"Dear friend,
I am black.
I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past, I have attempted to alert white people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative, or socially inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe there are no black people present, and to distribute this card when they do.
I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me."
-Adrian Piper, text from My Calling (Card) #1, 1986, lithograph on paper
An important figure in Conceptual art, performance art, and philosophy, Adrian Piper is known for introducing race and gender politics into a field formerly (and, arguably, still) dominated by white men. As a light-skinned African American woman, Piper has created pieces that challenge predominant associations of blackness with inferiority and whiteness with superiority, openly defying her ability to "pass" as white, as in her video installation Cornered (1988) (part 1, part 2). "But, you see, I have no choice," she says, confrontational, posed in the corner of a blank, white room, "I'm cornered: If I tell you who I am, you become nervous and uncomfortable, or antagonized. But if I don't tell you who I am, then I have to pass for white, and why should I have to do that?" (pt. 1, 4:28-52)
Piper refers to whiteness as a "racial club" (pt. 1, 2:25-30), even as a sort of haven - "...because if someone can look and sound like me and still be black, then no one is safely, unquestionably white" (pt. 1, 6:32-46), she states sardonically - a "social fact" reinterpreted as a metaphorical space that allows its insiders greater opportunities than those who are excluded. Cheryl I. Harris echoes these ideas: recalling the story of her light-skinned grandmother's move to Chicago and integration into white society, Harris writes, "...she could thus enter the white world...not merely passing, but trespassing." (1711) Thus whiteness becomes both a property in the attributive sense as well as a property in the material sense, both a personal trait and a personal possession.
Conversely, blackness too becomes a property in a way both opposite and parallel to the propertization of whiteness; obviously, the privileges of being white contrasts sharply with the disadvantages of being black, yet both blackness and whiteness are inheritable, statuses that pass down, along with their associated opportunities (or lack thereof), to younger generations. While the inheritance of whiteness comes more in the form of material and immaterial advantages, the inheritance of blackness can be construed as something more bodily and visceral; take, for example, the concept of hypodescent, or the "one-drop" rule, in which blackness becomes inherited through blood.
Inheritance through blood, or infection? Race becomes disease, a contaminant, which spreads into real estate property: Laura Pulido writes, "'Too many' people of color might reduce a neighborhood's status, property value, or general level of comfort for white people." (16) The immateriality of race becomes realized through the politics of property: who has access to what. If whites can inherit privilege, as well as monetary and real estate gains, then do nonwhites inherit pollution?
Piper undermines the idea of hypodescent, however, by asserting that "some researchers estimate that almost all purportedly white Americans have between 5 and 20% black ancestry. Well, this country's entrenched conventions classify a person as black if they have any black ancestry. So, most purportedly white Americans are in fact black." (pt. 1, 6:47-7:14) With this assertion Piper reimagines and reverses the black-white racial hierarchy, describing a "black majority" (pt. 2, 0:37-0:41) and a "white minority" (pt. 2, 1:43-55), and a society in which, though whiteness is still elite, blackness may be a property worth investing in: "Or will you feel disappointed [if you discover you are certifiably white], deprived of something special? Perhaps you'll even lie and tell people you're black even if you're not. There's a nice, subversive strategy for you." (pt. 2, 2:46-3:03)
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
the politics of definition
To define race, to define arbitrary categories of difference, whether by physicality or anthropology: it seems so easy to say "this is white," "that is black," as if race lay simply in the ability of the body to produce melanin. Even the Oxford English Dictionary holds this as fact: "each of the major divisions of humankind, having distinct physical characteristics." But this popular, superficial understanding ignores the historical struggles of race, and especially the contradictory and convenient definitions of race that have both informed and been informed by American politics; the ways in which white and non-white people have been imagined and categorized by white Americans, and how these imaginations have become manifest realities.
Following Stephen Jay Gould, Claire Jean Kim imagines race as a geometric plane, a field in which relationships between different points can move in two directions: "civic ostracism" along one axis, "relative valorization" along the other; i.e. a scale of inclusion and exclusion, and a hierarchy of superiority; challenging more traditional notions of race as a singular grayscale, which posits white and black at opposing poles, with Asians, Latinos, native Americans, and so on, at various points within the middle. With this model, we can understand race not as a "bipolar" construction, but rather a complex field of nuances in which, for example, Asian Americans can be characterized (in the popular imagination) as somewhere relatively in the middle between whites and blacks in terms of superiority, but far lower than both in terms of assimilability.
