I been scared and battered.
My hopes the wind done scattered.
Snow has friz me,
Sun has baked me,
Looks like between ‘em they done
Tried to make me
Stop laughin’, stop lovin’, stop livin’–
But I don’t care!
I’m still here!
– “Still Here” by Langston Hughes
I think 2012 is off to a good start — just received notice that my article on the future of black public intellectuals has finally come out in Global Academe: Engaging Intellectual Discourse, edited by Silvia Nagy-Zekmi and Karyn Hollis. This will be my first academic article publication!
Here’s the link: http://us.macmillan.com/globalacademe/SilviaNagyZekmi
The representation of the economic, political, cultural and, more importantly, global interrelations between agents involved in the process of intellectual activity is at the core of the inquiry in this volume that scrutinizes a distinct transformation occurring in the modalities of intellectual production also detectable in the changing role of academics themselves. In our transitional era, due to a worldwide political and economic crisis since 2008, world powers are slowly shifting into different positions of authority making the debate concerning intellectual contributions to public discourse timelier than ever.
Praise:
“Contesting Richard Posner’s neoliberal valorization of lawyers and politicians as the proper public intellectuals, and advancing Edward Said’s advocacy of humanistic academics as providing society a dissenting voice in conflicts with authority, Nagy-Zekmi and Hollis offer a stimulating collection of essays defending them as producers of knowledge rather than as teaching professionals who merely transmit it. In suggesting that digital media and the internet offer avenues for a transnational conversation with academics that has a chance of circumventing corporate-owned media, contributors to this important discussion provide a timely forum on the vibrancy of scholarship as a refreshing, disturbing, and necessary voice in the public forum.” –John C. Hawley, co-editor, The Postcolonial and the Global
This year is going to be a bright one. Wishing everyone out there a blessed year full of love & grace!
“Show me whom to desire”
induction / induction
The loved being is desired because another or others have shown the subject that such a being is desirable: however particular, amorous desire is discovered by induction.
– from A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.
I don’t have enough hands to count how many times people have asked me if my parents are “still together” and upon hearing that yes, they have been together for over 25 years, expressed sincere surprise at this fact. Interracial marriages are apparently not supposed to work; the miscegenation taboo prevails. I guess whoever says race doesn’t exist is not only color-blind but sleep-walking.
I remember reading an article a while ago on how, according to higher education research, mixed-race people are perceived as “more attractive.” Conducted by Dr. Michael Lewis of Cardiff University’s School of Psychology, the research involved a collection of 1205 randomly-chosen black, white, and mixed-race faces (a limited choice of representative faces altogether). Each face was then rated for its perceived attractiveness, and it was found that mixed-race faces took the cake. The findings were then presented to the British Psychological Society.
On the subject of interracial dating, this study has much larger implications than the “cultural” fact that racial hybrids are perceived as better looking than monoracial populations. What is the point of coming up with such research if so many people will vehemently deny that they aren’t racist yet still see dating “outside of their race” as ultimately taboo? I remember talking to a girl in grade 6 about boys, when she confessed the following to me: “I wish when I grew up I could have children who look like you, but I can’t ‘cuz my mom says I have to date someone who looks like me. So, like, I don’t know. What do your parents think?”
The topic of interracial dating isn’t so sensitive for me personally, since I’ve dated people Black, white, both, neither; and again, my parents are (gasp) still together. An element of cultural connection—whether on the basis of ethnicity, family values, or favorite books—has usually been an important aspect of deciding who is worth my time. But articles that make a fetish out of mixed-race figures is a bit alarming—I know I date people for who they are but does it mean that the people I date are in it more for what I look like?
Contrary to popular opinion, I am not flattered by the fact that studies are interested in my face, because frankly, they don’t really see me at all. When mixed-race gets talked about in the media, it’s often automatically celebrated as a marker of socio-political progress, completely disconnected from the racial trauma of being deemed inauthentic by others, the wounds of self-questioning, and the reality of racialized violence and fetishization. I have been asked by previous partners if my hair, eyes, and even skin color were “real” as if I were a specimen to be poked and prodded at; as if my personhood were dependent upon the undressing of some enigma. The point was not if I colored my hair or if it were naturally this or that hue; the point lied in the question, the strange liberty people have found in dissecting what I am.
