fathers statement that was ingrained in me since I was a child has proven true in the dating world. Sadly, I had to test the waters to prove his statements to be true.

Julie: Light-skinned = good. Dark-skinned = bad. Gay/lesbian also = bad. The races fell into those guidelines.

I grew up Vietnamese in a predominantly white area where they pulled eyes at me and made fun of my parent’s height and accents. As a displaced people who were just trying to survive, and as we watched other PoCs in our neighborhood/family turning to drugs and guns, assimilation seemed like the key to our well-being. I was surrounded by the ‘goodness’ of white people (some were pretty nice, but ignorant) and was brought up to appreciate them and to adopt their ideas, including their racist ones.
I may have received these messages, but more than what I was ‘sold’, was the fact that I was a target for racism (Seventeen Magazine was definitely not written with PoC in mind) and thus differentiated. I grew wary of white people and started gravitating to other races for my friendships (mostly latino and asian) in my late teens.

Brandann: I grew up mixed-race, and only slightly conscious of what that meant. I am assuming that my being a product of a mixed-race relationship meant that my family didn’t frown upon the idea of interracial dating or relationships.

I’m Ojibwe/Anishinaabe and European by descent, registered with the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. If there were problems with such relationships, there was no indication of it from my immediate family. Though, as I got older and understood racial identity better (things such as the endearing nickname my father’s father gave me, which was a bit of a jab at my mixed-heritage but meant to be affectionate), I noticed that other people within my own community had ideas about what was right and what was less-than. Relationships between two Native people, at least in my own limited experience, were looked upon more favorably than those between Native and non-Natives.

The only time race ever arose as an issue was when I met my husband, who is Asian. My grandfather is a Korean War veteran, and I personally had fears that it would be an issue, however right or wrong that fear was. Turns out, it was never something I needed to worry about. He was accepted with open arms.

Lyza: Growing up in a rural farm community, where my mom grew up in a suburb of Grand Rapids and my dad grew up on a farm in Rockford, MI(which back when he grew up there it didn’t have the reputation it does today), allowed me to have a simple growing up experience that was for the most part homogeneous(white working class to middle class) in nature of where we lived. My mom was very intentional(coming from a Civil Rights and Feminism background) when it came to making my brother and I aware that the world was not homogeneous in nature she would yearly take us out of class to walk downtown Grand Rapids during the Martin Luther King Jr. day parade, as well as have literature and different avenues where we would be challenged with how we viewed the world from where we lived.

I thank my mom for being so progressive and going against the norm of ignorance that was prevalent in the community that we grew up in. My dad came from another generation where rural was rural and the only people of color in town were generally from the city and didn’t plan on staying any time soon. When I was in my early twenties I dated a Latino man that I worked with and after a date where he dropped me off at the home and met my family my dad sat me down and asked me what my intentions were with him and if I planned on dating him seriously. This comment disturbed me because of the undertone of racism that happened to ooze out of the comment. That was when I realized that there was a standard when it came to dating, and I was at a point in my life where I decided that was not acceptable. Within the past 3 years my father has changed his world view considerably with some hard life lessons that have come his way as well as my consistent challenging of how the world really “is” with all of the double standards.

My Grandpa (mom’s side) has been very adamant that interracial dating is unacceptable, however his deep seeded racism comes from generationalism and growing up in Benton Harbor pre and post WWII era. I constantly challenge his worldview by giving him an opportunity to explain why he has these views towards specific groups of people and offer him a different POV. Bringing some of my friends with diverse backgrounds to family events has allowed him to be around people that challenge where his fears and racism hold so closely to his belief system.

Andrew: I grew up in Ann Arbor, MI after having spent the first four years of my life in New York City. My mother immigrated from Lebanon in the late 70s and my father’s family, also Lebanese, has been in the United States since the beginning of the 20th century. On a personal level, both of my parents have always disregarded cultural traditions in favor of their own interpretations of what’s right and wrong or how people should and should not behave. For example, my mother was 31 when she married, which is virtually unheard of in a culture that pressures its women to marry young, and was the first woman to leave her village in Lebanon. Although there are far fewer social expectations imposed on men than on women in Arab culture, my father seemed to buck the trend by maintaining an air of humility despite his charm, intelligence, and professional success.

As a result, despite the fact that my upbringing was definitely defined by my Arab identity, I was always encouraged to challenge and confront cultural norms and traditions, and push social and personal boundaries within reason. When it came to sex and relationships, my parents never shied away from having conversations with me about relationships and sexuality, yet they rarely came off as nosey or intrusive. They have always encouraged me to view dating as a process through which I develop a better understanding of myself and what it is I’m looking for in a partner. Although I haven’t seriously dated a woman that isn’t Arab, I am confident that my parents would support an interracial relationship.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about my extended family. My grandmother (father’s mother) enjoyed being racist and would regularly claim that she was no Arab; she was Phoenician. She never missed an opportunity to obsess over the kinds of people her grandchildren would date and eventually marry, regularly encouraging all of us to date within our Arab Orthodox Christian community. Such attitudes are reinforced by the rest of my father’s family which, interestingly enough, embrace culturally traditional values and lifestyles despite being third and fourth generation Arab Americans.

On my mother’s side, I grew up knowing that interracial relationships were frowned upon and not taken seriously. This obviously did not extend to Europeans; my cousin was once married to a French woman. I should add, though, that my family is definitely more concerned with religion than they are race when it comes to relationships. This is because they assume that their children will not marry/date outside of the Arab community, and so they focus on religious identity. My Shiite Muslim (now ex) girlfriend definitely ruffled a few of their feathers, but I was never openly confronted about my relationship with her. As a man, I recognize that I enjoy significant privilege and am not subject to the kind of scrutiny Arab women must endure.

May: As a US born and raised to Syrian Sunni Muslim parents, I grew up watching both sides of my family interracially/ethnically marry—it was almost exclusively my uncles though, and to mostly white European women. As Syrians are regarded as the white people of the Arab world, I would venture to say that these kinds of unions were not only considered culturally acceptable, but a reinforcement of an aspirational whiteness.

Further complicating the fact that both my parents are Syrian (my father with a Bedouin background) was the culturally enclavish way I was raised. We lived on a cul-de-sac with all my father’s family populating the six model homes that the track housing in the sleepy Southern California suburb was based on. Thus not only was I encouraged to maintain a link with my “roots” but I was also expected to only have my cousins as my friends. As my father once retorted when I asked to attend a schoolmate’s sleepover party, “Friends? why do you need friends? You have cousins!” So you can imagine the jingoistic way marriage was regarded/viewed.

Because some of the aforementioned interracial/ethnic marriages failed, this led my father to come to the conclusion that his children would be best suited to marry someone who was culturally similar to us. Or in his words “another Arab.” Knowing very well the narrow definition my father was operating under with such an assertion, I pressed him to share his criteria for entry into this marriageable “Arabness” with series of annoying Socratic questions. Here is how that delightfully uninhibited conversation unraveled: The Match-making Chronicles: Race/Ethnicity/Nationality of Ideal Husband.

I never understood how I was to meet or even respect this imaginary husband in my father’s mind who, as illustrated above, should be Syrian from my father’s city of origin and from “a good family,” when I was never raised with Arabs or Muslims who did not bear my same last name. In fact, my father was known in the Southern Californian Syrian community as “The Syrian who doesn’t interact with Syrians” and kept company with a Benetton ad campaign circle of friends—Mexicans, Cubans, Salvadorians, Jews, African Americans and many more non-Arabs.

But I never shared my dating history with my father—neither did he have any desire to know. My mother, mapping together conversational glimpses of my dating history understood the geographic stretches of my past relationship partners, only had two criteria for me. The man I was to marry should 1) make me happy and 2) be a Muslim. Also knowing the narrow definition my mother thought fit snugly into her “open-minded” views on cultural diversity, I pressed her. “So you would be okay if I married a Chinese Muslim.” She paused…for a while, took a breath and asked “you would want to marry a Chinese man?” For my mother, although she and another aunt advised me against marrying an Arab, there was still a cultural closeness or familiarity she associated with being “Muslim.” To my mother’s credit, she finally released the emo-cognitive tight grip she had on notions of being Muslim.

Fatemeh: My father is Iranian and my mother is from Scottish and Irish heritage, growing up Mormon in Utah. Growing up, their racial differences seemed minimal to me, which probably normalized the idea of dating someone different than I. The most exposure to their differences I’d get is when they’d tease each other about polygamy on both sides of the family (my father comes from a Muslim family, my mother comes from an LDS [Mormon] family). They’ve been married over 35 years now.

Thankfully, my parents don’t push me about marriage. They want me to be happy and economically stable, and I don’t think they could care less about who I marry as long as I’m financially independent–when I was growing up, both parents stressed that I should get an education, get a good job, and then worry about marriage.

El: I’m full Persian and there are some pretty general taboos in Persian culture: don’t marry a non-Iranian, but if you must, at least bring home a white boy. The biggest taboo would probably be marrying a black or perhaps an Arab man (depends on how nationalistic your family is, I suppose). This was never really expressed within my immediate family, but when your culture has some closed-minded views, the messages will find a way to seep in somehow. For Iranians, it’s mostly about preservation of culture, of being able to pass down the language, customs and traditions onto your offspring. Interracial marriages can be seen as a threat to that.

Contrasting to that, I also came up in (and am still a part of) a religious community (the Baha’i community) where unity of mankind is a central principle and interracial marriages are quite common. We even have scripture that touches upon the topic! It’s seen as a positive thing in this community. I had a lot of half-Persian friends growing up and I was able to witness, firsthand, a variety of family dynamics in Persian-and-“other” pairings.

My day-to-day surroundings growing up were much less diverse. Almost all of the kids in my school and small town were white, so you really didn’t have any other choice BUT to interracially date. Even still, there was a weird dynamic in the town. Some other minority kids and I developed these weird complexes – we felt we were almost “too ethnic” to be dated there, and became every guy’s best friend who happens to be a girl. But then we went off to diverse colleges where guys hit on us, asked us out – we had to work out our issues and it took some time to see ourselves differently.

Cecelia: The only fears I had were dating a white male because of privileges and abuse of power. I have dated Latino, White, Native, Black and African. My worst relationships were with white males because of how their privileges brushed up against my multiple oppressions. My best relationship was with the Latino male who was half Peruvian and half White. We had a balanced relationship, would take about oppression, race, class, gender and do things such as hike, drink tea and enjoy meditation.

Julie: My worst experiences were with white males. My best ones with asian males. I was hesitant going into relationships with white males as a teenager (I was already wary of them but didn’t know better), where I suddenly became visible to the white peer world (it takes a white man to bestow the honorary white badge, I suppose). Disliking that, I got out of those relationships, lickity split.

By the time I was dating asian/mixed-asian men, I was hanging out with other diasporic asians, re-learning my heritage, and actively avoiding white people. I became more visible to the asian man, as he could feel safer with me and not have to worry about my throwing racist asian male stereotypes at him. My only fear was that I would ‘slip-up’ with my whiteness-upbringing, show my ‘whiteness’, oppress somebody.

By the time I married a Taiwanese-American man, I was comfortable in my skin and very tired of seeing asian girls with white men (the ‘accepted’ norm). I had no fears going into our relationship, whatsoever. I had an ally, flesh and blood. People from my hometown were generally surprised, but were used to being surprised by me, and I no longer feel like I belong there.

