Readings for Diversity and Social Justice 4th edition [4 ed.] 9781138055278, 9781138055285

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DIVERSITYAND SOCIAL JUSTICE Edited by Maurianne Adams, Warren J. Blumenfeld, D. Chase J. Catalano, Keri Safire” DeJong, Heather W. Hackman, Larissa E. Hopkins,

Barbara J. Love, Madeline L. Peters, Davey Shlasko,

and Ximena Zuniga

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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2021 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

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For nearly 20 years, Readings for Diversity and Social Justice has been the trusted, leading anthology to cover a wide range of social oppressions from a social justice standpoint. With full sections dedicated to racism, religious oppression, classism, ableism, youth and elder oppression, as well as an integrative section dedicated to sexism, heterosexism, and transgender oppression, this bestselling text goes far beyond the range of traditional readers. New essay selections in each section of this fourth edition have been carefully chosen to keep topic coverage timely and readings accessible and engaging for students. The interactions among these topics are highlighted throughout to stress the interconnections among oppressions in everyday life. A Table of Intersections leads you to selections not in the section dedicated to an issue. Retaining the key features and organization that has made Readings for Diversity and Social Justice an indispensable text for teaching issues of social justice while simultaneously updating and expanding its coverage, this new edition features:

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Over 40 new selections considering current topics and events such as the Black Lives Matter movement, workplace immigration raids, gentrification, wealth inequality, the disability rights of prisoners and inmates, and the Keystone XL pipeline protests. Anupdated companion website with additional resources and short classroom-friendly videos that further complement the readings in each section. A holistic approach to sexism, gay, lesbian, trans and gender-queer oppression that challenges widely held assumptions about the usual practice of separating analyses of sex and gender binaries. A more optimistic focus on the role of social justice at all levels of society, whether personal, institutional, local, or global, and the intersections among them.

Offering over 140 selections from some of the foremost scholars in a wide range of fields, Readings for Diversity and Social Justice is the indispensable volume for every student, teacher, and social justice advocate.

Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, First Edition, 2000 Edited by Maurianne Adams, Warren J. Blumenfeld, Carmelita (Rosie) Castaneda, Heather W. Hackman, Madeline L. Peters, and Ximena Zuniga

Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, Second Edition, 2010 Edited by Maurianne Adams, Warren J. Blumenfeld, Carmelita (Rosie) Castavieda, Heather W. Hackman, Madeline L. Peters, and Ximena Zuniga

Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, Third Edition, 2013 Edited by Maurianne Adams, Warren J. Blumenfeld, Carmelita (Rosie) Castaneda, Heather W. Hackman, Madeline L. Peters, and Ximena Zuniga

Readings for Diversity

and Social Justice Fourth Edition

Edited by

Maurianne Adams, Warren J. Blumenfeld, D. Chase J. Catalano, Keri “Safire” DeJong, Heather W. Hackman, Larissa E. Hopkins, Barbara J. Love, Madeline L. Peters, Davey Shlasko, and Ximena Zuniga

Taylor & Francis Group

Fourth edition published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2018

Taylor & Francis

The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Desians and Patents

Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now

known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2000 Third edition published by Routledge 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-05527-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-05528-5 (pbk) Typeset in Swiss 721 and Classical Garamond by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK Visit the companion website: www.routledge.com/cw/readingsfordiversity

®

MIX Paper from responsible sources

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FSC® C014174

Printed and bound in the United States of America by Sheridan

ontents

Table of Intersections

XIV

Acknowledgments

Readings for Diversity and Social Justice: A General Introduction

secrion1

XXiV

GETTING STARTED: CORE CONCEPTS FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION

Introduction Maurianne Adams

1

The Complexity of Identity: “Who Am 1?” Beverly Daniel Tatum

2

Identities and Social Locations: Who Am |? Who Are My People? Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey

3

The Social Construction of Difference Allan G. Johnson

4

Microaggressions, Marginality, and Oppression: An Introduction Derald Wing sue

Gy

The Cycle of Socialization Bobbie Harro

6

Theoretical Foundations for Social Justice Education Lee Anne Bell”

Core Concepts for Social Justice Education Maurianne Adams and Ximena Zuniga

7

Five Faces of Oppression Iris Marion Young

8

Intersectionality Revisited Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge

secrion2

‘Ve

RACISM

introduction Context

9

Mike Funk, Rani Varghese, and Ximena Zuniga

a

Defining Racism: “Can We Talk?”

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|

Beverly Daniel Tatum

10

A Different Mirror Ronald Takaki

ti

vi | CONTENTS 11

This Land

82

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

12

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

87

Geoige Lipsitz

13

Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing

96

Andrea Smith

14

La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness

102

Gloria Anzaldua

15

Patrolling Racial Borders: Discrimination Against Mixed Race People

106

Heather Dalmage

16

Selected Reports

tt

National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights

Voices 17

Finding My Eye-dentity

122

Olivia Chung

18

Identification Pleas

123

Eric Gansworth

19

American Hijab: Why My Scarf Is A Sociopolitical Statement, Not A Symbol Of My Religiosity

126

Mariam Gomaa

20

My Tongue Is Divided into Two

128

Quique Aviles

21

Letter to My Son

131

Ta-Nehisi Coates

22

My Class Didn’t Trump My Race: Using Oppression to Face Privilege

138

Robin J. DiAngelo

Next Steps

23

Women, Race, andRacism: A Dialogue inBlackand White

= «=

147 —

Andrea Ayvazian and Beverly Daniel Tatum

24

Forging El Mundo Zurdo: Changing Ourselves, Changing the World

180

AnaLouise Keating

25

The Personal Is Political

oe

Richard (Chip) Smith

3

CLASSISM

163

Introduction Maurianne Adams, Larissa E. Hopkins, and Davey Shlasko

Context 26

Class in America

173

Gregory Mantsios

27

Class Dismissed

182

Laura Smith and Rebecca M. Redington

28

Race, Wealth, and Equality

185

Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro

29

What’s Debt Got to Do with !t? Brett Williams

192

CONTENTS 30

|

At the Elite Colleges Peter Schmidt

31

Is the Near-Trillion-Dollar Student Loan Bubble About to Pop? Sarah Jaffe

32

Students with Disabilities: Financial Aid Policy Issues Thomas R. Wolanin

33

“Free” Labor: Past and Present Forms of Prison Labor Whitney Benns

34

Wealth Inequality Has Widened Along Racial, Ethnic Lines Since End of Great Recession Pew Research Center

Voices 35

Bonds of Sisterhood—Bonds of Oppression Mary Romero

36

White Poverty: The Politics of Invisibility bell hooks

37

The Laws That Sex Workers Really Want (TED Talk) Juno Mac

38

Born onThird Base Chuck Collins

39

Gentrification Will Drive My Uncle Out of His Neighborhood, and | Will Have Helped Eric Rodriguez

Next Steps 40 How Occupy Wall Street Changes Everything Sarah van Gelder

41

“Classism from Our Mouths” and “Tips from Working-Class Activists” Betsy Leondar-Wright

