Session Slides
(Links to an external site.)
As a kid growing up in the US in a multigenerational immigrant family that spoke Taiwanese, Mandarin, and English at home, I had to quickly learn about the many uses of language. If you followed me around and listened to what I said, you would be able to tell who I was speaking to based on what language and what words I used. In fact, my parents would call me by different names depending on who was around them or who they thought was around me, using my Taiwanese names when it was just us or we were with other Taiwanese people and using my Americanized nickname when they, we, or just I was around people who weren’t Taiwanese. This communication structure worked for us because we all shared the same communication rules and definitions.
When talking about topics such as race and racism, however, people often communicate without having shared definitions or rules about talking about race and racism. For some of us, race is about the “color” of your skin. For others, it is about “where you are from.” For some racism is about treating people differently based on their perceived race. For others, racism is the historic and ongoing oppression of some people placed into racial categories and the privileging of others in other racial categories. And while some people actively seek to work to create single universal definitions of race and racism or sets of rules for talking (or not talking) about race and racism, in this space we begin by saying that to communicate effectively we need acknowledge the possibility of different or shared definitions and rules.
For this week, we assigned four required resources: Crenshaw (2016), McIntosh (1989), Pierce (2015), and Yamato (2004). You were then to pick two of the remaining six resources. Take five minutes now to reflect on the resources you read/watched and then answer the following questions:
I have attached 4 assigned readings in different pdf form
· How do the authors define race and racism? What do the authors say about talking about race and racism?
· How does this balance with what you were taught is race and racism? About talking about race and racism?
Once you have written out your response – again this doesn’t need to take more than 5 minutes or 100 words or so – post your response to the discussion board. Please also read other people’s posts and consider whether what they are saying – either about the resource or about their own lived experience – is a window or mirror for you. Post these thoughts as replies to their post if you are willing to connect with them and potentially continue the conversation. As you read through other people’s responses, consider what it means to have shared or different definitions and rules? What is your goal in these conversations? To only be with people who have the same definition and rules? To change other people to your perspective? To learn from people who might have different definitions or rules?
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In Search of an Authentic Indian: Notes on the Self
25 Replies
1. I started writing this in the aftermath of the Dolezal affair and have continued to write as the Andrea
Smith story has taken off. But it’s not about them. The various ways in which race and passing, cultural
appropriation andcalculation have been discussed has inspired this text. But it’s more like a personal essay
and a confession. I have been at various points in my life White, Latino, and Native American. That is, I have
claimed—with varying degrees of certainty, archival support, and agency—three different forms of
ethnocultural belonging. (I know what you’re thinking. Just wait.) This is not to say that one day I imagined I
was Latino and started calling myself that for the hell of it, or that I proposed to dupe an institution into
accepting me as something I knew I was not. Rather, the way in which my racial ambiguity has played out
over the course of my life has been highly informed by context, by language, by desire, by the way I imagined
(myself) and was imagined (by others). The question of ambiguity is crucial in all of this because it speaks to
a longer history of how racialized subjects are interpellated by the textures of ethnic identification. The thing
that sticks in my mind from the recent coverage of Dolezal and Smith is the way in which deception lingers
unresolved as the sign of racial violence. It signifies intent and malice. But what might oppose this deception,
the hypocrisy that imbues these two stories? What might an authentic approach to racial ambiguity look like?