I am quite troubled about this, which is why the topic of “interracial dating” for me is less about promoting interracial dating as, like, totally the best of multiple worlds than it is unpacking the interracial figure as a site of sexualized and even scientific interest. More striking than the actual “research” that has been coming out—on how interracial marriage is flourishing in U.S. (omg miscegenation is for real?) or a revived interest in documenting the presence of mixed-race communities (for example, the NYT Race Remixed series)—is a rather curious and incredibly recent addition to the overall history of media disengagement from critical discussions on race, interraciality, and racial divides.
The divides were clearly apparent in 1967, the year when the Sidney Poitier film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—a comedy built around parents’ acceptance of an interracial couple—was considered groundbreaking. Spending my time between Canada and the U.S., I have developed an acute sense of how race has different nuances depending on where you are (some kind of race radar almost, absurd as that sounds). I set foot in my hometown of Toronto and the familiar sensation of bienvenue is quickly felt—both in terms of its familiarity, as well as general friendliness and openness to ethno-cultural mixing. I set foot back south and the reality of college blackface parties and cross burnings are still hot topics. Then again we *do* have a Black/mixed-race President. I guess there is just less politicization of the color line going on in Canada which, I think, is ultimately unattractive.
Alright, so we’re not in Kansas anymore; that is, we’ve come a long way, and in-your-face racism is pretty rare. But that’s just it—it’s not all about faces, or facing your oppressor. It’s about realizing how racism functions systemically and sometimes subconsciously, affecting not only your friend or dating choices but your most interior sense of self.
I am not generally offended if someone calls me exotic-looking, or asks me if I’m really half-Black, but after a while it does get annoying. It seems as though the fetishizing of mixed-race figures happens because they are perceived as lesser, inauthentic derivatives of an original racial identity and so there’s room for appropriation in there. In the case of a woman’s experience, for example, systems of oppression and domination that create difference and separate people into categories parallel strategies that have been used to dominate women both seek to organize bodies into a monopoly so that particular needs are satisfied (i.e. mixed-race people would be more satisfying as partners) in the same moment at which those bodies are produced as commodities (i.e. the mixed-race body as fetish).
In her essay, “The Mulatto Millenium,” Danzy Senna writes ironically about the ascendant “Mulatto Nation,” and how she has “found it’s not so bad being a fetishized object, an exotic bird soaring above the racial landscape.” While I enjoy the imagery of soaring above, and am a huge fan of Senna’s writings, I am not so sure I feel the same. To enjoy being fetishized without a clear sense and outward expression of irony upon such an explication is to say yes to vulnerability and objectification.
I am eager to continue exploring the images of mixed-race men and women and how they have come to bear particular meanings in the public eye, and how these images might relate to our personal, private dating choices. I will continue to do this in some capacity in my role as Culture Editor for Race-Talk.org. The surge in interracial marriages and multiracial families has been embraced across North America, and this is obviously a good thing. Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy addresses the topic in his book, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption, where he writes, “Malignant racial biases can and do reside in interracial liaisons, but against the tragic backdrop of American history, the flowering of multiracial intimacy is a profoundly moving and encouraging development.” I think it is very important to rethink our investments in the traditional sense of what dating is, or what the nuclear family is; I applaud our social progress in that a blended family is becoming more ubiquitous in households across the continent. Still, we need to continue to rethink investments in a racialized and gendered role system that inscribes the mixed-race body in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power so that this body is essentially made docile (which is what I guess makes it hypersexual).
As for dating tips or guidelines, mine are more old-fashioned than revolutionary. When I was younger I told my parents that I had to marry a mixed-race man because ultimately, he would be the only one to understand me. I continue to question the validity of this statement, and I think a lot of mixed-race women are in this cultural moment. With a bit more experience under my belt now, I’d just say to find someone who will value you instead of throw you into what might feel like a marketplace where you will ask yourself if you are good enough. In love we sometimes become exigent beings, unable to give ourselves over to the possibility of freedom we initially foresaw as possible in the idolized other. Let your partner idolize you as their other, definitely; but not as their Other, please, racial or otherwise.
Works Consulted
Senna, Danzy. “The Mulatto Millennium.” In Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial or Bicultural. Ed. Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn. New York: Pantheon, 1998.
Randall, Kennedy. Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.
I came across a really intriguing artist today, in my Race & Psychoanalysis seminar. Her name is Firelei Báez, and she hails from the Dominican Republic to Dominican and Haitian parents and now lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited in various national and international institutions, including the New Jersey City Museum and El Museo Del Barrio, and won many prestigious awards including The Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, The Jaque and Natasha Gelman Award, and The Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) Award among others.