42

Deep Thoughts About Class Privilege

233

Karen Pittelman and Resource Generation

43

Home Economics: The Invisible and Unregulated World of Domestic Work

238

National Domestic Workers Alliance

44

Charts from United for a Fair Economy

secrion4

RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION

243

247

Introduction Maurianne Adams and Christopher MacDonald-Dennis

Context 45

America’s Changing Religious Landscape

209

Pew Research Center

46

Examples of Christian Privilege

264

Sam Killermann

47

Christian Privilege and the Promotion of “Secular” and Not-So “Secular” Mainline Christianity in Public Schooling and in the Larger Society

265

Warren J. Blumenfeld

48

Racing Religion Moustafa Bayoumi

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viii

| CONTENTS

49

275

Precedents: The Destruction of the European Jews Raul Hilberg

50

278

Maps—History of Anti-Semitism Sir Martin Gilbert

51

291

“Working it Out” and “See You in Court” Diana Eck

52

298

Native American Religious Liberty: Five Hundred Years After Columbus Walter R. Echo-Hawk

53

Religious Freedom Advocates Are Divided Over How to Address LGBT Rights

302

Kelsey Dallas

54

From Pearl Harbor to 9/11: Lessons from the Internment of Japanese American Buddhists

305

Duncan Rydken Williams

55

308

A Somali Influx Unsettles Latino Meatpackers Kirk Semple

Voices 56

312

Jews in the U.S.: The Rising Costs of Whiteness Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

57

317

Oral History of Adam Fattah Amna Ahmad

318

Oral History of Hagar Omran Hoda Zawam

58

319

Modesto-Area Atheists Speak Up, Seek Tolerance Sue Nowicki

59

321

Why Are You Atheists So Angry? Greta Christina

Next Steps 60 Creating Identity-Safe Spaces on College Campuses for Muslim Students

325

Na‘ilah Suad Nasir and Jasiyah Al-Amin

61

329

Guidelines for Christian Allies Paul Kivel

62

Critical Reflections on the Interfaith Movement: A Social Justice Perspective

330

Sachi Edwards

vov5

SEXISM, HETEROSEXISM, AND TRANS* OPPRESSION

341

Introduction D. Chase J. Catalano, Warren J. Blumenfeld, and Heather W. Hackman

Context Co

“Night to His Day”: The Social Construction of Gender

Judith Lorber

354

La

GA) a 2

64

Feminism: A Movement to End Sexist Oppression bell hooks

(65)

Patriarchy, the System: An It, Not a He, a Them, Or an Us

‘tual

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359

Y

362

Allan G. Johnson

66

Privilege Devon W. Carbado

367

CONTENTS 67

He Works, She Works, But What Different Impressions They Make

| 373

Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey

Generation LGBTQIA

68

374

Michael Schulman

Women & LGBT People Under Attack: 1930s & Now

69

378

Warren J. Blumenfeld

Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity

70

381

Michael S. Kimmel

Overcompensation Nation: It’s Time to Admit That Toxic Masculinity Drives Gun Violence

386

Amanda Marcotte

72

TAY

Introduction—How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States Joanne Meyerowitz

388

The InterSEXion: A Vision for a Queer Progressive Agenda

391

Deepali Gokhale

394

Transmisogyny 101: What It ls and What Can We Do About It

74

Laura Kacere

398

Pansexual Visibility & Undoing Heteronormativity

75

Cameron Airen

400

Transgender Liberation

76

Susan Stryker

The Impact of Juvenile Court on Queer and Trans/ Gender-Non-Conforming Youth

77

403

Wesley Ware

Feminism and Abolition: Theories and Practices for the Twenty-First Century

78

Voices 10/ Bones

re

L

indy West

Men Explain Things to Me

80.“

407 je

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Angela Y¥. Davis

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412

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415

Rebecca Soinit

419

Mutilating Gender

81

Violence Against Women Is a Men’s Issue

82

Jackson Katz

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Trans Woman Manifesto

83

Julia Serano

Real Men and Pink Suits

84

Charles M. Blow

Mestiza/o Gender: Notes Towards a Transformative Masculinity

85 y,

86

Daniel E. Solis y Martinez

Look! No, Don’t! The Invisibility Dilemma for Transsexual Men Jamison Green

My Life as an Out Gay Person in Russia Masha Gessen

Ss

d

Dean Spade

/

425

iX

xX

| CONTENTS Next Steps 88 { Grassroots: Introduction

444

Winona LaDuke

89

_

National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH) Statement on Healthcare for All

446

National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health

90

Becoming an Aliy: A New Examination

447

Nancy J. Evans and Jamie Washington

91

Transgender Day of Remembrance: A Day to Honor the Dead and the Living

456

Shelby Chestnut

92

Unbowed: A Memoir

457

Wangarl Maathai

93

Calling All Restroom Revolutionaries!

459

Simone Chess, Alison Kafer, Jessi Quizar, and Mattie Udora Richardson

94

Why | Marched on Washington—With Zero Reservations

461

Rinku Sen

95

Getting to Why: Reflections on Accountability and Action for Men in Gender Justice Movements

464

Jamie Utt

secrion6

ABLEISM

467

Introduction Benjamin Ostiguy-Finneran and Madeline L. Peters

Context 96 _

Struggle for Freedom: Disability Rights Movements

475

Willie V Bryan

97

Immigration, Ethnicity, and the Ugly Law

480

Susan M. Schweik

98

Disability Does Not Discriminate: Toward a Theory of Multiple Identity Through Coalition

482

Zanita E. Fenton

99

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Leaves Scars “on the Inside,” lraq Veteran Says

486

Edward D. Murphy

100

Disability in the New World Order

487

Nirmala Erevelles

101

Disabled Behind Bars

490

Rebecca Vallas

102

The Silent Victims: Inmates with Learning Disabilities

492

Douglas P. Wilson

103

Go to the Margins of the Class: Disability and Hate Crimes

493

Lennard J. Davis

104

Why the Intersexed Shouldn’t Be Fixed: Insights from Queer Theory and Disability Studies

497

Sumi Colligan

105

Students with Disabilities Frustrated with Ignorance and Lack of Services Allie Grasgreen

902

CONTENTS Voices 106

Understanding Deafness: Not Everyone Wants to Be “Fixed”

|

504

Allegra Ringo

107

How to Curse in Sign Language

506

Ashley and Deborah

108

On the Spectrum, Looking Out

'

(

Jess Watsky

109

What I'd Tell That Doctor

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Malem

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Jason Kingsley

Next Steps 110 Toward Ending Ableism in Education

515

Thomas Hehir

111

Facilitating Transitions to College for Students with Disabilities from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Backgrounds

518

Heather A. Oesterreich and Michelle G. Knight

112

Increasing Awareness: Language, Communication Strategies, and Universally Designed Environments

523

Karen A. Myers, Jaci Jenkins Lindburg, and Danielle M. Nied

113

Learning Disability Identity Development and Social Construct: A Two-Tiered Approach Cheryl L. Howland and Eva Gibavic