2. My father was adopted. That is the beginning of my racial ambiguity. He was adopted in San Antonio,
Texas, by a White family, who took him to East Texas, where he was raised and typically introduced as their
‘adopted son’ in a close-nit, Leave it to Beaver-esque milieu. My father’s skin tone, somewhere between
warm brown and caramel (the Spanish trigueño comes to mind), his formerly jet black—and for many years
salt and pepper—hair, his high cheek bones, all pointed to a non-White (or at least not entirely White) ethnic
origin. And he was adopted in San Antonio, a city with a majority Latino population. So…Latino? My father
was probably Latino? But we didn’t have any realdocumentation to back this up. Nor did his adoptive parents
say very much about the process. Perhaps they preferred not to talk or even imagine their son as a racialized
subject; perhaps my father preferred the same. (Transracial was not yet a thing.) Perhaps he preferred just to
exist, to belong to the cultural and affective community in which he was raised. That is, after all, what he
knew, that was where he felt comfortable. The comfort of that silence is important. That silence that means
not having to subject yourself to the violence of being something other than White. Perhaps it was a defense
mechanism. 3. I am the biological son of this father, whose dark features were never really made explicit, but
certainly pointed toward ‘ethnic’, and a mother who comes from a more typical Western European
background. My maternal grandfather’s surname points to French ancestry; my maternal grandmother’s
maiden name points to English heritage. My mother is clearly identifiable as White. I grew up in Corpus
Christi, Texas, where the population is almost evenly divided between White and Latino—mostly Mexican-
American or Chicano/a of various patterns of migration and generational history. Some families have been
there for centuries, while others are recent arrivals. Soculturally, it bears repeating, I grew up in an ostensibly
http://josephmpierce.com/2015/07/02/in-search-of-an-authentic-indian-notes-on-the-self/#comments
http://moontimewarrior.com/2015/07/01/no-andrea-smith-is-not-the-native-american-rachel-dolezal/
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/07/01/four-words-andrea-smith-im-not-indianhttp://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/07/01/four-words-andrea-smith-im-not-indian
http://www.today.com/news/rachel-dolezal-speaks-today-show-matt-lauer-after-naacp-resignation-t26371
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/06/17/3670801/transracial-adoption-rachel-dolezal-caitlyn-jenner/
http://nitanahkohe.tumblr.com/post/121337593928/andrea-smith-is-not-cherokee#121337593928
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White middle-class family. My parents have decent jobs. I went to a small liberal arts college with partial
scholarships. I was able to study abroad. I eventually went to graduate school and am now a professor. I left
college with no student loan debt. My parents were extremely supportive. That is a lot of privilege. I must
admit that for this story to make any sense. 4. But what I want to revisit here are the moments when I was
misidentified as part of that family. I remember the strangeness. I remember the desire to be the thing that
other people thought I was. I remember the desire to embody that which I imagined I was. But I didn’t know. I
didn’t have a term for what my body meant. I remember being in the grocery store and the checker asking if I
was my mother’s ‘stepson’. Stepson? Why would he say that? “No, this is my son,” she replied. His
discomfort. The way his neck flinched. What is the meaning of that gesture of recoil? What sort of expectation
was I failing to live up to? Being at the beach as a child and sitting next to my blond-hair blue-eyed brother,
and the double takes, the inquisitive, almost condescending, “who is this little guy?” The way my skin turned
darker while his burned. Playing soccer growing up: “you’re not bad so you must be ‘Latin’”. (More recently I
went to play soccer in Brooklyn with a group of mostly Anglophone Caribbean men who started calling me
“Spanish man” rather than actually asking my name.) A boyfriend who once admitted that his first thought
when he saw me was that I was “Mayan”. A jealous ex of a different boyfriend who asked mockingly,
scornfully, “Well are you Mexican or are you Indian?” and laughed. My least favorite line of questioning,
“Where are you from?” “No, where are your parents from?” “No, what is your nationality (read ethnicity)?” “No,
what areyou?” What are you? What kind of question is that? What story do I tell? My father was adopted, and
I know I’m brownish, but my brother has fairer skin than I, and my mom is White, but I take after my father,
and we don’t really know… But not knowing is not the same as fabricating. Not the same as consuming or
appropriating or re-colonizing. Not the same as deceiving.
5. Eventually we decided to go through the process of opening the sealed records for my father’s adoption
case. This was, not coincidentally, around the same moment when I was coming to grips with my own
sexuality. My ethnic and erotic ambiguities were not far apart. We completed all the paper work, jumped
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through all the hoops. What did I hope to find out? What were theserecords going to show that memory and
experience could not? What ambiguity would this resolve? They came one day in a large manila envelope,
official looking, but not entirely hefty. Indian. The records list the race of my father’s mother as Indian and his
father as White. So, what does this mean? What are you? 6. At this point I was already in graduate school in
a Master’s program in Latin American studies. I spoke Spanish fluently. I had at times identified as Latino to
other people, depending on the time I had to explain my ambiguity, my desire to be forthcoming with them,
the context, the crowd. There were times when I knew I was being identified, racialized as such, and I just
didn’t care enough to explain what I thought was an important and nuanced ethnic history. Maybe was
exhausting. Sometimes you’re at a bar and you’re talking to someone you know you will never see again, and
you just don’t have the time or the energy to go into all that. I know. I know. That is privilege, too. It’s a lot of
privilege. And it’s a lot of privilege because it is not allowed the other way around. 7. But then we found out
that my father’s mother was still alive. That she still lived in Oklahoma. And we called her. A few months later
we were sitting in the lobby of a La Quinta Inn in Amarillo, Texas, and she walked in with one of her
daughters, my aunt, my father’s half-sister. My grandmother was small, I remember thinking. Soft-spoken.