Brandann: I almost feel it is unfair to say “my worst relationships were with white men”. I have very little experience otherwise, and it is easy, I think, for me to dismiss any of the problems that occurred as things I did wrong. I too easily dismiss the idea that any of it could have been a result of an imbalance of power due to varying axis of oppression, but I have a tendency to feel responsible for anything, which, again, is probably a result of some of my relationships with mental illness.

My best relationship, obviously, is with my husband. I am not sure if it is because it feels like the power balance is more equal between us, or if our personalities just work well. It could be coincidence, but I’m not exactly naive enough to dismiss the idea that race affects it outright.

I’m read as “white” though, frequently, which further complicates my thoughts on the issue, because I am ascribed privilege and status that were not the experience of my upbringing or background. It is often presumed that I carry white privilege in our relationship, and it may be true to an extent, but my history definitely does not match that perception. I am not “white”.

May: Not really. I think one of my fears is related to my own judgments, especially when it comes to the courting process. This fear is that I would judge a man for not meeting the gendered expectations I had indoctrinated into me from childhood, ones that I had challenged at some points and now I see the value of upholding. I expect a man who is interested in me to approach me with expressed intention and—500 steps later or so—if serious about marrying me, obtain my father’s blessings before proposing to me. This is where an understanding of cultural sensitivities become fundamental—a man who is interested in me needs to be fully cognizant of the fact that he will probably not interact with my family, and mostly especially my father, unless his intention is to propose to me. Sometimes socioeconomic status and divergent educational background put more of a strain on the relationship or the potential budding of a relationship than race or culture.

As for the peers…

Most of my close friends are not Arab or Muslim and come from diverse racial, class, educational, and professional backgrounds. And because I have a tendency to self-isolate outside of the comfy boundaries of trusted friendships, I rarely confront the ire that comes from a homogenuous community’s concern about one’s interracial dating or mating practices.

And as other participants have broached the “dating or ‘talking’ to white men” topic:

I rarely attract white men, and when I do, there is this underlying fetishism quality to the attraction (and the probability of white men approaching me is usually heightened when I am on the thinner side!). The “specious informant” has never been a legitimate fear of mine, but I will say I have received the attention of far too many white men interested in learning Arabic or at that moment enrolled in Arabic classes. I brusquely joke that war and the Kardashians have made my kind more popular—and even wrote about it: The Kim Kardashian Effect On Arab and Middle Eastern Women.

Andrew: I haven’t really dated interracially. I’ve had a few one or two week flings with women of different races, but don’t know what it’s like to have a serious romantic relationship with someone that isn’t Arab. I know that my family’s disdain for interracial relationships affects me subconsciously, and it is definitely more difficult to feel comfortable in the context of an interracial relationship knowing that my extended family will react negatively.

Hooking up with white women has, however, been a little stressful, but not because of my family. Many of my peers, including some of my closest friends, consider it a betrayal for a man of color to pursue a relationship with a white woman. As a result, I remember several occasions during college in which I made a concerted effort to make sure that if a white woman and I were to spend the night, she would be back at her house before any of my roommates were aware of her presence. To this day, I go to great lengths to keep any romantic relationships I may have with white women an absolute secret (although, admittedly, they don’t happen very often).

Fatemeh: Since there aren’t a lot of other white/Persian hybrids like myself to date, I’d say all my dating has been interracial. And I always assumed it would be–growing up in a majority-white Utah made me assume I’d never find anyone like me to date. Living in a different majority-white state shores up this assumption, though I’ve met other biracial Persians like myself.

I don’t date much, but when I do, one of my biggest worries is that the person I’m dating won’t understand my ethnic and religious identities. Trying to figure out how to be together is hard enough without trying to educate someone on privilege, oppression, and gender issues. It’s really important to me that the person I’m dating understand these issues and is sensitive to them.

El: I’ve mostly dated interracially and I haven’t had many fears or misgivings going into it; overall, that aspect of it has mostly been positive. I honestly don’t care about my partner’s background and I don’t really have a moratorium on dating Persian men. When it comes to race, all that matters is that he’s race-conscious. And for a number of reasons, there aren’t many Iranian-Americans who are and vibe with me on that level.

If I had any qualms it was probably with dating white men because of how I grew up. I used to feel as if white men just weren’t attracted to me, and for whatever reason, I don’t often find myself attracted to them. Chicken or the egg?

Even still, I’m slowly bracing myself for the day when I bring home a non-Persian, non-white man as someone I want to marry. I don’t know if this is what will actually happen – I joke with friends that after all this, I’ll end up with a Persian doctor. But even still, it’s good to mentally and emotionally prepare. I’m not sure what the reactions will be, and the uncertainty is probably the hardest part. Family is very important to me and I want my partner to become a full part of it, I want there to be true joy and love to go all around. I’ve heard some horror stories from friends or their parents about when they brought home non-Persian mates – for some, acceptance took years. Others were shunned. But, in the end, many of them say their families grew closer through the trials and the prejudice within their families was slowly being eradicated, particularly when children and grandchildren arrived.

Who exactly is Jean Toomer?

Scholars, academics, and American literature buffs know him as the author of Cane, one of the landmark works to emerge from the Harlem Renaissance.

And yet, Toomer’s legacy is a bit more complicated than just his work. Back in the 1920s, in spite of segregation, Toomer articulated a vision of multiracial identity that was rejected by the norms of the time. Splitting time between exclusively white and exclusively black environments, Toomer decided that he was neither – he considered himself an American, a mixture of several different races and nationalities. However, he grew increasingly frustrated with the restrictions placed upon him due to his identification with black literature – in later life, he allegedly denied having any “colored blood.” As a result of this, Toomer’s legacy and the meaning of Cane has been left open for wide open for interpretation – and a new release of Cane has done just that, with scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Rudolph P. Byrd, asserting that Toomer wasn’t pioneering a new identity – he was trying to pass for white.

Felicia R. Lee sums up the controversy neatly in the first two paragraphs of her article in the New York Times:

Renown came to Jean Toomer with his 1923 book “Cane,” which mingled fiction, drama and poetry in a formally audacious effort to portray the complexity of black lives. But the racially mixed Toomer’s confounding efforts to defy being stuck in conventional racial categories and his disaffiliation with black culture made him perhaps the most enigmatic writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

Now Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard scholar, and Rudolph P. Byrd, a professor at Emory University, say their research for a new edition of “Cane” documents that Toomer was “a Negro who decided to pass for white.”

This charge actually reflects quite a bit about our current conversations on race. Lee speaks to both Gates and a different biographer of Toomer, Richard Eldridge, and comes away with very different takes on Toomer’s identity:

“I think he never claimed that he was a white man,” Mr. Eldridge said. “He always claimed that he was a representative of a new, emergent race that was a combination of various races. He averred this virtually throughout his life.” Mr. Eldridge and Cynthia Earl Kerman are the authors of “The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness” published in 1987 by Louisiana State University Press. [...]

Archival research reveals a clearer picture, said Mr. Gates, the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard: “Everyone on his family tree was black and didn’t claim to be anything else. Only Jean tried to cross over.”

The conversation swirling around Cane is fascinating, because it reveals how long we have been grappling with the same issues around race. As Toomer points out in his own words, race is a shifting social construct – people viewed him differently depending on their own conception of who he was. But Gates and Bryd interpret Toomer’s actions as a way of fleeing from blackness.

“He was running away from a cultural identity that he had inherited,” Mr. Gates said. And this came with consequences: “He never, ever wrote anything remotely approaching the originality and genius of ‘Cane,’ ” Mr. Gates said. “I believe it’s because he spent so much time running away from his identity.”

“I feel sorry for him,” he added.

(Thanks to Carmen for the tip! You just can’t quit, can you? )

I often feel that I’m not taken seriously as a full well-rounded nuanced person when it comes to things related to eroticism, burlesque, sexuality, queerness, and so on. I have grown up constantly being the Other, having everything I do viewed through the lens of the Other, assumed to be the representative of the Other, rather than just a representative of myself and my myriad views and backgrounds. I’d make a piss-poor representative for any other culture or background anyway, given how I stick out like a sore thumb in all of them. Too foreign for Bangladesh, too Bangla for Malaysia, too Asian for Australia, too X for Y.

I have been introduced at burlesque revues as the “Bollywood Princess”- which ticks me off a lot, particularly since I have yet to do a piece that involves Bollywood in any shape or form. Not even a subcontinental song! Anything I wear automatically becomes “exotic” on me. For example, I have a beautiful red dress, with some gold embroidery, that I bought from an op-shop for a performance project. When I first wore it to a rehearsal one of the other girls there said “wow! It’s just so YOU!”. “Me” doesn’t tend to go for dresses very often (it’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve started wearing dresses and skirts more regularly). It only looks exotic because it happens to be red with some gold embroidery and on me it looks like I’m wearing sari cloth. On a Chinese person it’d look like a reimagined cheongsam. On a white person? A Snow White or Red Riding Hood dress. The dress itself isn’t especially exotic; what makes it exotic is the lens brought on by people’s perception of the wearer.

Similarly, I think people in queer scenes are so mystified by the presence of a Racial Other that they fail to comprehend that I could also be a Sexual Other too. I swear, I’ve been to so many queer events with a bevy of straight people, and THEY get the attention. There’s probably been two queer girls in my entire life that have shown even a smidgen of interest in me as more than just a friend. I don’t ping anyone’s gaydar. As my Redhead Girl said one time, here I am proclaiming to the world my sexuality and hardly anything’s opened up, while here she is denying her sexuality until very recently and already she’s got a strong support network and even a relationship or two. I suppose having a boyfriend doesn’t really help (“yay, another barsexual”?) but at least talk to me beforehand and not make assumptions?

The other thing I notice with that is that my self-presentation, the way I look or act or dress, doesn’t tend to fit into local established ideas of “queer”. I don’t look especially femme or butch. Neither label fits me particularly well. They’re based on Western Anglo-centric notions of gender roles and gender identity that don’t always neatly coincide with my experiences growing up in Malaysia and in various multicultural backgrounds. In the West, two men holding hands or kissing is automatically sexual and queer; in the Middle East, it’s pretty normal. In the West, two girls being affectionate is pretty standard; where I come from it’s already enough to judge you as “ew a lesbian”. Women in South Asian culture are not often submissive; while they still often hold on to traditional ideas such as being the housemaker, in the kitchen, etc, they’re also very brash and open and loud and have just as much a say in the household as the men – perhaps having even more power and influence.

To be a man in Bangladesh – not butch, a man – all I have to do is wear pants and a shirt. That’s it. Enough to cause plenty of gender confusion when I went there for holidays (just wearing jeans even with a traditional top got me quizzed on my gender by a little kid). The women there wear salwhar khameez (a tunic and pantsuit) or saris. I don’t think there’s anything explicitly stopping you from wearing anything else (I wasn’t detained or shamed) – it just didn’t seem to occur to anyone else that there were other “feminine” clothes out there, or that a pants and a shirt weren’t necessary masculine. Similarly, I’ve met Western women who wouldn’t code salwhar khameez as feminine simply because there are pants involved.

My gender identity isn’t based on how high my heels are, how your hands can fit around my waist, my ability to fix cars, or my taste for flannel (urgh). Having a “lesbian haircut” still does nothing for me, because on a body and look like mine it gets hidden by the “OMG FOREIGN” lens. Even my use of language interferes; I’m not exactly sure what they mean, but I have had readers of my blog tell me I write about “lesbian” things as though I am a straight person. Perhaps because I grew up learning English with a hodge-podge of international influences, mainly within a culture that mentioned nothing about sexuality other than “we do not talk about such things”, only being aware of the existence of “queer culture” very recently? What does it mean to write as “straight” or “gay” anyway?