But how have Asians been racialized in these terms, as "model" and "foreign"? The long history of Asian exclusion and immigration quotas in America, as detailed by Mae Ngai, both was influenced by and further perpetuated concepts of Asian foreignness: "...the 'colored races,'" she writes, "were imagined as having no country of origin. They lay outside the concept of nationality and, therefore, citizenship. They were not even bona fide immigrants." (27) If we understand non-white immigrants in this manner (though the definition of "white" as we understand it now conflicts with legal definitions of "white" in the 1920s, during the era of quotas, complicated by the conquest of Mexican lands and, in turn, the status of Mexican immigrants as legally "white" in order to account for their new and unwitting presence in America), then they become "specters" (Ngai's word), not just non-citizens, but non-people, subjects who paradoxically belong to two nations and to no nation at all.
Indeed, non-white immigrants, as well as, admittedly quite broadly, all non-black minorities (and especially Asians and Latinos), can be defined by a system of paradoxes, the disparities between belonging and not belonging, inferiority and superiority, non-black and non-white. They inhabit a liminal space, a middle space, a boundary: they cannot be placed into the narrow, tidy categories of white and black.
That is not to say, of course, that non-black minorities have no relation to the bipolar American construction of racial politics, though they may lie outside that strict binary; rather, the ways in which they have become racialized depends on that established division. I am drawn especially to Kim's discussion of the "model minority," and its historic predecessors, which cast Asian Americans in a positive light vis-a-vis African Americans and Latino Americans, especially knowing the stereotype persists to this day. I become frustrated when people tell me about "how smart Asians are," because they do not understand the political history of the "model minority," and the intricate racist undertones it suggests. Is that what we as a nation have decided all Asians have in common, their (whether imagined or real) intelligence, perseverance, and cooperativeness? Furthermore, is that what we as a nation have decided all blacks lack?
Another definition of race, offered by the OED: "a group or set of people or things with a common feature or features," as if all members of a single "race" embody a monolithic, easily articulated identity.
Following Stephen Jay Gould, Claire Jean Kim imagines race as a geometric plane, a field in which relationships between different points can move in two directions: "civic ostracism" along one axis, "relative valorization" along the other; i.e. a scale of inclusion and exclusion, and a hierarchy of superiority; challenging more traditional notions of race as a singular grayscale, which posits white and black at opposing poles, with Asians, Latinos, native Americans, and so on, at various points within the middle. With this model, we can understand race not as a "bipolar" construction, but rather a complex field of nuances in which, for example, Asian Americans can be characterized (in the popular imagination) as somewhere relatively in the middle between whites and blacks in terms of superiority, but far lower than both in terms of assimilability.
But how have Asians been racialized in these terms, as "model" and "foreign"? The long history of Asian exclusion and immigration quotas in America, as detailed by Mae Ngai, both was influenced by and further perpetuated concepts of Asian foreignness: "...the 'colored races,'" she writes, "were imagined as having no country of origin. They lay outside the concept of nationality and, therefore, citizenship. They were not even bona fide immigrants." (27) If we understand non-white immigrants in this manner (though the definition of "white" as we understand it now conflicts with legal definitions of "white" in the 1920s, during the era of quotas, complicated by the conquest of Mexican lands and, in turn, the status of Mexican immigrants as legally "white" in order to account for their new and unwitting presence in America), then they become "specters" (Ngai's word), not just non-citizens, but non-people, subjects who paradoxically belong to two nations and to no nation at all.
Indeed, non-white immigrants, as well as, admittedly quite broadly, all non-black minorities (and especially Asians and Latinos), can be defined by a system of paradoxes, the disparities between belonging and not belonging, inferiority and superiority, non-black and non-white. They inhabit a liminal space, a middle space, a boundary: they cannot be placed into the narrow, tidy categories of white and black.
That is not to say, of course, that non-black minorities have no relation to the bipolar American construction of racial politics, though they may lie outside that strict binary; rather, the ways in which they have become racialized depends on that established division. I am drawn especially to Kim's discussion of the "model minority," and its historic predecessors, which cast Asian Americans in a positive light vis-a-vis African Americans and Latino Americans, especially knowing the stereotype persists to this day. I become frustrated when people tell me about "how smart Asians are," because they do not understand the political history of the "model minority," and the intricate racist undertones it suggests. Is that what we as a nation have decided all Asians have in common, their (whether imagined or real) intelligence, perseverance, and cooperativeness? Furthermore, is that what we as a nation have decided all blacks lack?
Another definition of race, offered by the OED: "a group or set of people or things with a common feature or features," as if all members of a single "race" embody a monolithic, easily articulated identity.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
belonging
I.
Once, a couple years ago, when I was walking down SoHo at night by myself, a man hissed at me, "Stupid Chink," and spat. I have never been more frightened for my immediate well being, afraid not only of what he would do next, or was capable of doing, to me, but also of the implications of being a "stupid Chink," the implication that, though I was born and raised in America, had only visited China twice in my life, though my mother often jokes I am more American than Chinese, that somehow I did not belong there; but, if I don't belong in this country, where do I belong?