114

Creating a Fragrance-Free Zone: A Friendlier Atmosphere for People Living with Environmental Illness

51

538

Invisible Disabilities Advocate

415

4

Recognizing Ableist Beliefs and Practices and Taking Action as an Ally

541

Madeline L. Peters, Carmelita (Rosie) Castaneda, Larissa E. Hopkins, and Aquila McCants

secrion7

YOUTH OPPRESSION AND ELDER OPPRESSION

545

Introduction Keri “Safire” DeJong and Barbara J. Love

Context 116 = =~——_-Understanding Adultism: A Key to Developing Positive Youth-Adult Relationships

550

John Bell

117

Terrorizing School Children in the American Police State

559

Henry A. Giroux

118

Police Make Life Hell for Youth of Color

565

Kathy Durkin

119

Ageism: Another Form of Bigotry

567

Robert N. Butler

120

Ageing with Disabilities: Ageism and More

oie

Debra J. Sheets

121

Black Elderly

574

Center on Aging Studies, University of Missouri—Kansas City

Voi Az

From Keystone XL Pipeline to #DAPL: Jasilyn Charger, Water Protector from Cheyenne River Reservation Amy Goodman and Jasilyn Charger

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xii

| CONTENTS

Elder Liberation Draft Policy Statement

580

Marge Larabee

fs)

People of Color Over Fifty

583

Dottie Curry

Next Steps 125 An Immediate End to the Criminalization and Dehumanization of Black Youth Across All Areas of Society Including, but Not Limited to, Our Nation’s Justice and Education Systems, Social Service Agencies, Media, and Pop Culture

584

Thena Robinson Mock, Ruth Jeannoel, Rachel Gilmer, Chelsea Fuller, and Marbre Stahly Butts

126

Allies to Young People: Tips and Guidelines on How to Assist Young People to Organize

588

Jenny Sazama with help from teens in Boston

127

Taking a Stand Against Ageism at All Ages: A Powerful Coalition

590

Margaret M. Guilette

128

What Allies of Elders Can Do

593

Patricia Markee

129

—-Youth Oppression as a Technology of Colonialism: Conceptual Frameworks and Possibilities for Social Justice Education Praxis

594

Keri DeJong and Barbara J. Love

8

WORKING FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE: VISIONS AND STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE

599

Introduction Ximena Zuniga

Context 130

131

Reflections on Liberation Suzanne Pharr

604

Developing a Liberatory Consciousness

610

Barbara J. Love

132

Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender

615

Patricia Hill Collins

133 7

430) =

What Can We Do? Allan G. Johnson

621

The Cycle of Liberation

627

Bobbie Harro

Voices

135

Courage

635

Cornel West

136

Allies

637

Gloria E. Anzaldua

Next Steps 137 Social Struggle

640

Richard (Chip) Smith

138

Intergroup Dialogue: Criti aenversallppagbout Difference and Social Justice rmid Ximena Zuniga, Gretchen E. Lopez, and Kristie

CONTENTS

139

Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity

xiii

647

Chandra Talpade Mohanty

140

The Renaissance of Student Activism

649

Alia Wong

Permissions Acknowledgments and Citations

653

About the Contributors

660

Table of Intersections

The tables on the following pages will enable readers to see at a glance the multiple issues that are taken up in each one of the selections. This Table of Intersections follows the sequence of the Contents, but it is laid out to show the multiple interconnections discussed in each of the selections. Column indicators are as follows:

R Cl RO S H EG Ab Y OE Global Issues Language Issues

Racism Classism Religious Oppression Sexism Heterosexism Transgender Oppression Ableism Youth Oppression and Elder Oppression Discussion of issues outside of US borders Non-English or English as second language speakers, or use of American Sign Language rather than vocal speech

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resources, indigenous spirituality, or culture. As Kare Shanley notes, Native peoples are a permanent “present absence” in the US colonial imagination, an “absence” that reinforces, at every turn, the conviction that Native peoples are indeed vanishing and that the conquest of Native lands is justified. Ella Shoat and Robert Stam describe this absence as “an ambivalently repressive mechanism [which] dispels the anxiety in the face of the Indian, whose very presence is a reminder of the initially precarious grounding of the American nation state itself... . Ina temporal paradox, living Indians were induced to ‘play dead,’ as it were, in order to perform a narrative of manifest destiny in which their role, ultimately, was to disappear.” Rayna Green further elaborates . . . “The living performance of ‘playing Indian’ by nonIndian peoples depends upon the physical and psychological removal, even the death, of real Indians. In that sense, the performance, purportedly often done out of a stated and implicit love for Indians, is really the obverse of another well-known cultural phenomenon, ‘Indian hating,’ as most often expressed in another, deadly performance genre called ‘genocide’” (Green, 1988). After all, why would non-Native peoples need to play Indian— which often includes acts of spiritual appropriation and land theft—if they thought Indians were still alive and perfectly capable of being Indian themselves? The pillar of genocide serves as the anchor for colonialism—it is what allows non-Native peoples to feel they can rightfully own indigenous peoples’ land. It is okay to take land from indigenous peoples, because indigenous peoples have disappeared.

ORIENTALISM/WAR A third pillar of white supremacy is the logic of Orientalism. Orientalism was defined by Edward Said as the process of the West defining itself as a superior civilization by constructing itself in opposition to an “exotic” but inferior “Orient.” . . . The logic of Orientalism marks certain peoples or nations as inferior and as posing a constant threat to the wellbeing of empire. These peoples are still seen as “civilizations’—they are not property or “disappeared”—however, they will always be imaged as permanent foreign threats to empire. This logic is evident in the anti-immigration movements within the United States that target immigrants of color. It does not matter how long immigrants of color reside in the United States, they generally become targeted as foreign threats, particularly during war time. Consequently, Orientalism serves as the anchor for war, because it allows the United States to justify being in a constant state of war to protect itself from its enemies. For example, the United States feels entitled to use Orientalist logic to justify racial profiling of Arab Americans so that it can be strong enough to fight the “war on terror.” Orientalism also allows the United States to defend the logics of slavery and genocide, as these practices enable the United States to stay “strong enough” to fight these constant wars. ... For the system of white supremacy to stay in place, the United States must always be at war. Because we are situated within different logics of white supremacy, we may misunderstand a racial dynamic if we simplistically try to explain one logic of white supremacy with another logic. For instance, think about the first scenario that opens this essay: if we simply dismiss Latino/as or Arab peoples as “white,” we fail to understand how a racial logic of Orientalism is in operation. . . . Latino/as and Arabs are often situated in a racial hierarchy that privileges them over Black people. However, while Orientalist logic may bestow them some racial privilege, they are still cast as inferior yet threatening “civilizations” in the United States. Their privilege is not a signal that they will be assimilated, but that they will be marked as perpetual foreign threats to the US world order.