I want to be able to mix up clothing, accessories, stances, looks, attitudes, words, expressions, body language, and not assume that I am coding as Butch or Femme or Kinky or Vanilla just because I’m expressing something that means different things to different people.

Sort of like how the word “air” can refer to both “the thing we breathe” in English, or “water” in Malay. Exact same letters, different pronunciation, different meaning. Similarly, my mannerisms and costumes and ideas may share the same letters or components as other “words” or subcultures, but I’m speaking a different language, so don’t assume you know what I’m saying.

I don’t often see non-white people at queer women parties like Scarlet in Brisbane or the Pussycat Club in Sydney. They are there, though they tend to know each other (though they have been friendly to me; one time they got me to dance with them because I was doing sticker duty – “Watch Your Drink” – and they called me a hero). I’m not automatically drawn to people from any particular race; half the time I don’t even know for sure what race or background anyone is. People make too many assumptions about my background that I tend to assume nothing about anyone else’s background. But it can be lonely and rather intimidating to go to someplace alone (as I usually do), not have any friends with you, the friends that are there are usually busy and preoccupied, and you just wish someone would come up to you and say hi.

Sometimes I wonder if I could purposely market myself – well, at least my performance persona The Merch Girl – to the female (lesbian?) gaze. It’s not terribly difficult to market to the male gaze as a girl. Tits! Nudity! Come-hither! Submission! Sure, that’s not the taste of all (or probably most) guys, but there are plenty of avenues for that sort of thing. Even alternative porn tends to go for some aspect of the male gaze, with the submission and come-hither and otherwise-conventionally-beautiful girls, empowered by the camera rather than using the camera as a means to own and display their own self-empowerment.

But the female gaze? The queer female gaze? It’d probably be like what Lady Gaga does half the time, especially with the Telephone video. Gender play. Masculine outfits (though can we move away from tuxedo suits please? They’re yummy and I have a thing for business suits, but I wonder what the reaction would be like if I wore an Indian sherwani. Probably won’t make a difference – it looks like a long dress anyway). Not completely femme’d up, but there are some hints. Androgyny – but how do you deal with a very obviously female curvy body with big breasts?

There’ll probably be a more intellectual imaginative aspect too. Building scenes, crafting situations, using the senses and words and music and art to create atmosphere, one where you can think yourself into and immerse yourself in your own delicious thoughts. Being a bringer of pleasure, making a girl feel good and revel in her own imaginative self-pleasure, being a conduit through her senses, through temptation, through pampering – being as turned on by her pleasure as she is.

Why a girl rather than a guy? Maybe because I find it more of a challenge. Firstly you’ll need to find a girl who’s open to the idea (and is not grossed out by the idea of a girl practically seducing her). Then you need to come up with something other than just “hey boobs!” – which could work, but she already has boobs of her own – and you want to contribute something else. Maybe it’s because I consider myself Kinsey 4.5 and already have a guy that I’ve done the seduction/play/pleasure thing with and am pretty comfortable with that. Maybe it’s because it’s the one area I still haven’t quite explored, that there’s still something fundamentally different about being with a woman, being with feminine sexual energy and pleasure, that I yearn to explore ever since I owned up to being pansexual sometime around the age of 16.

But I can’t seem to find people to take me seriously. Not when they’re already confronted by the idea of me being Foreign and don’t stop to think “hey, she’s probably Foreign AND queer too!”. I do know that quite a few girls (and guys besides) find pleasure in my various burlesque and stage performances; I just wish I could charm and attract and seduce people with it (for longer than 4 days online)!

Am I taboo? Am I this weird enigma that no one wants to consider because everyone has preconceived notions based on how I look? Do I approach sexuality and relationships in such a drastically different way that the Western models stymie me more?

What do I have to do to get people to show an interest?

Hard to believe, but I was born bald. Not cute little peach-fuzz bald. Not skinhead bald with a chance of stubble. No, I was born with a head as bald as a baby’s butt. What’s more unbelievable—I grew up with straight hair. Of course, if you look at me now, the first thing you see is what happens when Ireland and Iran decide to come together to have a baby—curls that put even Shirley Temple to shame.

My hair went curly in early adolescence, right around the time I hit middle school. I was a small, petite tweenster, and instead of fretting about breasts, which were hardly there, or periods, which were nonexistent, I poured my angst and energy into my newfound mop of kinky hair that sprung itself on me almost overnight. My father hated my curly hair. He said it made me look black. This is a problem to some Iranians, who hold a great pride in the purity of the Persian race. Iran is actually Farsi for Aryan. To this day, when people meet me, their first impression isn’t that I look Persian; it’s that I look black. My Arabic first name doesn’t help. It makes people assume that I’m one of “those black people” whose parents named her something from the homeland. Persians have lustrous hair, but usually it’s straight with a slight little wave. Mine is too kinky to scream and dance “Iran!” Even when I met Shirin Neshat, the most famous Iranian artist outside of Iran, who has made a career out of photographing Persian women, it wasn’t apparent. She didn’t realize I was Iranian until I mentioned my last name.

There is a racial element to the picture here—hair that is curly, kinky or even nappy is commonly associated in American culture as “black.” Silky, straight hair, on the other hand is usually seen as “white.” As comedian Paul Mooney put it, “If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed. If your hair is nappy, they’re not happy.” Herein lies the paradox of many ethnic women in America, black and otherwise—the pressure we curlyheads feel in assimilating into a dominant image of lustrous, straight hair that will seemingly make us look more well-kept or better-groomed in a culture of brushes, perms and irons designed to give straight hair what we already have. Yes, curly hair is sexy—at times. Usually the sexy sirens with curly hair are actually straight-haired women who know how to use a curling iron. The grass really is greener on the other side.

This ideology is pervasive, to the point that many times, we don’t even realize we’re buying into it. Beauty requires an acknowledged ugliness in something else, so in order to look damn good, someone else has to look like a train wreck. I remember being told as a child that curly hair is really a genetic mutation. I remember thinking I was a freak. When I was in high school, a classmate once told me that race is actually determined by hair type. If your hair is straight, then you’re Asian. If it’s wavy, then you’re white. And curly hair makes you black. I stood there dumb-founded that a straight-haired, freckled white guy was telling me this. The physical contradiction between him and his theory was so obvious. Even with a democratically elected black President, there are people in our country who still think that the American image should still lean towards white. And if you think that’s outdated, just look at this past summer when 11-year-old Malia Obama wore here hair in twists during a trip to Rome. The conservative blog Free Republic called her unfit to represent her country because her hair wasn’t straight. The blog has since pulled that thread from their site.

How is a young, ethnic girl with curls supposed to feel good about her body if the images she’s being told are sexy are those of women who either have straightened hair, or are women with straight hair that has then been curled? Google “curly hair celebrities,” and most of them are straight-haired women who have gone through a curling iron. I’m sorry, but end-of-hair flips do not constitute curly. Beach waves are called waves for a reason. They don’t count either. In Hair Matters, Ingrid Banks wrote, “Certainly white women have concerns with their hair, but their concerns do not involve the actual alteration of hair texture to the extent that is an expression of their cultural consciousness (Banks, 38).” There are naturally curly celebrities out there, but looking back, the only ones I have never seen with straightened hair are Bernadette Peters and Howard Stern. I hate to say it, but Howard Stern is keeping it real here. Guys seem to have it easy here—all they have to do it cut their hair super-short. It the world of curly hair, it really does seem as if you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. Even Michelle Obama straightens her hair, and Malcolm X tried, before he came to consciousness about it. In his autobiography, he writes on what he calls his “first really big step toward self-degradation:”

I’d seen some pretty conks, but when it’s the first time, on your own head, the transformation, after a lifetime of kinks, is staggering.

Now picture me in the quaint, white, cookie-cutter homes and gardens, picture of Littleton, Colorado, where almost every girl in my middle school sported sleek-straight locks with bleached highlights, suntanned over the summer and walked around dressed like the latest advertisements from Abercrombie and Fitch. I stuck out enough before with my dark hair and tan skin. But my curls made me stick out as if I were in a picture of a Where’s Waldo book. A hairstylist once told me I have an irregular curl pattern, and never was it more pronounced than in middle school. There was no fighting it. Every strand went whatever way it decided that morning, and brushing it only made it look worse. Classmates would come up to me during lunch hour and tell me my hair was too curly. They labeled me as the Iranian girl, and that mindset stuck with me into my twenties, that because I looked different, I was Iranian before I was American, and that was a status I would have to subscribe to because there was no way I could change my looks. In our inherent, but rarely caught habits of racializing appearance, curly hair commonly seems to get caught somewhere in the middle. It is, but sometimes, it isn’t. I remember hearing girls tell me, “This weekend, I saw a girl with really curly hair, but not kinky curly like yours, really pretty ringlet curly.” Even my mom, my number-one fan, called my hair kinky, a term commonly reserved for black hair. That never bothered her though. She said she loved my hair because she loved the look of African hair. It was exotic to her. She just wished she knew how to take care of it. At the same time, Iranians weren’t laying any claim on me either. To them, I looked more mullato than anything else. My father hated looking at me because he said I didn’t look like an Iranian child. It wasn’t enough that I was a scrawny, underdeveloped child with glasses and braces. No, that was too easy because too many other kids in my school had glasses and braces too. But I was the one with the out-of-control hair. By the time I reached high school, I saw girls all around me, left and right, getting asked out on dates and dances, but I was getting glossed over like the big white elephant in the middle of the room. I was positive my hair had something to do it, and that was when I bought my first hair relaxer kit. I’m not alone in this endeavor. According to the market research firm Mintel, home relaxer kits made $45.6 million in sales in 2008. And that’s just a temporary fix.

Hair relaxing wasn’t my first attempt at taming my curls. I can’t even to begin to count how many nights I would spend doing homework with jumbo curlers in my hair, hoping they would at least smooth the strands. They never did, so then I would pull my wet hair back into a ponytail, hoping to at least straighten the top part of my do. My mom once told me that puberty made her hair a little curly, but then it calmed down. I clung onto that, thinking that if straightness came back to her, it was only written in my genes to come back to me as well. I was in such denial, I would still insist on having my hair cut into layers as if it were straight, so that the moment my hair decided to behave, it was already cut to look perfect.

I relaxed my hair for the first time one spring weekend during my freshman year of high school. I didn’t tell anyone. I wanted the new me to be a surprise. Quite honestly, the chemicals are the worst smell ever, but beauty isn’t painless, and I was willing to deal with the smell if it led to me looking normal again. Of course, it didn’t straighten my hair. It only loosened my curls by about ten percent. What the fuck is wrong with my hair? That was when I pulled out a paddle brush and a hairdryer, and I yanked it until it dried moderately straight. Then I ran the flat iron through it. You have to realize how many products are involved in making curly hair look naturally straight. First, there’s the relaxer kit. Then there’s the moisturizing shampoo and conditioner, because curly hair is naturally thinner and drier than straight hair. After that is gel, and handful goops of it, followed by the heat protectant spray or lotion. Sometimes, a serum is thrown in right here. John Frieda was my choice, but that was mostly because of the before and after pictures. My hair never settled like the models, but I was convinced with regular use, it finally would. Then you have the brush, hairdryer and flatiron. After that is the conditioning gloss spray, which really doesn’t condition so much as it coats your hair with a silicone-like film that reflects the light and distracts you from obvious follicle damage. All this, just to hide the fact that you just willingly burned your hair and your scalp for the sake of aesthetic hygiene. The whole process can take all evening, and because I had teenage grease, I would have to repeat the process from shampoo and conditioner on down once or twice more that week. When I walked into school after my first relaxed experience, everyone did a double-take. Not too long before, I did a video project with a friend for our government class that covered the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Jerry Springer-style. I played Monica Lewinsky. I don’t know how that casting worked out, but when my friend saw me in class, the first she said was, “I wish you did this two weeks ago. Now you look even more like Monica Lewinsky!”

