Powell
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Joined: 27 Nov 2004
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 Posted: Wed 13 Aug 2008 23:17 Post subject: Rebecca Walker on racial identity |
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| Quote: | The Racial Identity
Monday, March 31, 2008 7:53 AM
By rebeccawalker
So I'm, like, omni-racial. My mother is African-American, Native American, and Irish. My father is Ukrainian by way of Brooklyn.
In my late twenties I wrote a memoir about being mixed race, and what it was like to move between so many worlds and feel allegiances to everyone and no one at the same time. The book was an attempt to piece together my then fragmented Self. It became the symbolic embodiment of a splintered Me that congealed --and healed-- through its rendering in literary form.
It was a deep situation.
Luckily it didn't kill me, and I've lived to see a black, mixed race candidate with some vision stand up and talk mess about race and changing the world all day long. It's great.
Maybe it means that my son won't grow up having to figure out the answer to "What are you?" like I had to every day. Maybe his sanity and sense of Self won't be bound up in a national discourse of black versus white, healthy versus tragic.
I'm hoping.
Tenzin is everything I am, plus his Dad is from Trinidad, with roots in South America and Scotland.
At the moment, Tenzin has no idea that race, as a concept or construct, exists. In an attempt to foster love and understanding, whenever he asks about a stranger, I tell him, "That's a human being, honey." "A human being?" "Yes, a human being, just like you."
(Which works really well until he turns to someone and says, "Human being? Can I tell you something about my friend, Elephant?" and said human being looks at me strangely.)
Tenzin is oblivious because he's three and we live in Hawaii, where he looks like he could be related to, well, almost everyone. Also, he's not around a lot of people, white, black or other, who are so identified with their idea of racial identity that they project it all over him and demand he relate to them based on it.
And he's oblivious because both of his parents are the same color, and while we can talk all night long about race, racism and the travesty of Reconstruction, we are surprisingly more likely to "genderize" Tenzin than "racialize him." Daddy bought him a football for example, which gave me pause. And even though I thought Tenzin could pull off a pink tee-shirt just fine, his Dad didn't agree.
What would it mean, at this age, to racialize him similarly? Would we feed him rice and peas? Collard greens and black eyes peas (which I ate in nursery school every day)? Would he be wearing Kente cloth onesies? Shearling booties from Kiev? Would we put his toddler bed in a tipi? Would we read him books about being biracial, "Tenzin Has A Thousand Ancestors"? Would we dress him in a lot of green clothes? Feed him cheese blintzes?
I'm serious.
At the moment, we don't ask Tenzin to perform a racial identity. We think in terms of how he may, in the future, be asked to perform a racial identity by others, and we strategize like hell about it. We talk about the qualities we want him to have, the situations, racial and otherwise, we want him to be able to navigate. We discuss the history we want him to know, and the human truths found in every culture, including his own, that we aspire to live and pass on.
The rest will be up to him.
How do you negotiate racial identity with your kids? |
http://blogs.theroot.com/blogs/seeds/archive/2008/03/31/the-racial-identity.aspx
http://blogs.theroot.com/blogs/seeds/archive/2008/07/11/flashdance.aspx
| Quote: | Since my first post on racial identity, I’ve been thinking about how the story of the multiracial person is morphing from tragic to Presidential, from margin to center, as a result of Obama’s presence on the world stage.
Looked at through this lens, the decision to raise my son to resist a static racial self-concept can be seen as one thread of this evolving mixed-race narrative.
If this is the case, and follow me here as I kick some omni-racial motherhood theory, it is important to note that the difference between a consciously articulated multiracial identity and an embraced monoracial identity can truly only be found in the outcomes of these identities, which we may not know for years to come.
At the moment, multiracial identity is being posited as a platform for greater racial harmony, but it may turn out to simply be a divisive us vs. them set-up, another journey to nowhere. If Obama is not careful, his current campaign message can be seen as asserting a false dichotomy between the past and present, the old and the new.
In the same way, it is also possible that an uncritical celebration of multiracial identity can lead to a divide between empowered, so-called progressive "post-racers" and denigrated, culturally specific "reactionaries."
Which means that my concept of raising my son without asking him to perform a racial narrative is, upon reflection, not entirely accurate. I am asking him to perform a racial narrative. It doesn’t include Kente cloth or Russian fur hats, but it does expect him to see race as an historical construct, and to pay less attention to skin color than to the intention of individuals to either heal or harm.
The choice I make to raise my son this way has undeniable value in a world ripped to shreds by race and culture-based hatred. But this does not mean that "transcending" or disavowing affirming racial identities is necessary, or that my approach to racial identity is inherently better (or worse) than anyone else’s. The issue is not how human beings identify, it is what they do with that identification that makes all the difference.
Teaching Tenzin to have a deep respect for the multitudinous ways human beings choose to make sense of themselves and the world is critical. Teaching him to look carefully at the results of these various cosmologies and choose one that appears to cause the least amount of harm is absolutely essential.
I don’t want him to be a bigot. But I don’t want him to be a fool, either. |
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