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ORGANIZING IMPLICATIONS

Under the old but still potent and dominant model, people of color organizing was based

on the notion of organizing around shared victimhood. In this model, however, we see that we are victims of white supremacy, but complicit in it as well. Our survival strategies and resistance to white supremacy are set by the system of white supremacy itself. What keeps

us trapped within our particular pillars of white supremacy is that we are seduced with

the prospect of being able to participate in the other pillars. For example, all non-Native peoples are promised the ability to join in the colonial project of settling indigenous lands. All non-Black peoples are promised that if they comply, they will not be at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. And Black, Native, Latino, and Asian peoples are promised that they will economically and politically advance if they join US wars to spread “democracy.” Thus, people of color organizing must be premised on making strategic alliances with each other, based on where we are situated within the larger political economy... . [Flor example, Native peoples who are organizing against the colonial and genocidal practices committed by the US government will be more effective in their struggle if they also organize against US militarism, particularly the military recruitment of indigenous peoples to support US imperial wars. If we try to end US colonial practices at home, but support US empire by joining the military, we are strengthening the state’s ability to carry out genocidal policies against people of color here and all over the world. ... These approaches might help us to develop resistance strategies that do not inadvertently keep the system in place for all of us, and keep all of us accountable. In all of these cases, we would check our aspirations against the aspirations of other communities to ensure that our model of liberation does not become the model of oppression for others. These practices require us to be more vigilant in how we may have internalized some of these logics in our own organizing practice. For instance, much racial justice organizing within the United States has rested on a civil rights framework that fights for equality under the law. An assumption behind this organizing is that the United States is a democracy with some flaws, but is otherwise admirable. Despite the fact that it rendered slaves three-fifths of a person, the US Constitution is presented as the model document from which to build a flourishing democracy. However, as Luana Ross notes, it has never been against US law to commit genocide against indigenous peoples—in fact, genocide is the law of the country. The United States could not exist without it. In the United States, democracy is actually the alibi for genocide—it is the practice that covers up United States colonial control over indigenous lands. Our organizing can also reflect anti-Black racism. Recently, with the outgrowth of “multiculturalism” there have been calls to “go beyond the black/white binary” and include other communities of color in our analysis, as presented in the third scenario. There are a number of flaws with this analysis. First, it replaces an analysis of white supremacy with a politics of multicultural representation; if we just include more people, then our practice will be less racist. Not true. This model does not address the nuanced structure of white supremacy, such as through these distinct logics of slavery, genocide, and Orientalism. Second, it obscures the centrality of the slavery logic in the system of white supremacy, which is based on a black/white binary. The black/white binary is not the only binary which characterizes white supremacy, but it is still a central one that we cannot “go beyond” in our racial justice organizing efforts. If we do not look at how the logic of slaveability inflects our society and our thinking, it will be evident in our work as well. For example, other communities of color often appropriate the cultural work and organizing strategies of African American civil rights or Black Power movements without corresponding assumptions that we should also be in

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solidarity with Black communities. We assume that this work is the common “property” of all oppressed groups, and we can appropriate it without being accountable.

_.. Simply saying we need to move beyond the black/white binary (or perhaps, the “black/non-black” binary) in US racism obfuscates the racializing logic of slavery, and prevents us from seeing that this binary constitutes Blackness as the bottom of a color hierarchy. However, this is not the only binary that fundamentally constitutes white supremacy. There is also an indigenous/settler binary, where Native genocide is central to the logic of white supremacy and other non-indigenous people of also form “a ientalist logic that menta pate rs jr role. ' Asians, Arabs, and Latino/as as foreign threats, requiring

construction, Black ei Native peoples ie sis thesepeoples,In permanent warwith Or’ an

Clearly the black/white binary is central to racial and political thought and practice in the United States, and any understanding of white supremacy must take it into consideration. However, if we look at only this binary, we may misread the dynamics of white supremacy in different contexts... . [C]ritical race theorist Cheryl Harris’s analysis of whiteness as property reveals this weakness. In Critical Race Theory, Harris contends that whites have a property interest in the preservation of whiteness, and seek to deprive those who are “tainted” by Black or Indian blood from these same white property interests. Harris simply assumes that the positions of African Americans and American Indians are the same, failing to consider US policies of forced assimilation and forced whiteness on American Indians. These policies have become so entrenched that when Native peoples make political claims, they have been accused of being white. When Andrew Jackson removed the Cherokee along the Trail of Tears, he argued that those who did not want removal were really white. In contemporary times, when I was a non-violent witness for the Chippewa spearfishers in the late 1980s, one of the more frequent slurs whites hurled when the Chippewa attempted to exercise their treaty-protected right to fish was that they had white parents, or they were really white. Status differences between Blacks and Natives are informed by the different economic positions African Americans and American Indians have in US society. African Americans have been traditionally valued for their labor, hence it is in the interest of the dominant society to have as many people marked “Black,” as possible, thereby maintaining a cheap labor pool; by contrast, American Indians have been valued for the land base they occupy, so it is in the interest of dominant society to have as few people marked “Indian” as possible, facilitating access to Native lands. “Whiteness” operates differently under a logic of genocide than it does from a logic of slavery. Another failure of US-based people of color in organizingis that we often fali back ona “US-centricism,” believing that what is happening “over there” is less important than what is happening here. We fail to see how the United States maintains the system of oppression here precisely by tying our allegiances to the interests of US empire “over there.”

HETEROPATRIARCHY AND WHITE SUPREMACY Heteropatriarchy is the building block of US empire. In fact, it is the building block of the nation-state form of governance. ... Christian Right activist and founder of Prison Fellowship Charles Colson makes the connection between homosexuality and the nationstate in his analysis of the war on terror, explaining that one of the causes of terrorism is same-sex marriage:

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Marriage is the traditional building block of human society, intended both to unite couples and bring children into the world ... There is a natural moral order for the family ... the family, led by a married crore and father, is the best available structure for both child-rearing and cultural health. Marriage is not a private institution designed solely for the individual gratification of its participants. If we fail to enact a Federal Marriage Amendment, we can expect not just more family breakdown, but also more criminals behind bars and more chaos in our streets. Colson is linking the well-being of US empire to the well-being of the heteropatriarchal family. He continues:

When radical Islamists see American women abusing Muslim men, as they did in the Abu Ghraib prison, and when they see news coverage of same-sex couples being “married” in US towns, we s ki abhorrent—t d they see as a blot on Allah’s creation. We must preserve traditional mari binadt oyos eed

United States

from those who would use our ee: to ee us. oer

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As Ann Burlein argues in Lift High the Cross, it may be a mistake to argue that the goal of Christian Right politics is to create a theocracy in the United States. Rather, Christian Right politics work through the private family (which is coded as white, patriarchal, and middle class) to create a “Christian America.” She notes that the investment in the private family makes it difficult for people to invest in more public forms of social connection. In addition, investment in the suburban private family serves to mask the public disinvestment in urban areas that makes the suburban lifestyle possible. The social decay in urban areas that results from this disinvestment is then construed as the result of deviance from the Christian family ideal rather than as the result of political and economic forces. As former head of the Christian Coalition, Ralph Reed, states: “The only true solution to crime is to restore the family” (Reed, 1990)... . As I have argued elsewhere, in order to colonize peoples whose societies are not based on social hierarchy, colonizers must first naturalize hierarchy through instituting patriarchy. In turn, patriarchy rests on a gender binary system in which only two genders exist, one dominating the other. . . . Just as the patriarchs rule the family, the elites of the nation-state rule their citizens. Any liberation struggle that does not challenge heteronormativity cannot substantially challenge colonialism or white supremacy. . . . [S]uch struggles will maintain colonialism based ona politics of secondary marginalization where the most elite class of these groups will further their aspirations on the backs of those most marginalized within the community. . . . [NJational liberation politics become less vulnerable to being coopted by the Right when we base them on a model of liberation that fundamentally challenges right-wing conceptions of the nation. We need a model based on community relationships and on mutual respect.