The relaxer addiction lasted all the way through graduate school, into my mid-twenties. Boys and theatre roles only made it worse. University of Denver, where I went to college, was ranked by US World News and Report as the least ethnically diverse campus in the country. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. According to the Census Bureau, Denver is just over 50% white. Somehow, I kept on finding myself dating white guys who were scared of me when my hair stepped out of the shower. One boyfriend said when I let my hair go natural, I looked like I had just be electrocuted. Another boyfriend, a Jewish violinist who had a fetish for Middle Eastern girls, used to always call my hair frizzy. Hairstylists thought I wasn’t going far enough. Repeatedly, I was pressured into thinking about Japanese thermal straightening, which after shelling out anywhere from $500 to $1500, will leave your hair sleek, soft and bones-straight for the next six months. By the end of that half-year bliss, your roots have grown out, and it’s time to pay another $250 for a touch-up, which ends up becoming more of an arduous process than the original straightening itself. No secrets? I did consider it. Multiple times. But I never followed through.

Roles on stage didn’t help with the curly hair psychosis. In American society, where the public body is so important in gaining profit, the commodification of looks is even more magnified in performance. On stage, good looks are a demand, because if people are going to be looking at you for two hours, you better be something they want to look at. Yet there’s no qualitative definition for good looks. It changes from person to person, so the most reliable gauge is what you see most represented in media, and most hair in the media is straight. I was much more likely to get a role with straight hair than I was with my natural hair. Curly hair not only invokes racial biases, but age biases as well. Shirley Temple had curly hair, and so did little orphan Annie. Remember when Chelsea Clinton was seen at the 2002 fashion show with straight hair? Everyone went nuts. The Guardian wrote:

It is the hair that summons most interest. There is something expressly attention-seeking about it. As Chelsea knows, relaxed hair attracts spectators: there is an element of suspense to it that you just don’t get with other hairstyles.

What is it with the news media scrutinizing the curly hair of first daughters? This translates to theatre, where to walk into an audition with a mop of curls can make you childish, funky, and not really well-rounded. With straight hair, I looked older, more mature, and with my tan skin, the catch-all ethnic actor. Most actors have European and Southern dialects listed on their resumes. I have Indian, Persian, Arab and New Orleans. I think the only ethnicity I haven’t been cast for is Pacific-Asian. Something tells me that’s where my hair would draw the line. When I was asked to play an Indian woman one time, I told the theatre that I didn’t even look Indian. They simply replied, “Well, your skin and your hair (straight at the time) look close enough. Audiences will never be able to tell the difference.” There’s a Foucault-like power element here, when you look at the racial and particularly age prejudices of curly hair. For him, power is acted upon and through the body. Ja’Nean Palacios goes on to elaborate that

power manifests itself through the relationship between curly hair and beauty. Since curly hair is regarded as being less than beautiful, this hair type becomes the site of the body that requires discipline.

I cannot tell you how many people have told me I look older and more mature with straight hair. And it’s the lack of discipline in my curly hair that makes me look younger and less mature. One time, a young girl asked me how I get my curly hair. Her mother replied, “She doesn’t brush it!” Curls equal a lack of discipline, a habit of letting those strands go and allowing them to dry and settle however way they feel. Throughout history, there has always been a very deep relationship between discipline and beauty. Just look at our cosmetics industry. How many different types of foundation does a woman need to put on before she looks like a piece of dry, flaking cake? So when we’re confronted with opposing images of a woman with straight hair that’s styled with a curling iron, and a woman with free-styled kinky curls, the one with straight hair is going to come off as more mature, because her beauty routine takes more discipline.

Anti-feminist as it may sound to say this, it was a boy who finally made me feel comfortable with my hair. I was twenty-four, in my last year of graduate school. I went in to model one summer evening for figure drawing class that was run by a guy I would later fall in love with. My hair was pulled back, and he could see the ringlets in the back of my ponytail. Sometime that evening, he asked me to let my hair down. I was terrified—I had no idea what it would look like. He didn’t care, and he asked me again to take it down. Turns out, he loved it. That night, while he held me back after class to chat, he couldn’t stop telling me how much he loved it. I didn’t know at the time that I was going to date or even marry him, but his excitement over my curls made me want to try to make peace with them. The next day, I found a salon in Denver with hairstylists specially trained in cutting curly hair. The haircut is called the DevaCut, because the method came from the Devachan Salon in New York City, which specializes in curly hair. The cut works with the curly hair pattern, and instead of cutting wet hair straight across, the stylist cuts each individual dry curl so that the curl pattern isn’t disrupted. I also learned how to break product addiction—all I needed to style my hair was conditioner. When I got home and realized how much of my bathroom I could empty out, I saw how much time, energy and money I was sinking into achieving an image that was so completely against what was natural for my body. I realized that a lot of my justification for it came from being a performer. I had gotten so used to playing other women, I completely lost the ability to play myself.

Then a weird thing happened. Somewhere along the way, I stopped calling myself Iranian-American and started referring to my ethnicity as American-Iranian. I honestly don’t know where it started, except that it was after the night the artist I would fall in love with raved about my curly hair. Sometime after that, I realized that “American” does not equal just white. Maybe in the past it did, but look at our country. America is a catch-all phrase, and when minority Americans acknowledge themselves as equally American as white Americans, then our images of racial beauty in this country can truly change. It’s interesting to see stuff categorized as African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic-American, and so on. But American-American? It seems like a politically-correct code word for “white.” Any time a race is unspecified, we’ve been conditioned to assume it’s white. People think sometimes that it’s ironic for me to have this viewpoint, because technically speaking, I’m purely white. While that’s true, practically speaking, I’m not, because it really comes down to not genetics, but how you appear to other people. Unfortunately, we’re still a society that looks first, and then maybe learns later. The fact of the matter is that because I have kinky hair and tan skin, most people encounter think I’m black, and their projection of racial residue has really pushed me to look at race and ethnicity from a more black and less Eurocentric standpoint. I wonder what it’s like for purely white women with curly hair. Obviously, they’re not assumed to be black, but I wonder to what extent they feel the pressure to look and feel racially “normal”?

The audiences with the loudest voices aren’t always minorities. And I’m pretty sure they have straight hair. Political leadership, magazine fashion spreads, advertising—I can count the natural tendril appearances on my hand. Curly hair, naturally curly hair, is just as American as straight hair. Why do we need to feel the pressure and expectation of physically altering ourselves so that we can fit into a more homogeneous picture of ideal or perfect beauty? How is hair straightening really any different from a breast lift or a nose job? You can argue that hair alteration is more temporary, but even boob jobs need some level of surgical maintenance. It’s not, and I think it’s seen as less severe because in plastic surgery, you see a lot of white women trying to look more refined. In hair straightening, you see black women looking more white. I have a way of looking at the politics behind appearance, and I think it’s the Iranian in me that brings that out. Iran is a country where one of the few ways a woman can express herself publicly is through her looks, so everything she does to it, from letting hair show to getting a nose job, is a conscious political decision. In a way, embracing my curly hair was my own conscious political decision. For the first time, I was consciously making the choice to depict myself on stage the way I naturally look, not alter it to accommodate to how mass media tells me I should look. David Mamet wrote that the hardest role a performer can play is himself, and it’s when a performer does so that we can see the vulnerabilities that make us approachable and understandable human beings on the stage. For me, that role came through my curly hair. What’s ironic is that audiences respond more strongly to the curls. My hair sticks with them. What’s more, I chose to label the image of my curly hair as American. Feeling like I belong to this country shouldn’t lie in how I look, but how I act.

I haven’t straightened my hair since then, and quite honestly, I don’t really care to. To many people recognize me this way now. Now that I’ve moved from straight theatre to one-woman shows that are written by me, there’s no need to alter my appearance to better fit into potential roles. I’m the one who writes them now. My hair has now become my trademark, usually the first thing people notice or remember about me. Isn’t that what performers (and people) strive for? A definable characteristic that sets them apart from the crowd? Turns out, I had that all along, and fight it I did, until I realized that self-esteem, at least in performance lies not so much in portrayal as it does in self-acceptance. Perfection, or ideal beauty is really a distraction, especially amongst minorities, because instead of guiding us to look inward, it manipulates us to focus on outside projections that tell us how we should look and feel, and we become white-washed, so to speak; formulaic, sterile. The more Euro-centric you look, the easier it is to get taken seriously. Think about all the hair health that’s been compromised, and for what? Assimilation? Attractiveness? I don’t find anything attractive about chemically-burned hair. Just because you can cut it doesn’t make it any less traumatizing than burned skin. Appearance is either in compliance or reaction to dominating media images, which is destructive, because it gives one margin the entitlement to marginalize anyone who doesn’t fit in that clique. What a boring landscape to see America dominated by the same hair type, which goes deeper to imply that we ‘re also the same (white-dominated) racial landscape and the same personality.

I can go on an on about the problem, but the solution is an action that one person can’t take on alone. Collectively, we need to see more images of ethic Americans in their natural state. By that I mean no weaves, no airbrushing to make everyone look like they have a ballet body, but a media movement that redefines the aesthetic appreciation of the human figure, the most basic common denominator every race shares. Don’t portray the differences; accept them. “I am not my hair, I am not this skin,” goes India.Arie’s hit single I Am Not My Hair, “I am the soul that lives within.”

I meant to write this post a long time ago – kept saying that I would – but it just didn’t happen, finally fell on the back-burner. Recently, however, I read another post (here) that addressed this topic, but in a manner that felt – to me – to retain the very same “Us vs. Them” theme that’s gotten us here in the first place. The angle taken, the examples given, some of the comments, etc. allow for a dangerous misunderstanding to continue (not the author’s intention, but nonetheless . . .). So I felt it’s time. Let’s do this.

A while back, I was talking to a friend of mine (a black female, which is relevant) – we’ll call her “W.” She’s telling me about this guy she ran into at some store; this Vietnamese guy (“or Chinese or Korean or something”) comes over and starts chatting her up, hitting on her, trying to get her number and all that. She’s not feeling it. She gets irritated on a number of levels. But her primary annoyance is that she feels like he’s just messing with her, so she ends up telling him “give me a break, you don’t date black women,” and (tamely) telling him about how racist Asian guys are.

She finishes her story, looks at me, and, laughing, says “can you believe that?”

I give a one-word response. “Yes.”

But my mind was reeling – because there was so much going on in this one interaction (sort of two interactions, including the re-telling) that just sum up the state of oppression-related affairs in the U.S. First, there’s a (black) woman getting hit on by some random guy, which always carries a tinge of objectification, dominance, etc. In this case, it’s an Asian guy – so we’re bringing together two notoriously “undesirable” race/gender combinations in this country. Then there’s her confusion over the exact ethnicity of this Asian dude. Then there’s her belief (based on real past experience) that he’s not really interested in dating her; that he’s more or less mocking her, because – as an Asian man – he’s probably crazy-racist against black people. And, finally, the beauty of it all – she’s casually relating this story to me, her friend – an Asian (okay, mixed-Asian) male.