She had a round gray perm. She had beautiful almond eyes. We had a different nose. We talked for about an
hour about the weather, what had come of my father, about what she had done in her life. We talked about
my academic successes and my brother’s professional advancement. We just talked. It was a first step. Allow
me to recap: My father was born in the early 50s. His mother was Cherokee and his father was White, we
found this out in the mid 2000s. She had been born on the Cherokee Nation and grew up speaking Cherokee,
though she later attended the normal schools where she was forced to speak English. She told us matter-of-
factly that she could only remember a few words at this point. We never reconnected with my White
grandfather, though we knew that he had died years earlier. I think that says something also. My father was
the product of something like a one-night stand when she was still a teenager but already working at a diner
in the Oklahoma panhandle. He was in the military, she said. What are you? I thought this information would
make it easier to explain myself to other people. I thought that if I could say “I’m Latino” or “I’m Indian” it would
make it easier. But it didn’t. It hasn’t. The story is just longer, more “complicated”. We wanted to continue the
relationship with my grandmother and to meet the rest of her family, so we made a trip to visit them in
Oklahoma. It was a family reunion in the most sincere sense of that term. My parents, my brother, and I all
went. And I remember feeling strange, like we were being grafted back on to their family tree. There is a scar
there. Family. We talked about this with them. I met a cousin who speaks more Cherokee than the rest of the
Oklahoma family. She wanted to learn and so she did. It reminded me of learning Spanish when I was young.
We had barbeque and drank iced tea. My grandmother told more stories about her youth. I craved those
stories. We still keep in touch with the Oklahoma relatives, in spite of my grandmother’s passing two years
ago. 8. But while we were in Oklahoma we also went through the process of becoming citizens of the
Cherokee Nation. First with the help of an amateur genealogist cousin (from my father’s adoptive family), and
later confirming with my grandmother, who did have tribal citizenship, we were able to trace our descent to
the “final rolls of the Five Civilized Tribes,” of 1907. Another archival process. We went to Tahlequah. I
remember the garish gold letters on the Cherokee Capitol Building. I remember picking up my “White Card”
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declaring I have a ¼ blood quantum certified by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I remember the young man at
the registration office commenting that that was more than 98% of enrolled Cherokees. I don’t know if that is
true. Maybe it was hyperbole. Maybe it was meant to invite me to feel more Indian.
But what does that mean? What “cultural connection” do I have to this tribe? What claim can I ethically make
to this past, to this family, to their stories? What right do I have to say that I am Indian, even though, now,
legally (legally?) I am? I have not actually lived the experience of systemic racism, though I have certainly
been racially abused for not being White enough. 9. But then again, maybe I have. Were it not for the social
and economic exclusion that my grandmother experienced, her forced monolingualism, her forced
acculturation, were it not for the stigma attached to a mixed-raced child like my father, then maybe I would not
exist. It is very likely that I would not exist. Were it not for the accumulated weight of racism and the gross
neglect of Indian communities in the US, I highly doubt that I would be here to write these words. The thing is
that my body has a history that began long before me. My present—all of our presents—is imbued with the
past, even if we do not know that past. The past doesn’t simply dissolve because we don’t know it. But what
do we do in the face of this historicity? What do we do when we want to know what we are, but we do not
have the ability to say? Many of these histories exist beyond the horizon of the archive. And this is
“complicated”. Archiving blood has been—and continues to be—a very “complicated” thing to do. Indeed,
blood quantums have served entirely sinister purposes over the course of world history, and they continue to
serve to exclude and racialize and stigmatize. Tribal citizenship is not exempt from coloniality. It seems ironic,
though, that precisely what I lacked—the archival legitimacy of my racial history, what provoked my own
ambiguity, indeed my own ‘passing’—is also what has served to vilify Dolezal and Smith. To be sure, they
made choices. They attempted to write themselves back into a history that was never theirs. That is violent.