II.
Growing up in a small, largely white, middle class neighborhood, I didn't develop an allegiance with or even become aware of an Asian American community until I moved, at the age of 11, to a more diverse area, where Chinese American families sent their children to Chinese school, as if, by slaving for several hours each week over how to write and pronounce basic Mandarin, they could somehow become "more Chinese." Even then I avoided the Asian cliques, having had only white friends in elementary school, having only interacted with other Chinese because they were friends with my mother, because I was unfamiliar with the culture of Chinese America. I had never endured Chinese school, never gone to Chinese church; I found the "Got Rice?" logo (which all of the other Chinese teens seemed to love) distasteful.
On the other hand, I was acutely aware of my own racial identity, used to white children slanting their eyes at me, or strangers saying, "Ni hao," as if by knowing how to greet me in a language that wasn't even my native language, they somehow knew all there was to know about me. Especially in elementary school, being the only Asian with Asian parents (the other Chinese girl was adopted by a white American family), I became the oddity, the source of jokes, like how "thank you" in Chinese almost sounds like "shit shit."
III.
How can I reconcile the hard-earned success of my mother, who emigrated from China to pursue a Ph.D., managed to make enough money on her own to buy a decent house in the suburbs, send two children to college, with the working class Chinese I see every week in Chinatown, the old, hunchbacked cleaning lady who comes to my office every Friday, who can probably barely afford her rent? What decisions did my mother make, what turns of fate allowed her to gain access to higher education, a well-paid job, and comfortable housing, when hundreds of other Chinese immigrants are not so fortunate, living in cramped apartments and likely to be priced out?
Is she the exception?
IV.
1882: The Chinese Exclusion Act is passed, preventing further immigration of Chinese into America.
1924: The Immigrant Act is passed, prohibiting the immigration of East, Southeast, and South Asians.
1965: The Immigration and Nationality Act abolishes immigration quotas, once again allowing Asians to immigrate into the country.
For 80 years of American history, Asians have been excluded to some extent from entering the country; for even longer than that, they were categorically defined as foreign, ineligible for citizenship due to their non-white status.
V.
Where do I belong?
Once, a couple years ago, when I was walking down SoHo at night by myself, a man hissed at me, "Stupid Chink," and spat. I have never been more frightened for my immediate well being, afraid not only of what he would do next, or was capable of doing, to me, but also of the implications of being a "stupid Chink," the implication that, though I was born and raised in America, had only visited China twice in my life, though my mother often jokes I am more American than Chinese, that somehow I did not belong there; but, if I don't belong in this country, where do I belong?
II.
Growing up in a small, largely white, middle class neighborhood, I didn't develop an allegiance with or even become aware of an Asian American community until I moved, at the age of 11, to a more diverse area, where Chinese American families sent their children to Chinese school, as if, by slaving for several hours each week over how to write and pronounce basic Mandarin, they could somehow become "more Chinese." Even then I avoided the Asian cliques, having had only white friends in elementary school, having only interacted with other Chinese because they were friends with my mother, because I was unfamiliar with the culture of Chinese America. I had never endured Chinese school, never gone to Chinese church; I found the "Got Rice?" logo (which all of the other Chinese teens seemed to love) distasteful.
On the other hand, I was acutely aware of my own racial identity, used to white children slanting their eyes at me, or strangers saying, "Ni hao," as if by knowing how to greet me in a language that wasn't even my native language, they somehow knew all there was to know about me. Especially in elementary school, being the only Asian with Asian parents (the other Chinese girl was adopted by a white American family), I became the oddity, the source of jokes, like how "thank you" in Chinese almost sounds like "shit shit."
III.
How can I reconcile the hard-earned success of my mother, who emigrated from China to pursue a Ph.D., managed to make enough money on her own to buy a decent house in the suburbs, send two children to college, with the working class Chinese I see every week in Chinatown, the old, hunchbacked cleaning lady who comes to my office every Friday, who can probably barely afford her rent? What decisions did my mother make, what turns of fate allowed her to gain access to higher education, a well-paid job, and comfortable housing, when hundreds of other Chinese immigrants are not so fortunate, living in cramped apartments and likely to be priced out?
Is she the exception?
IV.
1882: The Chinese Exclusion Act is passed, preventing further immigration of Chinese into America.
1924: The Immigrant Act is passed, prohibiting the immigration of East, Southeast, and South Asians.
1965: The Immigration and Nationality Act abolishes immigration quotas, once again allowing Asians to immigrate into the country.
For 80 years of American history, Asians have been excluded to some extent from entering the country; for even longer than that, they were categorically defined as foreign, ineligible for citizenship due to their non-white status.
V.
Where do I belong?
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