And it all made perfect sense to me. Because, you see, I happen to be a sort of connoisseur of the black-Asian interracial experience, and everything that happened in that story follows the confusing, tense narrative of a relationship that has been being shaped for the last couple-hundred (maybe far more) years. It’s a long story – with a lot of loops and twists – but it’s one worth reading, so I hope y’all follow me to the end.

Prologue – “Setting it Straight” (aka “Prepare to Have Your Mind Blown”)

We “all know” that there’s this big rivalry between Asian and black folks. The “opposites” of the PoC spectrum, there just is no bridging the divide. I’ve heard it a million times (from both sides).

And so the look of shock on the faces of this one particular group of Asian folks I was with shouldn’t have surprised me when I asked what should have been a stupid question: “You all realize that there are black Asian people, right?”

But, you see – that’s what this post is about. In spite of all the claimed “differences” between the two groups, there are black Asian people. There are Asian black people. There are actually quite a lot of them. When I talk about my mixed background with my students, it never fails to bring a grin to my face (and give me hope) at how many of my “black” students tell me that they have Asian blood, as well. Filipino and black mixes are the most common, but there are so many other mixed-race black/Asian people out there. Because, get this – the communities are entwined.

Problem is, we’ve been conditioned for so long to buy into the whole concept of the division between the two, that we can’t even see it. No matter what I say here, no matter the evidence out in the world, in the end you’re all still going to believe that these communities are not connected because the messaging has been so strong in the other direction. Black folks with Asian blood will just call themselves “black,” and nobody ever knows otherwise, because they never think to ask (or even consider the possibility). Asian folks won’t reach out to Asian-blacks because of the same reasons. They blame each other, call each other out, and love to throw stereotypes at each other. Each group desperately clasps to racist notions to make sense of a frustrating world where they’re oppressed by racist notions.

One more situation where the epic construct of racism in this country prevails because of its genius simplicity. So huge. So obvious. We’re in the same boat. Working together would be a giant step in actually solving both of our problems. But the system’s power is in its knowledge of history, and employing the dividing tactic so brilliantly.

But I, for one, am tired of hearing (from both sides) about how different the black and Asian communities are, culturally-speaking. The stereotypes and media-based prejudices fall out differently – yes. But damnit – I lived in Tanzania (in East Africa). I currently live in China (in East Asia). I’ve lived in the SF Bay, California, Michigan, and Portland, Oregon (in central North America). I’ve run with all-Asian groups, all-black groups, all the mixes in between. I’ve mentored African refugees, Asian-American immigrants, and “at-risk” youth of both shades. There’s no epic, insurmountable divide in history and culture – it’s the opposite, actually. So often, I find myself having pieces of black (African and African-American) culture slap me in the face as being so eerily similar to Chinese (and other Asian) cultural practices. So many connections, right in front of our eyes. Yet most people are too damn lazy to see it – because accepting media-inflicted messaging is so much easier.

Because the truth is hard to dig up. It’s hard to see if you’re used to having your eyes closed and opened for you by outside teachers, mentors, newscasters, etc. It takes time. It takes some real thought.

Well – today’s your lucky day – because I’m going to give you a crash-course in history and explain to you the unbreakable ties between black and Asian folks (and others) in the United States of America. Read it, digest it – but don’t just take my word for it. When it’s all said and done, feel free to think for yourself and dig up your own truth, as well.

Part I, “Jews and the Creation of the Buffer Class”

Historically, it begins with the Jewish people and the beginnings of their persecution. A strange way to begin a story about Blacks and Asians, yeah? But stay with me – everything’s connected.

We’re in Europe, around the time of the first Crusades, early 1000s A.D. (*1) Christian scripture has been largely standardized at this point, and Jews are now – almost universally – determined to be a people rejected by God. Leaders of the European nation-states issue decrees and laws that effectively prevent Jews from being fully integrated into Christian community. However, various Christian tenets leave gaps open – jobs that “good” Christians should mostly avoid – and, out of a lack of other options, the Jewish people fill those gaps. They start handling the money – they become merchants, bankers, accountants. Would they like to hold other jobs, make their livelihoods in other ways? Sure. But they can’t – it’s not allowed. And they have families to feed.

So they get good at what they do. They make it work. And now, there are actually Jews who – in spite of oppression against them – are doing quite well for themselves. Other folks look on, and don’t like what they see. “They” shouldn’t have that kind of money. Something fishy must be going on.

Bring on the First Crusade. As the Christians invade the Holy Land, Jews shift over from “tolerated” to becoming “the enemy” (along with Muslims, of course). Suddenly, oppressive laws and decrees change to outright violence. The “huddled masses” of Christian have-nots are spurred on by the haves to take it from the Jews. Massacres. Pogroms. It has all begun.

More options are taken away, job-wise. The only “gap” left is that of “money-lender,” and so the Jews take on that role. This is convenient for the ruling classes, of course, because it’s easy to deflect class-rage aimed at themselves (the true perpetrators of this inequality) by having the oppressed target the people who are seen to be directly handing out the money (and asking for it back, as well).

This method of keeping the poor and oppressed from demanding real change by encouraging them to take out frustrations on a “buffer class” works so well, European leaders more or less make it state policy. (*2) Stereotype development as public policy has begun.

Part II, “the Age of Imperialism”

Hop-skip ahead to the so-called “Age of Imperialism” (as if it’s one that ended): the UK (and other countries, but we’re focusing on Britain here) has spread its grip over the world, with colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. As they murder and subjugate the more-pigmented peoples of the world, they butt up against a little problem – the more they devastate and debase the peoples they’ve conquered (and now – enslaved), the more likely it is that those people are going to someday snap and realize that there are just too many of them, and too little British, to let this continue. How to blunt that rage and frustration?

They look to the Jews and their historic use as the Buffer Class. Of course, they’ve effectively kept the Jewish population down through this technique, so there just aren’t enough alive to spread around the world like they need. So they look abroad (to their conquered peoples) and decide to import a new Buffer Class: the East Indians. Brilliant.

Suddenly, all over the British colonies East Indian folks are running little shops, small businesses. In the day-to-day, it’s the East-Indians that subjugated peoples (never mind that the East Indian people are also subjugated) see taking their money. Living a little bit better than themselves. Dots are connected (with the subtle support of the colonizers), so that now – when violence erupts – it’s mostly aimed at the new Indian buffer class, and the colonizers hold onto the spoils for a little longer.

In Africa, especially, it falls out like this: Stereotypes are created. Enforced. Inequality is demonstrated and questioned. Mistrust goes both ways (the Indians don’t trust the Africans because they’ve been attacked by them, the Africans don’t trust the Indians because they appear to be in all snug with the colonizers and are taking African money). All the while, the British are laughing their asses off and crushing both peoples under their heels.

“Independence” is eventually attained, but it’s too late. The damage has been done. To this day, tension and mistrust continues between the Indian “buffer class” and African peoples. In fact, this exact same racial scenario (between those of Asian descent and those of African descent) remains strong on a new continent.

Part III, “A Brave New World”

Okay. So now we’re ready to move over to the Americas – the “New World.” The U.S. has gained its “independence,” and the British monarchy no longer holds sway. But alas – their influence is most sorely felt.

In their zeal to achieve “Manifest Destiny,” the government has murdered too many indigenous Americans. They wanted to use them as their slaves to handle all the manual labor, but there just aren’t enough of them left (can you see a theme developing)? So what are these barbarians to do? Well, they look to the past as their guide and they find a solution – they import their slave labor from elsewhere (in this case, Africa). Great. Plantation life can carry on as planned and “equality and justice for all” can continue for the rich white men who coined that phrase.

Absolute tragedy and mental scarification of an entire race of people ensues. More stereotypes are developed and enforced that carry their weight into the present day.

Eventually, the Civil War erupts, and black slaves become “free.”

But that creates a problem – because how is the U.S. going to continue its rapid development without all that free (the only kind of “free” that really matters in a society like ours) labor it was relying on back in the day? And, suddenly, with “freedom,” these black Americans suddenly want to have equal rights? Get paid real wages? Be counted as real citizens? Hell no. But how can the top keep ravaging these “free” black folks without some heavy repercussions on down the line?

Once again, the dual-pronged solution is imported from abroad: immigrant labor. In this case, largely Chinese immigrant labor (among other Asian ethnicities as time rolls on). See – immigrants are a great solution because they aren’t citizens. They have no idea what to expect out here. Hell – they don’t even really speak the language. So you can do all sorts of evil sh– to them without them ever having the ability to do something about it – because you can always threaten to send them back, send their family back, randomly imprison them, kill them . . . the sky’s the limit. (*3)

Even better – you’ve now got that buffer class you needed to keep the “free” black folks from fully blaming those who deserve the blame. (*4) Because – don’t misunderstand – black folks are still on the bottom around here. And the best way to keep that going is to deflect their frustrations – so once again, the Buffer Class plays its role. (*5) With just a tiny bit of rhetoric, the ex-enslavers get black folks pissed at the Asian folks living in more or less the same squalid conditions as themselves, so the real oppressors can focus on more important matters – like rolling in money, for example.

Due to various lack of opportunities, Asian folks start getting pushed into certain roles (ala the Jews in Europe). The power-structure encourages Asian-black interracial tensions. Asian folks are slapped around but given a few bones to seem a step “above” black folks so, from the bottom, Asian people seem to be all cozy with “the Man;” while Asian people are encouraged to look down on black people and do all they can to exaggerate their “difference” (so as not to give light to the truth – that we’re all getting f—ed).

Stereotypes are developed. Enforced. Etc.

Part IV, “The Common Era”

And now here we are: here. Now.

Black folks are still a subjugated people in the States. Asian folks are still playing the role of the buffer class/model minority – subtly pushed into filling gaps that those at the top don’t want to be in – hence, all these Asian shopkeepers in predominantly-black neighborhoods. Young black folks are rightfully frustrated and angry about their place in this country. Yet where is that rage going to go? Not to the top, of course – because you’ve got these Asian folks directly taking their money right there in front of them. Do the math. (*6)

On the flip – Asian folks living in these neighborhoods are trained to mistrust the very black folks they are relying on for a livelihood. The messaging isn’t accidental. So you get Asian shopkeepers stereotyping black folks, to the point of murdering them in perceived “self-defense.” (*7)

On a less-dramatic level, you have ridiculous tensions between various Asian and Black communities throughout the U.S. You get recent spates of violence in schools. In communities at large. And the media has a field day with it all – because misdirection is the best way to keep oppressed people from doing anything constructive about it.

Because we have this tendency to throw ourselves into this one, taking sides, getting right into the middle of it. Black folks (rightfully) reference the massive color-based racism of many traditional Asian communities. Asian folks (factually) cite instances of black folks targeting Asians. You’ve got the two “least-desirable” romantic partners – Asian males and black females – lamenting their lack of love then each explaining why they “just aren’t interested” in dating the other. It’s too personal. So frustrating. Somebody needs to bear the brunt of this frustration . . .

Oppression Olympics. “We’ve got it worse than you because . . .” “You’re just as racist as white people because . . . ” “I’m not racist, just telling it like it is . . .”

Bla, bla, bla – back-and-forth, forth-and-back until both sides just prove each other right and reinforce stereotypes over and over again. So caught up in how this other group of oppressed peoples is so dangerous, so racist, so different. Meanwhile, “They” are laughing their asses off because these groups are so similar that “They” can use the same simple tactics to oppress both of them. Oppressed people are just so easy to manipulate . . .