I was particularly struck by her “Can I Pass? Introducing the Paper Bag to The Fan Test for the Month of December” self-portrait silhouettes… really haunting stuff. Here’s her description and an image:
“In documenting the daily changes to my hair, a natural hygrometer, this ongoing piece brings up two absurd tests used for racial stratification, the ‘brown paperbag’ and ‘fan’ tests, of the American South and the Dominican Republic, which informed social interactions during my upbringing in these sites.”
Can I Pass? Introducing the Paper Bag to The Fan Test for the Month of
December, 31 individual self-portrait silhouettes, configured in a 31
day calendar grid
2010
Gouache, ink and graphite on paper
108 x 84 inches
Visit her site and see her work here.
Happiest birthday to my Uncle Frank, who passed but watches over us, and remains forever an inspiration.
The Born Identity
Arise Magazine Issue 12
Thirty-six year-old Egor Belov has just told a childhood anecdote about scrubbing his face until it drew blood. He’d been playing in the snow and wanted pink cheeks like his friends. His dark complexion was never going to turn his desired shade but as a six-year-old living in a home otherwise occupied by white children, he struggled to understand why. The gathering of St Petersburg-based Afro-Russians (the collective name given to Russian nationals of mixed African and Russian parentage) with whom Belov shares this tale all smile knowingly and begin to offer up their own stories. Some tales, including lovers who were shocked that black skin is lighter on different parts of the body, are humorous. But others, such as how school years were marred by bullying, fights and adolescent paranoia, are indicative of the challenges of the Afro-Russian experience. A candid confession from Marie Madlene, a striking 44-year-old with a blonde afro gets a raucous laugh: “I’m so used to being stared at that when I travel to more diverse countries, I miss the attention.” Although the group has previously only met online through the ‘black-Russian-Ukranian-Belorussian-Kazakh’ page on Kontakt (Russia’s answer to Facebook), its members have developed instant camaraderie. After all, they are all mixed-race people living in a country that, despite its obvious multiculturalism (almost 180 ethnicities live in Russia), has one of the highest race-hate crime rates in the world. There are around 150 active far-right groups, many with ideologies of racial intolerance…
Read the entire article here.
WHO’S AFRAID OF POST-BLACKNESS?
What It Means to Be Black Now
By Touré
Illustrated. 251 pp. Free Press. $25.
Taken from the NYT article:
Much has been written on the benefits that accrued to the generation of African-Americans reaping the rewards of the civil rights revolution. But we have heard surprisingly little from those in the post-civil-rights age about what these benefits have meant to them, and especially how they view themselves as black people in an America now led by a black president. In his new book, Touré’s aim is to provide an account of this “post-black” condition, one that emerged only in the 1980s but by the ’90s had become the “new black.”
Read the rest of Orlando Patterson’s book review here.
“Night — grand and wonderful. I am glad I am living. I rejoice as a strong man to win a race, and I am strong — is it egotism — is it assurance — or is it the silent call of the world spirit that makes me feel that I am royal and that beneath my sceptre a world of kings shall bow. The hot dark blood of a black forefather is beating at my heart, and I know that I am either a genius or a fool. O I wonder what I am — I wonder what the world is — I wonder if life is worth the Sturm. I do not know — perhaps I never shall know: But this I do know: be the Truth what it may I will seek it on the pure assumption that it is worth seeking — and Heaven nor Hell, God nor Devil shall turn me from my purpose till I die. I will in this second quarter century of my life, enter the dark forest of the unknown world for which I have so many years served my apprenticeship. […] Carpe Diem!” — W.E.B. Du Bois, age 25
Writing this now, after returning to graduate school, I find it difficult to find the words to encompass the experience I’m going through. Strange! But at the same time, expected; thwarted that I am from previous expectations of life, now seeing life emerge in its full array of colors, opportunities, as well as problems, even; problems of the mind/heart which nevertheless intrigue me to look deeper, and ask more questions. I feel this year will be a year of asking questions, most of all; a year of self-discovery, not merely because I am turning 25, or going to graduate school, but self-discovery because I am in a place and time where the act of self-interrogation and self-exploration are both encouraged and made possible by the environment I live in. Living in the United States (as opposed to fulfilling my wanderlust by making excuses to head to New York) has also been life-changing; and I must admit that the prospective epoch in which I once hoped I could live to see — one where my country could finally have its leader look like me — has brilliantly come to pass.