That is hypocritical. That is disingenuous and inauthentic. 10. In the end, I am writing this to attempt to be
authentic to my experience of self in the face of this unknowing but also this new knowledge. It seems to me
that to deny this legacy, this heritage, however distant and bureaucratic it has been, is to participate in the
erasure of the Indian populations of the Americas. It is to continue to silence that history. It is inauthentic. My
choice is not to do that. So I do say now that I am Indian. But I say those words with humility. I say those
words knowing that they are part of a circuitous path toward Indigeneity. I say those words knowing that I do
not speak Cherokee, knowing that I do not know so much about what it means to be Cherokee. But I also say
those words knowing that not having access to our oral history is an authentic Indian experience. Knowing
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that not being able to care for your son, giving him up for adoption, was authentic for both my grandmother
and my father. Wanting to be more than an archival Indian is authentic to my own life experience. I try to tell
that more complicated story. Perhaps, in the end, this essay is my way of signaling the need to be honest with
these complications. Because neither personal history, nor archival evidence, nor desire completely suffice.
Because the ambiguity of race is not enough to justify the willful deception that dominates the narratives of
Dolezal and Smith. I do not have the ability to belong to the Cherokee Nation in the same way as someone
who grew up there. I do, however, have the ability to tell this story. In fact, this story is the most authentic
thing I have to honor the trajectory of my own racial history. And it is in this spirit, in this unlikely sense of self,
that I continue to imagine a more historically grounded sense of belonging to a community that was never
meant to be mine, but which I approach slowly, openly. Authentically.
SOC55 Readings for 18 October
SOMETHING ABOUT THE SUBJECT MAKES IT HARD TO NAME
Gloria Yamato
In Margaret L. Anderson and Patricia Hill Collins. eds. 2004. Race, Class, and Gender. 5th Ed. NY:
Thomson/Wadsworth Pub. Pp. 99-103.
Racism—simple enough in structure, yet difficult to eliminate. Racism—pervasive in the U.S. culture to
the point that it deeply affects all the local town folk and spills over, negatively influencing the fortunes
of folk around the world. Racism is pervasive to the point that we take many of its manifestations for
granted, believing “that’s life.” Many believe that racism can be dealt with effectively in one hellifying
workshop, or one hour-long heated discussion. Many actually believe this monster, racism, that has had
at least a few hundred years to take root, grow, invade our space and develop subtle variations . . this
mind-funk that distorts thought and action, can be merely wished away. I’ve run into folks who really
think that we can beat this devil kick this habit, be healed of this disease in a snap. In a sincere blink of a
well-intentioned eye, presto-poof-racism disappears. “I’ve dealt with my racism . . . (envision a laying
on of hands) . . . Hallelujah! Now I can go to the beach. Well, fine. Go to the beach. In fact, why don’t
we all go to the beach and continue to work on the sucker over there? Cuz you can’t even shave a little
piece off this thing called racism in a day, or a weekend, or a workshop.
When I speak of oppression, I’m talking about the systematic, institutionalized mistreatment of one
group of people by another for whatever reason. The oppressors are purported to have an innate ability
to access economic resources, information, respect, etc., while the oppressed are believed to have a
corresponding negative innate ability. The flip side of oppression is internalized oppression. Members of the
target group are emotionally, physically, and spiritually battered to the point that they begin to actually
believe that their oppression is deserved, is their lot in life, is natural and right, and that it doesn’t even
exist. The oppression begins to feel comfortable, familiar enough that when mean ol’ Massa lay down de
whip, we got’s to pick up and whack ourselves and each other. Like a virus, it’s hard to beat racism,
because by the time you come up with a cure, it’s mutated to a “new cure-resistant” form. One shot just
won’t get it. Racism must be attacked from many angles.
The forms of racism that I pick up on these days are 1) aware/blatant racism, 2) aware/covert
racism, 3) unaware/unintentional racism, and 4) unaware/self-righteous racism. I can’t say that I prefer
any one form of racism over the others, because they all look like an itch needing a scratch. I’ve heard it
said (and understandably so) that the aware/blatant form of racism is preferable if one must suffer it.