Part V, “Open Your Eyes”

So I’ll tell you what - y’all need to just back the f— up and get some perspective for a second. Because, by being so caught up in the middle of the storm, we’re missing some huge, glaring points that are just so incredibly obvious when we look at the bigger picture (which is, of course, exactly as the top wants it).

If there’s all this tension between the two communities; if there are all these incidents where they clash – in schools, communities, corner stores, etc. . . . If that’s the case, what’s one very obvious reason that that is possible? Well, because the two communities are entwined. Asian and black folks live in the same neighborhoods. They’re going to the same schools. Which means that – well, they’re actually going to be facing a lot of the same challenges. And these similar challenges are going to create a lot of the same frustrations. These frustrations breed similar pressure, and a similar mis-directed backlash . . . etc.

Historically? Pretty much anywhere there was black slavery, there were soon to be Asian immigrants living within the black communities (and, yes, living as part of those communities). And that has continued to this day.

But that can’t be true, right? Cuz “we all know” that black and Asian people are so completely different. There’s no overlap. Asian people live in the suburbs and black people live in the “inner-city.” Right?

Here’s my answer to that:

F— the stereotypes. F— what “we all know.” Stop watching tv shows and movies for your understanding of race in the U.S. If Asians are really doing so well on a large level – if they’re all really the well-off “model minorities” that “They” all want us to think they are- why are the majority going to the same underfunded, over-crowded, gerrymandered public schools that all the other brown folks are relegated to? If all Asian-Americans are living the “American Dream” and getting rich at the expense of black folks, why do the majority live and work in the same societally-ignored (and avoided) neighborhoods? There are Asian-American gangs, too. Violence. Poverty. Oppression.

On the flip side – if all black people are criminals and die young, how come there are so many old black people living in real houses, far from prisons? If all black folks are uneducated, what’s with all these historically black colleges and universities I’ve heard about? If they’re all poor, how come I keep hearing about all these black politicians being called “elitists”? And isn’t that “Obama” character a perfect example of a “Model Minority”? There are tons of black folks who are doing just fine. Who have never been involved in violence or any sort of crime. Black kids raised by two parents. Going to good schools. College. Yuppies. Republicans.

You getting me? In both cases, these communities are entwined. Sharing challenges and struggles – and successes.

But, in spite of that, I still have to ask stupid questions like – how can Asian people be all pissed off about false stereotypes and depictions of Asians in the media and then completely buy into stereotypes about black people peddled by the exact same media? How can you read only the articles about black criminals or violence (in relation to Asian folks) and feel satisfied that you actually know anything about what’s really going on? Asian-American organizations completely dismiss or ignore the plight of black folks in this country – and then we get mad that black organizations don’t support us?! Flip all those statements (to regard black folks with Asians), and it’s all the same damn thing. Have we all gone mad?

It’s a crazy, frustrating situation – where there’s so much reason to work together and fight against shared problems, but all this faulty history, all this brainwashing, all this careful manipulation by the dominant classes turns us into self-defeating hypocrites.

And yet . . . and yet . . .

There’s hope. Things can change. It will take a lot of work and a lot of understanding how the system created this infighting for us. But there is hope.

Which brings us all the way back to the story that began it all: “W” and her “Vietnamese” suitor. When you first read it, you probably thought I cited it as an example of the divide between black and Asian. The misunderstandings. The unavoidable conflict. How the two can “never get along.” An Asian guy hitting on a black woman, and racism is assumed . . .

But that actually wasn’t it. Because that story was one of hope. It’s an illustration of how the divide just really isn’t that big. Because, in spite of all those assumptions and defenses, etc. revealed in that story, “W” was sharing it with me, her friend – an Asian guy. At the time, her first and only Asian friend. The very same Asian friend that came over and celebrated Thanksgiving with her and her family. Needless to say, I was the first Asian guy to share a special occasion with her family like that. Of course, I was the only non-black person there. And I’ve never felt more welcome.

Because we’re friends. And with friends, you’re able to get over the B.S. weight of stereotypes and other assumptions and go with what the person is actually like. What they actually know, do, etc. You give each other a real chance, instead of letting some self-interested third-party tell you who the other person is.

So all of you – take a step back. Breathe deep. Stop buying into the nonsense and open up your minds the same way you ask others to about you. Black AND Asian. And Jewish, even. We’re all connected. More so than we’ll ever even know.

And that doesn’t mean that individuals – on both sides – aren’t going to have racist notions. It doesn’t mean that communities – acting in concert- aren’t going to further the misunderstandings. What it means is that if you really want to represent, then represent – your own community AND oppressed peoples as a whole – and give yourself and others a big-picture view. It’s going to take work – but it’s far from impossible. Stop being lazy and only touching the surface. Do something real.

Stand up. Head up. Fist up.
Use your free hand to shake hands with the causes across the way,
And then – and only then – can you honestly say:
“I want to get free.”

(*1) I use the “A.D.” label most intentionally here.

(*2) And be damned-sure that Hitler was taking notes on that one.

(*3) That’s another standard-play that’s been in the Inequality Rulebook for centuries.

(*4) Do I really have to point out that this continues today?

(*5) At this point, you should realize that the “Buffer Class” and “Model Minority” go hand-in-hand.

(*6) It’s an indication of how the media plays into this feedback loop that I don’t need to cite anything here for y’all to know exactly what I’m talking about.

(*7) Latasha Harlins being the most well-known example.

(*8) If you’re wondering at the lack of citations for this article – I keep asking y’all to not be lazy and do the work yourselves (not even just taking my word for it), and giving you citations wouldn’t accomplish that. Because then you’ll just stick to that. So put some work in. Find your own answers (but look on both sides and in between), and then hit me up with your comments, questions and concerns: “choptensils AT gmail DOT com”.

The other day I was having a drink with a friend, when he began describing a woman he was interested in. “She’s half Japanese,” he said. “Half Japanese?” I said, “She doesn’t have another half?”

At this point my friends have gotten used to my annoying linguistic nitpicking, the subtle (and allegedly annoying) ways that I make clear my thoughts on certain words. When friends tell me someone is lame, I say, “What? They only have one leg?” Or when my students tell me their textbook is gay, I say, “Oh really? What’s its stance on same sex marriage?” Or when a dude tells me another dude is a pussy, I say, “But I thought you liked those?…”

Most of the time people easily grasp the point I’m trying to make and either stop using certain words around me, or defriend me on Facebook. But when I object to the description of mixed race folks as halves, quarters and eighths, people get too confused to be irritated.

Which makes sense to me. Because even though I’ve been mixed race for almost three decades, it only occurred to me recently that perhaps I don’t really like being called a half of anything.

Apart from the fact that hey, I’m a whole person, referring to my different ethnic heritages as fractions leads to some sort of existential apartheid. When I refer to myself (or others) as half this and half that, what I am implying (whatever my intentions) is that half my body, self and experience is Chinese, and half of my body, self and experience is White.

I’m implying that the halves of my body are separately Chinese and White, that if you cut me in half you could clearly see which parts were white, and which were POC. That’s clearly untrue, even if my right hand is way better with chopsticks than my left.

It’s not like I can hold my different ethnicities separate from each other. I’m not half and half, something on this side and something else on the other…I’m both. At the same time. There are no parts of my experience that are solely white, or solely Chinese. I don’t have one compartment for Chineseness in my brain and another compartment for Whiteness, living side by side and sometimes visiting but ultimately existing separately. Every single part of me is a 100% white/Chinese mash-up, all the time. There ain’t no separating these things from each other.

I’m sure you can find me 3459876 mixed race people who don’t care if they are referred to as sixteenths or 13%s. I’m sure there are mixed race people who are gonna read this and think: Whatevs. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. And that’s ok, I’m all for people describing themselves in whatever terms they like. But I’m saying that this mixed race person doesn’t like that terminology, because of what it implies about how we think of race in general.

Which is this: potentially we like to refer to people in halves, becuase even as the entire world is an inextricable, bloody mash-up of hundreds of different ethnic groups, we still like to imagine racial groups as separate, impenetrable, sanitised entities. Even while they are simultaneously existing in one human.

Many of the issues that plague the mixed race identity have to do with feelings of inadequacy and inauthenticity. Maybe some of that has to do with the fact that people are always telling us (and we often tell ourselves) that we are half of things. I mean, that has to have some kind of impact somewhere.

So in the interests of the boiling pot, or just simply the sanity of this one mixed race person, if you know someone who is mixed race, say (for eg) “Carmen is Chinese and Dutch,” not “Carmen is half Chinese and half Dutch.”  Because the first means exactly the same thing as the second, it’s just that the first is being much more realistic.

A couple of weeks ago I had the Toronto launch of my novel, Shine, Coconut Moon. I prepared myself in the usual way, going over what I would read, how I would introduce myself and the book to the guests, and anticipating audience questions during the Q&A. This Q&A, however, threw me off. I should have known better than to expect the usual, “So, when did you know you wanted to be a writer?” line of questioning from my Canadian peeps.

The questions they wanted answers to were more along the lines of: So, what would you say is the difference between Canadian racism and American racism? And, Would you say South Asians in the U.S. are more assimilated than South Asians in Canada?

Maybe I brought it on myself with the intro.

Before reading an excerpt, I talked a bit about how, while living in Canada, I never thought of myself as Canadian – I was always Indian or Punjabi or Sikh and then later, South Asian. It wasn’t until I moved to the U.S. and lived through eight years of the Bush administration, that I felt the most Canadian I’d ever felt in my life. That was when I realized that things I’d always taken for granted (free universal health care being only one of many) were values that formed and shaped who I was. They were the underpinnings of what I thought was right and just. And I was clearly not in Canada anymore.

But having to answer those tough questions for fellow Canadians was one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do yet. So much of the experience sits as half-formed thoughts that I had to somehow mold into coherent responses.

Things like the fact that when I lived in Canada, I reveled in my “ethnicity,” wore my Indian-ness with unapologetic joy. But the minute I crossed the border I shrunk from everything that made me appear “too” ethnic. I was hassled at the border several times when I visited home and tried to return. My partner at the time begged me to remove my nose ring and to dress more “corporate” so that I would get across. And the time that I followed that advice, the crossing was smooth and uneventful. I understood, then, on a much deeper level, why that push for assimilation was so strong south of the border.

Things like the fact that most of the South Asians in the U.S. were recruited during the “Brain Drain” from India in the 60s and 70s while Canada threw open its doors to “unskilled labor” from parts of South Asia. And that this history is critical in looking at the differences between the experiences of South Asians in the U.S. and Canada. Whereas the “professionals” who came over to the U.S. became a “model minority” – held up as examples of what was possible if one were to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, unskilled laborers sweated in low pay factory jobs, stood for hours on assembly lines, and cleaned up after their Canadian bosses.

And yet, to write the post-9/11 thread in my novel, which takes place in New Jersey, I went back to the first years after we arrived in Canada. The fear of backlash, the hostile environment toward anyone who was perceived as Muslim, or Arab, or a terrorist, the shame of being unwanted and unwelcome in your own home – all were as true for Indian-Americans (and anyone else with brown skin) post September eleventh as they were for South Asian immigrants in Canada in the late 60s and early 70s.

It was within the first year after we arrived in Canada that the Sikh temple next door to us was set on fire with the words, “Pakis go home” seared onto the walls. And immediately after the events of September eleventh, Sikh temples were bombed and set aflame in both Canada and the US in retaliation for the attacks in New York and Washington.