CONCLUSION Women of color-centered organizing points to the centrality of gender politics within antiracist, anticolonial struggles. Unfortunately, in our efforts to organize against white, Christian America, racial justice struggles often articulate an equally heteropatriarchal racial nationalism. This model of organizing either hopes to assimilate into white America, or to replicate it within an equally hierarchical and oppressive racial nationalism in which the elites of the community rule everyone else. Such struggles often call on the importance of preserving the “Black family” or the “Native family” as

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the bulwark of this nationalist project, the family being conceived of in capitalist and,

heteropatriarchal terms. The response 1

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La conciencia de la mestiza Towards a New Consciousness Gloria Anzaldua Por la mujer de mi raza bablara el espiritu.

José Vasconcelos, Mexican philosopher, envisaged una raza mestiza, una mezcla de razas afines, una raza de color—la primera raza sintesis del globo. He called it a cosmic race, la raza césmica, a fifth race embracing the four major races of the world. Opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy of racial purity that white America practices, his theory is one of inclusivity. At the confluence of two or more genetic streams, with chromosomes constantly “crossing over,” this mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool. From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization, an “alien” consciousness is presently in the making—a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It is a consciousness of the Borderlands.

UNA LUCHA DE FRONTERAS/A STRUGGLE OF BORDERS Because I, a mestiza,

continually walk out of one culture and into another, because I am in all cultures at the same time, alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro, me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio. Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan simultdneamente.

The ambivalence from the clash of voices results in mental and emotional states of perplexity. Internal strife results in insecurity and indecisiveness. The mestiza’s dual or multiple personality is plagued by psychic restlessness.

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In a constant state of mental nepantilism, an Aztec word meaning torn between ways, la mestiza is a product of the transfer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group to another. Being tricultural, monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual, speaking a patois, and in a state of perpetual transition, the mestiza faces the dilemma of the mixed breed: which collectivity does the daughter of a darkskinned mother listen to? El choque de un alma atrapado entre el mundo del espiritu y el mundo de la técnica a veces la deja entullada. Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems, la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war. Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision. Within us and within la cultura chicana, commonly held beliefs of the white culture attack commonly held beliefs of the Mexican culture, and both attack commonly held beliefs of the indigenous culture. Subconsciously, we see an attack on ourselves and our beliefs as a threat and we attempt to block with a counterstance. But it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence. The counterstance refutes the dominant culture’s views and beliefs, and, for this, it is proudly defiant. All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against. Because the counterstance stems from a problem with authority—outer as well as inner—it’s a step towards liberation from cultural domination. But it is not a way of life. At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. Or perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off altogether as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

A TOLERANCE FOR AMBIGUITY These numerous possibilities leave Ja mestiza floundering in uncharted seas. In perceiving conflicting information and points of view, she is subjected to a swamping of her psychological borders. She has discovered that she can’t hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries. The borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death. Only by remaining flexible is she able to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically. La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes. The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else.

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She can be jarred out of ambivalence by an intense, and often painful, emotional event which inverts or resolves the ambivalence. I’m not sure exactly how. The work takes place underground—subconsciously. It is work that the soul performs. That focal point or fulcrum, that juncture where the mestiza stands, is where phenomena tend to collide. It is where the possibility of uniting all that is separate occurs. This assembly is not one where severed or separated pieces merely come together. Nor is it a balancing of opposing powers. In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a new consciousness—a mestiza consciousness—and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm. En unas pocas centurias, the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By creating a new mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave—la mestiza creates a new consciousness. The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The ans er to the problem between the white race and the colored, the split that originates in the very foundation between males and females, lies in healing our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic of thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.

LA ENCRUCIJADA/THE CROSSROADS A chicken is being sacrificed ~ ata crossroads, a simple mound of earth ;a mud shrine for Eshu, Yoruba god of indeterminacy, who blesses her choice of path. She begins her journey. ) Su cuerpo es una bocacalle. La mestiza has gone from being the sacrificial goat to becoming the officiating priestess at the crossroads. As a mestiza | have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because | am every woman’s sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but [ am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.) | am cultureless because, as a feminist, | challenge the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet. Soy un amasamiento, | am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings. We are the people who leap in the dark, we are the people on the knees of the gods. In our very flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures. It makes us crazy constantly, but if the center holds, we’ve made some kind of evolutionary step forward. Nuestra alma el trabajo, the opus, the great alchemical work; spiritual mestizaje, a “morphogenesis,” an inevitable unfolding. We have become the quickening serpent movement.

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Indigenous like corn, like corn, the mestiza is a product of crossbreeding, designed for preservation under a variety of conditions. Like an ear of corn—a female seed-beari ng organ—the mestiza is tenacious, tightly wrapped in the husks of her culture. Like kernels

she clings to the cob; with thick stalks and strong brace roots, she holds tight to the earth— she will survive the crossroads.

Lavando y remojando el matz en agua de cal, despojando el pellejo. Moliendo, mixte-

ando, amasando, haciendo tortillas de masa. She steeps the corn in lime, it swells, softens.

With stone roller on metate, she grinds the corn, then grinds again. She kneads and moulds the dough, pats the round balls into tortillas. We are the porous rock in the stone metate squatting on the ground. We are the rolling pin, el maiz y agua, la masa harina. Somos el amasijo. Somos lo molido en el metate. We are the coma sizzling hot, the hot tortilla, the hungry mouth. We are the coarse rock. We are the grinding motion, the mixed potion, somos el molcajete. We are the pestle, the comino, ajo, pimienta, We are the chile colorado,

the green shoot that cracks the rock. We will abide.