Outright racists will, without apology or confusion, tell us that because of our color we don’t appeal to
them. If we so choose, we can attempt to get the hell out of their way before we get the sweat knocked
out of us. Growing up, aware/covert racism is what I heard many of my elders bemoaning “up north,”
after having escaped the overt racism “down south.” Apartments were suddenly no longer vacant or
rents were outrageously high, when black, brown, red, or yellow persons went to inquire about them.
Job vacancies were suddenly filled, or we were fired for very vague reasons. It still happens, though the
perpetrators really take care to cover their tracks these days. They don’t want to get gummed to death or
slobbered on by the toothless laws that supposedly protect us from such inequities.
Unaware/unintentional racism drives usually tranquil white liberals wild when they get called on
it, and confirms the suspicions of many people of color who feel that white folks are just plain crazy. It
has led white people to believe that it’s just fine to ask if they can touch my hair (while reaching). They
then exclaim over how soft it is, how it does not scratch their hand. It has led whites to assume that
bending over backwards and speaking to me in high-pitched (terrified), condescending tones would
make up for all the racist wrongs that distort our lives. This type of racism has led whites right to my
doorstep, talking ’bout, ”We’re sorry/we love you and want to make things right,” which is fine, and
further, “We’re gonna give you the opportunity to fix it while we sleep. Just tell us what you need.
‘Bye!!”—which ain’t fine. With the best of intentions, the best of educations, and the greatest generosity
of heart, whites, operating on the misinformation fed to them from day one, will behave in ways that are
racist, will perpetuate racism by being “nice” the way we’re taught to be nice. You can just “nice”
SOC55 Readings for 18 October
Yamoto
2
somebody to death with naivete and lack of awareness of privilege. Then there’s guilt and the desire to
end racism and how the two get all tangled up to the point that people, morbidly fascinated with their
guilt, are immobilized. Rather than deal with ending racism, they sit and ponder their guilt and hope
nobody notices how awful they are. Meanwhile, racism picks up momentum and keeps on keepin’ on.
Now, the newest form of racism that I’m hip to is unaware/self-righteous racism. The “good
white” racist attempts to shame Blacks into being blacker, scorns Japanese-Americans who don’t speak
Japanese, and knows more about the Chicano/a community than the folks who make up the
community. They assign themselves as the “good whites,” as opposed to the “bad whites,” and are
often so busy telling people of color what the issues in the Black, Asian, Indian, Latino/a communities
should be that they don’t have time to deal with their errant sisters and brothers in the white
community. Which means that people of color are still left to deal with what the “good whites” don’t
want to … racism.
Internalized racism is what really gets in my way as a Black woman. It influences the way I see
or don’t see myself, limits what I expect of myself or others like me. It results in my acceptance of
mistreatment, leads me to believe that being treated with less than absolute respect, at least this once, is
to be expected because I am Black, because I am not white. “Because I am (you fill in the color), you think,
“Life is going to be hard.” The fact is life may be
hard, but the color of your skin is not the cause of the hardship. The color of your skin may be used as
an excuse to mistreat you, but there is no reason or logic involved in the mistreatment. If it seems that
your color is the reason, if it seems that your ethnic heritage is the cause of the woe, it’s because you’ve
been deliberately beaten down by agents of a greedy system until you swallowed the garbage. That is the
internalization of racism.
Racism is the systematic, institutionalized mistreatment of one group of people by another
based on racial heritage. Like every other oppression, racism can be internalized. People of color come
to believe misinformation about their particular ethnic group and thus believe that their mistreatment is
justified. With that basic vocabulary, let’s take a look at how the whole thing works together. Meet “the
Ism Family,” racism, classism, ageism, adultism, elitism, sexism, heterosexism, physicalism, etc. All these
ism’s are systematic, that is, not only are these parasites feeding off our lives, they are also dependent on
one another for foundation. Racism is supported and reinforced by classism, which is given a foothold
and a boost by adultism, which also feeds sexism, which is validated by heterosexism, and so it goes on.