In Canada, we as children fought the slur of “Paki” by distancing ourselves from it. We tried to explain to our tormentors that we could not be Pakis because Paki comes from the word Pakistan and we were from India. Therefore we could not be Pakis. And those of us who were from Pakistan came up with other stories to prove that we were not the same as the people our tormentors hated. In the U.S., immediately after the attacks, there was a major media campaign that had television commercials at regular intervals with people of all backgrounds proudly proclaiming, “I am an American.” In other words, I am not the Muslim, Arab, Brown, terrorist, “other” that you hate; I am just like you.

So while the histories of the two countries are different, the politics and psychology of fear are the same. One of the questions I was asked was along the lines of, “We always hear about American racism and how horrible it is, wouldn’t you say Canadian racism is just as bad, if not worse?”

I struggled to answer this one, because I honestly don’t know which racism is worse. I know that discrimination of any kind is about fear and shame . . . it makes you not want to be who you are and you have to fight to love your own Self. I know that the U.S. has a history of slavery and internment camps, but Canada has the Komagata Maru incident and a healthy scattering of Neo-Nazis in all provinces.

And I know that here in North America, we fight whatever our fight is – discrimination based on gender, race, sexuality, class . . . while in other places women are fighting the politics of Faith. They are fighting for the right to say no to sex with their husbands. They are fighting men who call them whores because they are not being “good Muslims” and are, instead, embracing the ideology of “Christian infidels.”

And the only thing I know for sure is that none of us is fighting for the right to be Brown or female or gay or wealthy. We are fighting for our very basic human rights. The right to be who we are, exactly as we are, and entitled to the same privileges as anyone else.

So as I considered the questions at my book launch at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, I was grateful to be in a room with such thinking, probing minds. People who are looking for answers—hoping, knowing that the way things are right now isn’t really working for anyone. And that there absolutely is a better way . . . we just have to keep asking the questions that will help us find it.

A few months ago, I got into a fistfight on the subway.

I was coming home from work and it was packed. There was this gawky twelve year old kid standing nearby. I’d noticed him earlier in the ride clowning around with a friend: Skinny kid, all fingers and toes, awash in the dorkiness of an actual pre-teen who does not have his own show on the Disney channel. I was tired and spacing out when the door slid open and people shifted to get off. The kid made a move for the door but I had a few stops left so I twisted out of the way to let him exit but instead of moving forward he just stood there, blinking and stammering. Just as I was asking him, “are you getting off?” someone behind me gave me a hard shove out of the way. I fell forward, the guy walked around me, and out the door…but not before I gave him a hard shove back.

Then he whirled around and sucker punched me in the face.

In retrospect, the dorky kid was probably paralyzed because he could see past me to the impatient guy who, it turns out was big. Very big. But I didn’t really have time to process any of that in the moment because when he punched me I saw red and…do you remember how Garfield the cartoon cat used to sail through the air to throw himself on to a cartoon lasagna? I did that. “Hello,” said my lizard brain, “I will be taking it from here.” Impatient guy was surprised. The people around us, who were streaming off of the subway, were surprised. Hell, I surprised myself. We stumbled out on to the subway platform as New York commuters, disinterested but ready to move away in case one of us pulled out a weapon, watched blankly.

For some reason, this is the part of the story where everyone wants to know if the guy was black.

Yeah, he was. No, I did not yell something racial at him. Or struggle with myself because I really wanted to yell something racial at him. Or think something racial and then feel guilty about it later. This is not that kind of story.

Once I got a look at him, the first thing I registered was “Fuck. He is very big.” (I am not small by any stretch, but he was bigger than me. And he was an unhappy giant compared to the poor, nervous dork back on the train.) I hadn’t been in a fistfight since I was a kid but I used to box at my old gym so I wasn’t totally at a loss. Now that I saw them coming he couldn’t land a punch but since his reach was longer than mine, I couldn’t really get close enough to do much damage either. Basically, we were two guys in winter coats and messenger bags cursing and struggling, it wasn’t exactly Ali/ Frazier. But then his right hand shot out, closed around my throat and he began to squeeze.

I stared down the length of his arm and looked him dead in the eye.

About eight years earlier, in the weeks after 9/11, I was on the subway when a trashy white guy was yukking it up with one of his buddies on his cell phone as the train went above ground. He was doing that thing where he thinks his conversation is so amusing that he was speaking very loudly so that everyone else can enjoy it too. And the thing he was talking about so loudly was killing Arabs. I was standing a foot away from him and he had no idea that he was talking about killing me. Unlike the guy from my then-office who had to quickly explain he was Cuban to group of punks looking to beat an Arab on his way home from work a few days before, I am fair skinned, green eyed: invisible. Listening to him laugh about murdering me, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I had no confidence that anyone would lift a finger if half the people on this train decided to beat me to death. I was sick with anger and fear, shaking from adrenaline pumping into my body. I stared at him until he noticed me. His eyebrows shot up. He looked away and looked back. His face was beery and pink. My face was blank. “You want something?” he said. I said nothing. I just waited. “You got a problem?” I shook my head. I wanted him to see me and know who I am.

I thought to myself, Look at me, you son of a bitch. Look at me and see me. I thought, My people invented higher mathematics. The concept of time. We invented the concept of Zero. The color purple. The letters in the alphabet that make up the words you are using to talk about exterminating us. My father ran away to fight the Nazis in World War ll and was sent home because he was just a skinny kid. He fought in Korea as a young man and when he died decades later, he was buried with an American flag in his casket.

And I. Am. Standing. Right. Here.

I could feel all of the things about me that made his eyes just slide over me in the first place—my skin, my eyes, my perfectly assimilated western bearing—fall away and for the first time he could see that I am an Arab.

He reddened and said under his breath, “Do you want to hurt me?” I shook my head. Watery eyed, he began to bluster at me about how his cousin is a fireman. “Are you a fireman?” I asked evenly. He looked down. “No, uh, I tried to take the test and uh…”

I started to laugh. It was cruel but I couldn’t help it.

“You don’t know what it means to be a hero!” he hissed. “Neither do you” I said, my eyes on his.

That is the look I feel myself giving the guy who has his hand on my throat. All the anger and frustration of the intervening years—Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Lebanon, Palestine, legalized torture, “random” searches, profiling, casual hatred—comes pouring out of my eyes and into his. I want him to see me too. I am standing right here! I think at him. His eyes get big and I can tell he is thinking, Oh shit, this guy is crazy. And its true, I am crazy.

The world is making me crazy.

Then something happens I wasn’t counting on. His hand goes soft around my throat but just before he lets go, his eyes cut to the side. And I know in that second he is wondering if there are any cops on the platform. Suddenly he sees himself, a very big black man strangling a—for all intents and purposes—white man in broad daylight on a busy subway platform. There isn’t really any way this can go well for him. He knows this but his anger made him forget. He jerks his hand away and begins to step back. But I am not making it easy for him. I am ready to go and I tell him so. He is more and more wary and tries to get away from me. “Yeah, when you tell this story don’t forget to add the part where you walked away, bitch!” I shouted after him as he high tailed it up the subway steps.

Yeah, I know. Stupid.

I’m not telling it because I am proud of myself.

I am telling it because between those two looks—when I looked at him as he was strangling me, and when he looked away to check if there were cops on the platform—there is a story about race in America. Racial invisibility is always relative and conditional, when you are discovered or reveal yourself, anything might happen. Looking the way that I do is sometimes like stumbling into a cave of sleeping bears, every interaction is a potential confrontation. The lack of instantly recognizable markers for racial or ethnic identity creates an atmosphere of potential threat. On the other hand, for people like my would-be strangler, whose skin color immediately marks him “other”, racial visibility makes him perpetually vulnerable to authority. I have no illusions that I chased him off by myself—it was the ghosts of white men with guns that sent him up the steps and away from me. It seems that we are all always moving in and out of visibility, depending on who is looking.

Like a Rorschach, the picture emerges between the black and white.

Cherien Dabis is having one of those dreamlike weeks. She was named one of Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch in 2009, and her film Amreeka had its world premiere at Sundance this past weekend to a standing ovation and positive reviews. Now all she needs to do it sell the film and get an agent.

Not being in Sundance, I haven’t seen the film but if I were there, it would been tops on my list. Here’s the description from the catalog:

Director Cherien Dabis’s auspicious debut feature, Amreeka, is a warm and lighthearted film about one Palestinian family’s tumultuous journey into Diaspora amidst the cultural fallout of America’s war in Iraq. Muna Farah, a Palestinian single mom, struggles to maintain her optimistic spirit in the daily grind of intimidating West Bank checkpoints, the constant nagging of a controlling mother, and the haunting shadows of a failed marriage. Everything changes one day when she receives a letter informing her that her family has been granted a U.S. green card. Reluctant to leave her homeland, but realizing it may be the only way to secure a future for Fadi, her teenage son, Muna decides to quit her job at the bank and visit her relatives in Illinois to see about a new life in a land that gives newcomers a run for their money.Dabis weaves an abundance of humor and levity into this tale of struggle, displacement, and nostalgia and draws an absorbing and irresistibly charming performance from actress Nisreen Faour as Muna, who stands at the heart of this tale. Amreeka glows with the truth and magic of everyday life and signals the arrival of an exciting, new directorial talent.

She took a couple of minutes to discuss the film and her Sundance experience.

Women & Hollywood: What made you want to make this film?

Cherien Dabis: The story is quite personal, inspired by my family and loosely based on true events. I grew up in a small town in Ohio of about 10,000 people. I actually grew up between Ohio and Jordan but most of my time was spent in this small town where as Arab Americans we were isolated because there was no Arab community and not a whole lot of diversity. For a while everything was fine and we fit in relatively well until the first Gulf War when my family was scapegoated and overnight we virtually became the enemy. All kinds of absurd things happened. My father who is a physician lost a lot of his patients because they wouldn’t support an Arab doctor and then it came to a head when the Secret Service came to my high school to investigate a rumor that my 17 year old sister threatened to kill the president.

It was an eye opening time, my coming of age. I became politicized, and very aware of the media and how the media were perpetuating the stereotypes that were directly effecting us. So I decided to become a storyteller. I don’t know if it was as conscious a decision as that, but I was knew that I wanted to do something that would change the way the media related to Arabs, to change the way we were represented. To also change the fact that we are underrepresented. I simply wanted to get our stories out there because we have so many and I thought if people could see it from our point of view they would realize how funny and absurd it is.

W&H: Is the film contemporary?

CD: The film is relatively contemporary. It’s a soft period piece and takes place during the 2nd Iraq invasion in 2003.

W&H: You are trying to give a different vision of Arabs and breakthrough typical Hollywood stereotypes.

CD: People can be lazy in their storytelling and then characters become one dimensional and easy to villanize. Then it becomes the story of good vs. evil rather than people are people. I think it is much more difficult to create characters that are complex, rich and multidimensional and it’s easy to fall back on the formulaic stereotypes.

W&H: This film seems quite timely with what just happened in the Middle East.

CD: The film is not really political. It’s political in context but the heart of the story is the relationship between the mother and son. It’s the story of a woman who desperately wants to secure a better future for her son and will do anything for him including leave her homeland and start over completely. She wants to flee her controlling mother, her failed marriage and start anew to get to be someone else, somewhere else. The backdrop of the film is the adversity they have to overcome and the stereotypes and prejudices that people have about Arabs and those are some of the challenges she faces. But she is optimistic and hopeful and she surprises others with her optimism.

W&H: Do you think it’s a good time for this film to come out? Will people be more receptive to it now?