There is a new degree of solitude in my days, now; sometimes comforting, and sometimes not. But anyone who is not comfortable in their own space, outside the realm of social engagements and loud traffic, is not necessarily taking hold of life. As Pascal once said, “All [our] miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” I am learning to remember the necessity of quietude in order to both get back on the saddle of graduate studies, and teach myself that all that is pleasurable is not grandiose. Also, I don’t think it’s healthy to see grad school in terms of ego-worship (worshiping your own/making sure people worship you), as much it often feels that way. I think worshiping ego, fearing annihilation at the hands of others, is a tiring business. And the pursuit of knowledge is ultimately a labor of LOVE. I am trying to find that balance between hard work in the name of professionalization and a kind of total vision of love for my craft… and walk in this world with grace, always.
The most difficult thing about moving away from family and friends has been the lack of support networks as I take the plunge into graduate-level work. During the MA, I had my parents and aunt, who had all pursued graduate school, and my uncle Alex, who recieved his PhD in Mathematics in 2000. He was accepted into Princeton but declined because he didn’t want his parents to suffer his absence, choosing to go to the University of Toronto instead. In my heart I cannot imagine a more selfless act. I continue to try and understand his decision, which is at once humbling but also confusing, throwing me into a whole range of self-questioning about what I am doing and why.
My uncle passed away in 2009, and left me several of his philosophical writings. This has been the most meaningful gift anyone has ever given me. But not just a gift; a gesture of absolute love, as if he knew I would need them. I still continue to try and understand this gesture, too.
If we love those we see, we have an absolute duty to love those whom we see no more because they have passed. “The work of love in remembering one who is dead is a work of the most unselfish love,” wrote Kierkegaard in Works of Love. It is also a work of the most committed love. I think love (define it how you will) is a thing that seeks freedom but enacts itself in very specific duties and obligations; it is carried out with diligence and faith. The same goes for personal objectives, goals and dreams. Those who seek greatness as creative minds do not in fact seek creativity but ego. I have been thinking deeply about this as I embark on my studies, supported by the very works of love my uncle provided. Here is a short excerpt from one entry:
“If we insist on living within institutions, then we must create a barrier to protect ourselves. A sanctuary within which we may be ‘free’ within that confined area. The trouble is that this area is too confining and we are not free enough to feel love. [...] The cure to all my ailments is to develop the ability to recognize when I am being motivated by my ego and to recognize when I am motivated by love.”
The writings he has left behind have become my main source of consolation, and in reading them I think I am for the first time getting in touch with the spiritualized horizon of everyday life. The tension between ego and love is really at the heart of so much in this world. This journal will serve as a platform for critical analysis but will also not be afraid to look at the world with softer eyes. In this newly-launched journal of mine is a project that “dares to know” what is happening in the social and political world of the lived realities and experiences of people everywhere, and not just those in the ivory tower. It is a project of a deepening sense of humility that will never preach anything in particular, but at times may sing praises, get excited about bookish things.
Having undergone my first week of being 25, an historic number that is both to be celebrated and to be feared, I am doing my best to choose celebration. I feel pretty good about what I have worked towards. Most importantly, I exceeded my goal of publishing a book before turning 25. I have always kept sight on ways to improve myself, ways to give back to my community, ways to share my love of writing with the younger generation.
But there is no such thing as perfection, only commitment. There are a myriad things I want to see happen this year: I want to finish a second book of poems and rescue my abandoned novel, I want to take more walks and attend church more often, learn a new language and become an excellent cook, as well as an excellent friend. I want to dedicate myself fully to the life of the mind and not be affected by those who cannot see the sublimity of such a life. I want to dedicate myself fully to the life of the heart and not hurt anybody along the way, or allow myself to get hurt. And while pursuing a life of mind/heart, remain firmly footed on this earth and share my scholarly work and resources with others.
Let me not attach myself to temporary delights, which is a hopeless endeavor, or concern myself too much with those who are judgmental without cause. Let me never become so lofty in my idea(l)s, so delusional in my goals or so egoistic in my pursuits that I end up losing my identity. Let me recognize that I am free to manifest my will into the above objectives in every moment, even in the darkest hour, which is never truly dark, but the moment that comes before the light.
The chapel bells are ringing down my street. Until next time.
A.