You cannot have the “ism” functioning without first effectively installing its flip-side, the in-ternalized
version of the ism. Like twins, as one particular form of the ism grows in potency, there is a
corresponding increase in its internalized form within the population. Before oppression becomes a
specific ism like racism, usually all hell breaks loose. War. People fight attempts to enslave them, or to
subvert their will, or to take what they consider theirs, whether that is territory or dignity. It’s true that
the various elements of racism, while repugnant, would not be able to do very much damage, but for
one generally overlooked key piece: power/privilege.
While in one sense we all have power we have to look at the fact that, in our society, people are
stratified into various classes and some of these classes have more privilege than others. The owning
class has enough power and privilege to not have to give a good vvhinney what the rest of the folks have
on their minds. The power and privilege of the owning class provides the ability to pay off enough of
the working class and offer that paid-off group, the middle class, just enough privilege to make it
agreeable to do various and sundry oppressive things to other working-class and outright
disenfranchised folk, keeping the lid on explosive inequities, at least for a minute. If you’re at the bottom
of this heap, and you believe the line that says you’re there because that’s all you’re worth, it is at least
some small solace to believe that there are others more worthless than you, because of their gender, race,
sexual preference . . . whatever. The specific form of power that runs the show here is the power to
intimidate. The power to take away the most lives the quickest, and back it up with legal and “divine”
sanction, is the very bottom line. It makes the difference between who’s holding the racism end of the
stick and who’s getting beat with it (or beating others as vulnerable as they are) on the internalized
racism end of the stick. What I am saying is, while people of color are welcome to tear up their own
neighborhoods and each other, everybody knows that you cannot do that to white folks without hell to
SOC55 Readings for 18 October
Yamoto
3
pay. People of color can be prejudiced against one another and whites, but do not have an ice-cube’s
chance in hell of passing laws that will get whites sent to relocation camps “for their own protection and
the security of the nation.” People who have not thought about or refuse to acknowledge this imbalance
of power/privilege often want to talk about the racism of people of color. But then that is one of the
ways racism is able to continue to function. You look for someone to blame and you blame the victim,
who will nine times out often accept the blame out of habit.
So, what can we do? Acknowledge racism for a start, even though and especially when we’ve
struggled to be kind and fair, or struggled to rise above it all. It is hard to acknowledge the fact that
racism circumscribes and pervades our lives. Racism must be dealt with on two levels, personal and
societal, emotional and institutional. It is possible—and most effective—to do both at the same time.
We must reclaim whatever delight we have lost in our own ethnic heritage or heritages. This so-called
melting pot has only succeeded in turning us into fast-food gobbling “generics” (as in generic “white
folks” who were once Irish, Polish, Russian, English, etc. and “black folks,” who were once Ashanti,
Bambara, Baule, Yoruba, etc.). Find or create safe places to actually feel what we’ve been forced to
repress each time we were a victim of, witness to or perpetrator of racism, so that we do not continue,
like puppets, to act out the past in the present and future. Challenge oppression. Take a stand against it.
When you are aware of something oppressive going down, stop the show. At least call it. We become so
numbed to racism that we don’t even think twice about it, unless it is immediately life-threatening.
Whites who want to be allies to people of color: You can educate yourselves via research and
observation rather than rigidly, arrogantly relying solely on interrogating people of color. Do not expect
that people of color should teach you how to behave non-oppressively. Do not give into the pull to be
lazy. Think, hard. Do not blame people of color for your frustration about racism, but do appreciate the
fact that people of color will often help you get in touch with that frustration. Assume that your effort to
be a good friend is appreciated, but don’t expect or accept gratitude from people of color. Work on
racism for your sake, not “their” sake. Assume that you are needed and capable of being a good ally.
Know that you’ll make mistakes and commit yourself to correcting them and continuing on as an ally, no
matter what. Don’t give up.
People of color, working through internalized racism: Remember always that you and others like you are
completely worthy of respect, completely capable of achieving whatever you take a notion to do.
Remember that the term “people of color” refers to a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. These
various groups have been oppressed in a variety of ways. Educate yourself about the ways different
peoples have been oppressed and how they’ve resisted that oppression. Expect and insist that whites are
capable of being good allies against racism. Don’t give up. Resist the pull to give out the “people of color
seal of approval” to aspiring white allies. A moment of appreciation is fine, but more than that tends to
be less than helpful. Celebrate yourself. Celebrate yourself. Celebrate the inevitable end of racism.