SOMOS UNA GENTE Hay tantisimas fronteras que dividen a la gente, pero por cada frontera existe también un puente. Gina Valdés Divided Loyalties. Many women and men of color do not want to have any dealings with white people. It takes too much time and energy to explain to the downwardly mobile, white middle-class women that it’s okay for us to want to own “possessions,” never having had any nice furniture on our dirt floors or “luxuries” like washing machines. Many feel that whites should help their own people rid themselves of race hatred and fear first. I, for one, choose to use some of my energy to serve as mediator. I think we need to allow whites to be our allies. Through our literature, art, corridos, and folktales we

must share our history with them so when they set up committees to help Big Mountain Navajos or the Chicano farmworkers or los Nicaragtienses they won’t turn people away because of their racial fears and ignorances. They will come to see that they are not helping us but following our lead. Individually, but also as a racial entity, we need to voice our needs. We need to say to white society: We need you to accept the fact that Chicanos are different, to acknowledge your rejection and negation of us. We need you to own the fact that you looked upon

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| RACISM We us as less than human, that you stole our lands, our personhood, our self-respect. of sense need you to make public restitution: to say that, to compensate for your Own experience defectiveness, you strive for power over us, you erase our history and our because it makes you feel guilty—you’d rather forget your brutish acts. To say you’ve split yourself from minority groups, that you disown us, that your dual consciousness splits off parts of yourself, transferring the “negative” parts onto us. (Where there is persecution of minorities, there is shadow projection. Where there is violence and war, there is repression of shadow.) To say that you are afraid of us, that to put distance between us, you wear

the mask of contempt. Admit that Mexico is your double, that she exists in the shadow of this country, that we are irrevocably tied to her. Gringo, accept the doppelganger in your psyche. By taking back your collective shadow the intra-cultural split will heal. And finally, tell us what you need from us.

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Patrolling Racial Borders Discrimination Against Mixed Race People Heather Dalmage “Is she part Black?” asked the imposing woman ahead of us in line at the Dollar Store. “Yes,” I responded, not wanting to continue this conversation in an impersonal and public arena in front of my two-year-old daughter for whom the word race still meant, “last one to the porch is a rotten egg.” Raising her voice, the Black woman bent down toward my daughter’s face and proclaimed, “We call that mulatto. Yes, indeed, you’re a mulatto.”

I felt strongly compelled to respond but was uncertain which piece should be addressed and how. Should I have begun to talk with this woman about the ugly origins of the term mulatto? Should I have addressed the dehumanizing and degrading aspects of categorizing other people (especially children)? I knew I was not going to let someone else impose the context of a race debate in front of my two-year-old. I left the store. While such intrusions are not uncommon, more often they remain in the realm of the silent stare. A multiracial woman once said to me that being stared at was such a part of her existence that when it came time for her to perform in front of an audience she was very comfortable. Historically, in academic research and beyond, much emphasis has been placed on the ways multiracial people adjust to race in society. The assumption underlying much of the analysis is that race is a concrete, objective, and static phenomenon. | propose that if we want to more fully understand multiracial experiences we need to “flip the script” and analyze why racial categories have been created in particular ways and why people who identify themselves with a single racial category feel the need and right to intrude upon, pass judgement on, and discriminate against multiracial people and their families.

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GROUP BOUNDARIES AND DISCRIMINATION Race thinking developed in the U.S. around and through questions of citizenship and

resource distribu Thetion. history of U.S. immigration and citizenship reflects a system

_ deeply embedded in the protection of White privilege and the denial of rights to people of color. ¢ ization, slavery, genocide of indigenous people, the Chinese Immigration xclusion Acts of the 1800s, the Bracero Program, internment camps, Jim Crow laws, and numerous other legally sanctioned forms of discrimination have been used to define and defend Whiteness by creating clear distinctions between White people and all others. When the distinctions seemed threatened, anti-miscegenation laws—those that denied people the right to marry across race lines—were enforced through penalties that included imprisonment, enslavement, and death. The primary threat was not the marriage itself but rather the fact that in the U.S. marriage legitimizes the offspring. If multiracial children were deemed legitimate, then all laws based on the separation of “the races” would be delegitimized. After three centuries of anti-miscegenation laws, in 1967, buttressed by the strength of the Civil Rights Movement, the Supreme Court ruled that interracial marriages must be recognized in every state. Unfortunately, multiracial families still face discrimination, and the children of these marriages are still expected to claim only one race. While the Civil Rights Movement paved the way for the legal acceptance of multiracial families, it also created a new set of struggles for these families. The Civil Rights Movement included various groups struggling for liberation and self-definition such as the Young Lords, the Chicano Movement, the Black Power Movement, the Asian American Movement, and the American Indian Movement. Through these struggles, groups of color that had previously been on the defensive against White supremacist abuses began to define themselves for themselves. This meant that the distinction between insider and outsider was defined from within each of these groups rather than predominantly imposed from the outside by Whites. However, the way lines were drawn caused many problems for those who found themselves on the borders of racial groups, particularly those who were racially mixed. Moreover, the struggle for civil rights led to the passing of legislation meant to address and redress racism. The government needed a way to track compliance and by 1977 had agreed on four discrete racial categories; every U.S. citizen was required to check one. The census became a vehicle for protecting people of color against White supremacist abuse, and it strengthened the distinctions between racial categories. As a result, multiracial people, already discriminated against in a White supremacist society, became more susceptible to discrimination from all sides. How “sides” are defined is a matter of history. Those people with whom we identify most closely, those with whom we share a history, a collective memory, and a collective way of knowing are generally considered our in-group, our side. For instance, a quick trip to the Gaza Strip makes the point clear. Stone-throwing Palestinians do not have a natural or inherent disdain for the Jews at whom they throw the stones. Likewise the tank-driving Israelis are not genetically driven to violence toward Palestinians. This particular conflict is driven by historical circumstances in which children are raised and through which they understand themselves and their world. The collective memories on each side are used to define the boundaries of in-groups. Often, as is the case in the Middle East, in-group cohesion is strengthened through the hatred of an out-group, those against whom in-group members define themselves. Moreover, each side knows itself in the negation of the other; for it is at the boundaries that identities are framed. In such a construction, little room exists for someone to be both Palestinian and Israeli. The history of Whiteness and various forms of racism directed at groups of color has

meant that in the U.S. being a member of one race—or one side—has immediately placed

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| RACISM an individual as an out-group of the other. The greater the power imbalance between groups, the greater the emphasis on maintaining boundaries between sides. The boundaries are maintained on both the institutional and individual levels through various forms of discrimination. On an institutional level, discrimination occurs as an outcome of laws and eee of color are denied equal access the way society functions. For example, i to education as a result of years of housing discrimination in a society in which a large | portion of school funding is tied to property values through taxes. The segregated housing market ensures that children of color, particularly African Americans and Latinos, are disproportionately-receiving an an inferior education relative ive to White children. sTicchiniaation and racism also play out between individuals. For instance, one student refuses to speak

to another because she sat at the wrong lunchroom table. In this case, the discriminatory act is clear; the individual discriminator can be identified. Given that institutional mechanisms, from the housing market to the census, have functioned to keep lines between racial and ethnic groups clear and defined, multiracial children are facing unending demands to choose a side and stake a claim. In other words, demands are made that they adhere to the larger rules of race that guide U.S. racial thinking. On all sides, border patrollers, or the race police, believe the color line is static and immutable, and thus they think they can distinguish between “us” and “them.” Border patrollers claim that race is a simple concept, demand that others comply, and make their presence felt through various actions. The most common action, by far, is the stare. Other forms of border patrolling include probing and inappropriate questions. “What are you?” is one of the most common questions Teeny RIE eeoolee Moe times, however, people will not ask: instead they will begin to label a multiracial person. A friend of mine once told me that cab drivers assume she is whatever they are. Because border patrollers think they can determine “authentic” behaviors they also think they have the right to grant or withhold acceptance. Even when acceptance is not granted, individuals are expected to act in ways deemed appropriate; to do otherwise will provoke further patrolling. All racial groups patrol the borders; thus, in addition to facing White racist abuse, multiracial people also face discrimination from their communities of color. Here I identify five broad areas of everyday life in which multiracial children are patrolled and face discrimination and demands to comply with existing racial rules. 1.