CD: Absolutely. We have a president with an Arab middle name. He’s the first African American president. There is a feeling of hope. It’s a new era. Barack Obama represents the new America and in some way my film represents the America that this country should be – what this country could be if people were a little more open, friendly, trusting and accepting like Muna. So much of this business is about timing and the timing is really good with the change in the administration.

W&H: It’s hard for people to make films nowadays, harder for women’s stories, harder for a woman writer and director and even harder for stories about women of color. Talk about the struggles to get this film made.

CD: I started writing it in 2003 when I was a graduate student at Columbia studying film. I already spoke about my experience in 1991 and exactly a decade later I moved to NY in September of 2001 and started film school. It was surreal to be in NY right after 9-11 and what was happening set the tone for my film school experience. 9-11 got a lot of people to stop and think, what am I doing with my life and why am I doing what I chose to do. It made everyone re-evaluate where they were, and it was especially true for people in film school because film seemed so frivolous at the time. People were going to donate blood and we were making movies, who cares. That was the feeling for a little while after 9-11.

For me it reminded me of why I became a filmmaker when I was again hearing stories of middle easterners being scapegoated and then when the US invaded Iraq again and history was literally repeating itself that was when I said OK I have to sit down and write this story. The world is ready for a Palestinian immigrant story, one that can reach mainstream audiences. I was aware of not wanting it to be political, I wanted it to have humor. I want people to see it. I don’t want it to be ghettoized because I didn’t make it just for the Arab community.

W&H: What do you want them to think about when they leave the film?

CD: I want them to really fall in love with the characters. It’s a glimpse into a world they might not have otherwise seen. I want them to walk away knowing that the culture is beautiful and should be appreciated and that stereotypes are unnecessary. I want them to walk away with a feeling of love and hope that they have just met people they have really liked.

W&H: Talk about the Sundance experience.

CD: It’s been a whirlwind.

W&H: What was the biggest high?

CD: My world premiere was on Saturday afternoon at the Eccles Theatre which seats 1400 people and it was entirely packed. It was such a thrill and I was so nervous. I had to introduce the film and was sad that my mother couldn’t be there so I called her on my cell phone and had her on the phone while I introduced the film and everyone say hi to her. Everyone shouted hi mom. I got so emotional and she was giggling and sobbing. It was such a sweet moment that I will never forget. Then the movie started and everyone was laughing in the right places and they were so with the film and afterward there was a standing ovation. It was a magical moment.

W&H: The films about guys are generating most of the buzz have you noticed that?

CD: Yes, it’s interesting. I wasn’t prepared for how tremendously postive the response has been. In some ways it is the perfect reception for this movie and maybe if it wasn’t such a difficult market we would have sold the film already. But I am hopeful and the prospects seem good. I have noticed that it is easier to get a film with a male lead financed, and to get those movies seen and sold and I don’t know why.

In Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood plays a bitter old man who’s basically the only white person left in a run-down neighborhood somewhere in the Midwest. He (reluctantly, at first) gets to know his Hmong neighbors, and ends up getting intricately involved in their lives, as they deal with issues caused by a local Hmong gang that some of their relatives are a part of.

There are plenty of things about the movie that might make for great posts on Racialicious:

1. Like most Hollywood movies that are about a community of people of color, Gran Torino features a white protagonist who not only saves the day, but also has the most layers of complexity to his personality.

2. As the first major Hollywood film about Hmong Americans, how did it do at depicting this community? Does the exposure of Hmong culture and the opportunity for Hmong actors outweigh the possible inaccuracies and negative representations? (See some of the commentary about this on AsianWeek.)

3. Clint Eastwood’s character’s constant racist remarks serve as a running joke in the movie. Just because he uses outdated and blatantly un-P.C. language with an “equal-opportunity discrimination” approach, is it OK to use this deeply offensive language as comic relief?

But I don’t really want to write about those things. I want to write about another reaction I had.

Of course I’ve seen other movies involving gangs, shootings, and/or rape. But this one hit me harder. After seeing it, I couldn’t stop worrying about the Hmong family depicted in the movie. I think there were a few reasons that the gang violence and the rest of the plot made such a big impact on me:

One reason is that the gang members and family affected were all Asian. I suppose I had heard of the existence of Asian American (or even Hmong American) gangs, but it’s easy to forget. Because of the media I’ve been exposed to my whole life, I usually make the assumption that street gangs are mostly made up of African Americans and Latinos, and then I also hear about “organized” crime—the Italian mafia, Chinese mafia, etc. (I’m pretty sure there’s a fine line between gangs and organized crime anyway, and I wonder how much racist assumptions factor in to that distinction.)

The gang activity in the movie was disturbing because it was relatively unexpected. My girlfriend pointed out that in the beginning of the movie, the neighborhood where it takes place doesn’t seem like a dangerous neighborhood. I think that’s because the neighborhood isn’t the stereotypical dangerous neighborhood usually depicted in films—which would be a black or Latino neighborhood in a densely populated urban area. In Gran Torino, the first impressions the viewers get of the neighborhood are of a white (Polish American) family gathering at one house, and then of a Hmong family gathering at the house next door. White and Asian families coming together around home-cooked food on the weekends, in their two-story houses with lawns, doesn’t seem to have much to do with criminal activity. But of course, that’s because the movie scenes we’re accustomed to tell us otherwise.

Another thing that made the setting less stereotypical was that it took place in the Midwest (I’m not sure where exactly). And rather than showing us the culturally homogeneous setting that we’re used to seeing and that’s become synonymous with the Midwest (except for Chicago), we see an extremely diverse neighborhood, in which the main character is quickly becoming, or already is, a racial minority as a white person. Indeed, a little casual research showed me that Minnesota and Wisconsin have the largest populations of Hmong Americans along with California.

The reality is that there are large numbers of Asian American gangs and a whole lot of gangs in the Midwest. I’m obviously not an expert on this, but to take one example, just Googling “Hmong gangs” brings up a list of many of the factions of the Crips all over the United States and Canada. On that list of 115, there are 17 factions of the Crips that are specifically described as Hmong, 11 labeled as Laotian, and 5 others with “Asian” or “Oriental” in their names. There are about 10 factions in Minnesota, 10 in Wisconsin, and some others in Indiana, Kansas, Ohio, and Oklahoma. These are facts that I’m pretty sure most American media consumers have never heard.

The film showed situations and settings that we don’t normally see in mainstream movies, and I have to give it a lot of credit for that. Highlighting a minority group that most Americans have never even heard of, showing cultural diversity in the Midwest, and even featuring an elderly person as the protagonist, were all uncommon choices.

If you saw Gran Torino, what did you think?

As we celebrated the eve of November 4th, I was struck by a comment from New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. He pointed out with pride the role of the Latino vote in Obama’s election. I wish I could say that about my fellow Filipinos.

And yes, I know, the Filipino vote is not monolithic. I am specifically talking about Filipinos like me, who have immigrated here in our adult lives. We’re working to make ends meet. Many of you are raising families, go to church every Sunday, support extended families back in the Philippines. The Philippines that would theoretically be a very red state if it could vote.

So yeah, there are lots of factors behind this particular Pinoy demographic’s support of McCain and Proposition 8, but I will dive into the one that presents the most challenges.

Filipinos can be quite forthcoming when talking about race. In news interviews in the Philippines and in Pinoy gatherings, many immigrant Pinoys have made it abundantly clear that their “discomfort” over Barack Obama is not due to the rumors that he’s an inexperienced, socialist, Muslim politician. Their discomfort is from Obama’s blackness.

Filipino Americans have long been proud of our ability to assimilate into American society. Decades of colonization helped ensure that Filipinos buy into the American Dream completely — minimal input from a government that back home is often corrupt, working hard to pull oneself up, and evidencing said hard work through conspicuous consumption.

But as writer Benjamin Pimentel points out, buying into the American Dream also includes embracing “the views of the dominant white society – including the prejudiced, distorted image of blacks.”

Pimentel quotes Toni Morrison:

“In race talk, the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens,” she wrote in Time magazine in 1993. “Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African American… It doesn’t matter anymore what shade the newcomer’s skin is. A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door before it will open.”

This aspiration to whiteness is not new, of course. It has been evident in our history, as Filipino elites supported revolution not because of nationalism, but on the grounds that elites were honorary whites themselves, or at least figuratively white enough to take on the “white man’s burden.” Decades later, this valorization of whiteness is truly entrenched in Filipino society. Just consider the popularity of those skin bleaching lotions that let the brown masses show their “natural whiteness.”

This home-grown tendency gets magnified once Pinoys set foot in the United States. In the strong desire to identify with the white colonizer, many Pinoys readily adopt the hostility to whoever is considered the Other. And for Pinoys already steeped in colonial mentality back home, it does not take much to stoke the disdain against those who are considered the Other — Blacks, Muslims, and gays.

At the heart of this disdain is fear, partly of the population deemed the Other, but also a fear of losing privileges. Deeply entrenched in the collective Pinoy psyche is the belief that we have a “special relationship” with America, one wherein Americans really really likes us. Or at least, America likes us better than the other minorities out there. So we aspire to be favored by the dominant group and act grateful for the small crumbs that thrown our way.

This mindset is a formidable barrier to coalitional work, and the Filipino immigrants’ misguided support for Proposition 8 illustrates the failure of activists to connect to this community. But this is also a challenge to the Pinoy immigrant community to see beyond the divisive rhetoric, build upon its strong traditions of bayanihan, and to take its place in the greater struggles for social justice.

The whole “acting black” label isn’t an unheard one in really any community these days, but I’ve always thought it was an interesting one to hear in my own community, from my own people.

Let me give it to you straight and say I already know how much we have in common; Native/Indigenous peoples and Black/people of African descent. While we might have been born here (although the jury is still out on where we all actually came from) y’all were dragged here, and not by your own choice. And you came from a place with a strong Indigenous identity and spiritual centre.

Not to mention of course the number of “Black Indians” there are, who some say represent almost 50% of African Americans today (with Oprah, Rosa Parks, and actress Rosario Dawson on that list). As White historian William Katz who has studied this stuff to death says:

“This story began at the time of Columbus, ranging from North American forests to South American jungles, and the jewel-like islands of the Caribbean. The first freedom paths taken by runaway slaves led to Native American villages. There black men and women found a red hand of friendship and an accepting adoption system and culture. The sturdy offspring of Black-Indian marriages shaped the early days of the fur trade, added a new dimension to frontier diplomacy, and made a daring contribution to the fight for American liberty”.

The story also included some Native Americans owning slaves, namely in the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole nations. There were also many nations who as Katz says, adopted people in, helped slaves escape, or assisted organizing various revolts. It’s a long, complicated history to go through, but I do know today that the Descendants of Freedmen are still trying to acquire legal recognition in the Cherokee Nation.

In a perfect world, we would understand this and all work as allies for our common struggles of self-determination and autonomy to live as our authentic selves in this still oppressively bigoted society. We would celebrate our rich heritages in peaceful solidarity, while together honouring the ancestors who lived so courageously to give us those few bits of raw culture we cling on to today.

Alas, that world isn’t part of the real world and what’s happening is rather shameful. In light of hip-hop culture or acting what some might perceive as just plain “cool”, the label you are automatically given if you partake in any of this is of course “black” with all of its stereotypical negative connotation. And every time I hear someone from my community say that, whether it’s because they are criticizing Native rappers or don’t understand why so many Native youth identify with Black culture, it makes me wonder how much they don’t know or just don’t remember where we’ve all come from, or even how we got here.

I thought the colonizers were the ones who told us what we could or could not be.