PATROLLING OF THE CHILD’S PHYSICALITY

All children tend to be conscious of appearance; however, not all children have to give

conscious thought to the racial implications of their choice of hairstyle, make-up, weight and body shape, clothes, shoes, bags, and hats. Multiracial children do—they must because border patrollers on each side are watching and commenting. This form of discrimination can be very hurtful to multiracial children who must expend an inordinate amount of energy negotiating their appearance. For example, a Black-White multiracial woman I interviewed spoke of the devastation she felt as a child because her White mother did not learn to do “Black hair.” As a result she faced relentless teasing from Black girls at school. Unfortunately, many parents, particularly White parents, do not understand the importance of hair and other physical markers to their child’s ability to negotiate racial borders. Le

PATROLLING LINGUISTICS

Individuals who think that they can tell who is an “authentic” member of their race and who is not often listen intently to the use of language. Multiracial children are patrolled for

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their ability to “speak the language.” For instance, a young multiracial student was granted acceptance by his Black peers only after he proved that he could play the dozens (or snaps,

e.g., “Yo mama is so big . . .”). Once he could show that he understood the nuances of the language as it defines racial groups, then he was more accepted. Multiracial children are often bilingual; that is, they have the ability to comfortably converse as an insider with more than one racial group. Unfortunately, multiracial children who engage in bilingual practices are criticized _as being wishy-washy and fake. Parents and teachers sometimes reinforce this idea by advising the chi “ * thus implying that strong, certain, and clear-headed people speak only one way regardless of audience. In short, the message is that bilingualism is not acceptable and the child should choose a side. Such advice can be hurtful to a multiracial child for whom theability to switch gears may be part of being her or himself.

3.

PATROLLING INTERACTION WITH MEMBERS OF THE OUT-GROUP

Here the border patrollers demand a denial of all connections to, or affections for, the racial out-group. While this most often occurs around the issue of dating and friendship circles, multiracial children are even pressured, at times, to deny their parents and relatives. Most multiracial children have been in conversations in which White people are portrayed as universally evil. In these instances, if the child says, “But my father and my grandparents are White, and they are not evil,” her loyalties will be called into question; she risks becoming an outsider. Moreover, multiracial children who appear White are assumed by Whites to be an insider and are often subjected to White racist conversation. Multiracial children who speak out in these situations sometimes face the racist compliment, “Oh, we don’t think of you as Puerto Rican, you’re different, we think of you as White.” In this case, the child is devalued, and those Whites giving the “compliment” assume White to be something highly valued and that they have the right to bestow an identity on another human being. The children expend much energy deciding how to respond to the patrolling and discrimination.

4.

PATROLLING GEOGRAPHIES

Here, I am using geographies to address the physical spaces individuals occupy in their lives. Because of the segregation in society, racial groups are often geographically defined. Children have little control over where they live, and yet they are held responsible by border patrollers for a street address that might place them on the wrong side of the race line. In addition, other geographies are patrolled including what school a child attends, choice of classes, choice of lunchroom table, and how leisure time is spent. Multiracial children who might be comfortable sitting at several different (and racially defined) lunchroom tables may be reprimanded, “You are either one of us or you are not, you need to decide.” A multiracial woman who attended high school in Manhattan recalled that White, Black, Latino, and Asian students each exited the school from different doors. Each day she left the school she was made aware that her choice of exit was being noted by others. In short, because all social spaces are raced, the spaces multiracial children occupy throughout the day carry messages to others about the child’s loyalty to a particular side. 2.

PATROLLING OF CULTURAL CAPITAL

Cultural capital is the resources individuals can draw upon to give them status and credibility in society. Given racial divisions in society, cultural capital is used by all sides to determine who is a loyal and credible insider. The cultural capital important among children as they become aware of racial categories includes taste in music, television programs, sports, and magazines. A multiracial man who grew up in the Bronx reported that in high

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school he loved the music of Barry Manilow but that he always hid the tapes and listened to that music when he was alone. His enjoyment of that music marked him “too White,” and his Latino friends would have shunned him. Another Black-White multiracial young man remembered the difficulty he had with his Black friends when he joined the high school hockey team. He was given the label “White boy” for playing. All children face patrolling; however, multiracial children face racial border patrolling in addition to the usual demands children place on each other for conformity. Some children are given (or assigned to) one racial group by parents and teachers and expected to comply. Unfortunately, too often parents and teachers dismiss border patrolling by invoking “colorblind” language. The children are told to avoid labeling themselves and that they are part of the human race. In many cases, however, teachers and some parents just ignore race altogether. In the silence, the children are left to fend for themselves. Fortunately, most multiracial children do successfully negotiate border patrolling; however, if parents and teachers were more aware of the unique forms of discrimination these children face, they might be able to reduce the burden. While all sides patrol and police the boundaries of their racial communities, the reason for and consequence of the patrolling vary. Everyone who has learned about race, U.S. style, looks for clues about how to racially categorize others. Some White people need to take this step before they feel comfortable interacting with new people. They may sense that the color line is shifting and fear losing their racial status. Thus, until they can categorize others, they feel vague and uneasy about their own racial status and identity. For people of color, the desire to make distinctions may concern a quest for allegiance and unity, a means to determine who is “us” and who is “them” politically, socially, and culturally. Individuals who comfortably claim one racial identity or think that race is something that can be observed or uncovered with enough clues may feel confusion, anger, skepticism, concern, pity, hostility, curiosity, or superiority when they meet someone who does not seem to fit neatly into a preset racial category. These feelings play out through the course of interaction, and a multiracial person, regardless of how he or she identifies, must contend with the response of these individuals. For instance, Kimberly, a multiracial woman living in Manhattan, grew up being chastised by her parents and grandparents for not speaking “proper” English; in school Kimberly was taunted by Black students who insisted that she was trying to be White. As a person with racially ambiguous features, she receives many comments and stares from strangers. She is tired of hearing the same questions and comments and has also grown tired of defending herself:

People come up to me and they’ll say, “Do you get confused between being Black and White?” I say, “Well, yeah, you know, some mornings I wake up with this craving for fried chicken, and other mornings I just can’t get the beat, I start dancing and can’t get the beat.” I want them to see how narrow-minded they’re being. What do you think? One day I like fried chicken and the next I don’t? It’s not like that.

Kimberly points to the thinking that underlies the unique discrimination faced by multiracial people. If it is believed that race is inherent to an individual and that race is a way to group people into discrete categories, then it stands to reason that multiracial people must have separate races compartmentalized within them. Depending on the mix, multiracial people are assumed to have a genetically programmed way of being that can cause, at the extreme, an “internal war.” Responding to people the way she does, Kimberly externalizes the problem of race and, at the same time, gives others the opportunity to think about race in a more sophisticated manner. Given the history of race politics in the U.S., multiracial people have been largely ignored and more generally subsumed under communities of color for statistical and research

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purposes. Thus, until recently, multiracial people have not had a collective voice and have had to negotiate border patrolling individually. The explosion of writings since the early 1990s has begun the process of documenting and creating a voice for multiracial people and

their families. While multiracial children have many more resources available today than they did a generation ago, they still face a society that assumes and demands that people comply with racial codes of conduct—codes that have historically denied the existence of multiracial people.

CONCLUSION In this chapter I have addressed a brief history of and social context for the discrimination faced by multiracial people in the United States. I have identified those who discriminate against multiracial people as “border patrollers.” While the majority of this chapter addresses the individual outcomes of this discrimination, it is important to note that institutional forms of discrimination against multiracials maintain the framework in which border patrolling takes place. For instance, in the United States we have a segregated housing market and thus segregated schools. Stable, racially-mixed areas are few and far between. Thus, multiracial children often find themselves in situations in which they are the “only one” or one of a few. If their families live in predominantly White areas, then they will be the child of color in a White environment. If they are in an area that is predominantly of color, depending upon their own background and the background of the neighborhood, they will be labeled as different. Patrolling takes place on an individual level, the level of daily experience, the level that children are most likely to name and articulate. However, the fact is that border patrolling is the outcome of a larger system of racial injustice and segregation. Parents and teachers should be aware of the unique forms of discrimination faced by multiracial children and the White supremacist system in which that discrimination flourishes.

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at ae cao Selected Reports

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National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights INJUSTICE FOR ALL: THE RISE OF THE U.S. IMMIGRATION POLICING REGIME) HURRICANE?’s 2009-2010 report, Injustice for All: The Rise of the Immigration Policing Regime, finds that the U.S. government has put into place a brutal system of immigration control and policing that criminalizes immigration status, normalizes the forcible separation of families, destabilizes communities and workplaces, and fuels widespread civil rights violations. This “immigration control policing regime” is also contributing to and

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| RACISM tolerating an upsurge in racial discrimination and hate violence against immigrants and born or “illegal.” those perceived _to be foreign

Based on over 100 stories of abuse reported, collected and documented by volunteers,

staff and members of NNIRR’s initiative, HURRICANE: The Human Rights Immigrant Community Action Network, Injustice for All shows how a new dimension of immigration control, ICE-police collaboration and border security, are hurting communities from the rural areas of New Mexico and North Carolina to New York City and the suburbs of Chicago. Over the last ten years, the U.S. has built a policing regime that uses immigration status to segregate people, thereby scapegoating people of color in a new way for the worsening fiscal crisis. Public officials and corporations collaborate to cut and/or privatize public services, including using for-profit private prisons to incarcerate people for immigration charges, destroying civil and labor rights. Immigration status is also being used to deny Indigenous people their right to identity, land and community. The results are ominous. Congress and the Obama Administration have institutionalized this immigration policing, intensifying criminalization through immigration-police collaboration and other policies and programs. The U.S. has expanded workplace immigration policing, enhancing employer sanctions-through the E-verify program to detect and force “unauthorized” workers out of certain kinds of work. In fiscal year 2010, ICE reported more than 2,200 audits, up from 1,400 in 2009, issuing 240 fines totaling $6.9 million, up from 52 fines totaling about $1 million in 2009. And the prospects that Congress or the Obama Administration will reverse policies or restrain policing are unlikely, as dozens of states, local, and county governments and federal agencies are considering similar policies and legislation, egged on by a reactionary nativist movement. Since 2000, some 107 towns, cities and counties have passed anti-immigrant ordinances affecting access to services, housing and employment. THE RISE OF AN IMMIGRATION POLICING REGIME

In 2003, the majority of U.S. immigration service and policing responsibilities were transferred from the former Immigration and Naturalization Service to the then newly-formed Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks, the U.S. created the DHS as an umbrella agency that directly incorporated immigration affairs with national security policies. DHS also launched Operation Endgame, a 10-year strategic detention and deportation plan designed to build the capacity to “remove all removable aliens.” (11.1 million undocumented immigrants are currently estimated to reside in the United States.) Operation Endgame represents a significant turning point in U.S. immigration policy. Endgame has built a new “immigration policing regime” that attempts to connect the dots between disparate issues—including immigration, citizenship, the “war on terror,” border control, national security, crime, law enforcement, and the economy—all under the guise of “protecting the homeland.” This approach to immigration control and enforcement consists of four pillars:

Relentless criminalization of immigration status and the use of incarceration through U.S. laws, policies, measures and practices—weakening and even eliminating constitutional rights, particularly due process rights, and labor protections for noncitizens. Persistent linking of immigration to the politics of national security and engaging in policing tactics that rely upon racial, ethnic/nationality and religious profiling.

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Escalating militarization of immigration control and border communities; reinforcing policies and strategies that deliberately “funnel” migrants, forcing them to cross through the most dangerous segments of the U.S.-Mexico border and compromise the rights and safety of border residents. Scapegoating immigrants for the economic crisis and leveraging anti-immigrant sentiment to push federal, state, county and local laws and policies that cut and/or eliminate public services, and roll back civil rights, environmental, labor and other social protections. These policies contribute to corporate profit-making and are integral to “free” trade and other economic development programs that displace communities and force individuals around the world into involuntary migration. In reports from California, Arizona, New Mexico, Illinois, North Carolina, and New

York, different forms of immigration-police collaboration are impacting communities, youth, women, workers, Indigenous people and people of color. Immigration policing is taking different forms along the border (local police and the Border Patrol, for example) than in the interior (driver’s license and DUI checkpoints) but the impacts are just as devastating. Immigrationpelice-eottaboration-creates more problems in all communities:

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Police collusion with ICE undermines community safety. Residents will not report crimes and fires if they fear detection and deportation. Women are less likely to report domestic violence if they or their partners have immigration status. Batterers are also more likely to threaten their partners with turning them over to ICE to stop them from reporting an abusive relationship. Equally troubling, local law enforcement is not trained in immigration law and requires substantial amounts of time and money to reach a satisfactory level of expertise. As a result, local police departments, already strapped on resources and manpower, cut back other vital community services, affecting community safety. Police cooperation with ICE encourages racial profiling, already illegal, resulting in civil rights violations and abuses against immigrant and refugee communities. Even where police departments have worked to end racial profiling, such collaboration undermines the credibility of police departments to effectively serve all communities.

IMMIGRATION-POLICE COLLABORATION GOES VIRAL In the past year, dozens of states and other local and county governments have been spurred to create copycat Arizona-style laws. And there is an undeniable economic angle to such immigration policing. For example, Arizona’s SB1070 was developed by lawmakers in collaboration with corporations that build private jails to incarcerate immigrants; these companies stand to earn considerable profits from the growing trend of detaining immigrants for enforcement and deterrence. Indeed, some two-thirds of persons imprisoned for immigration charges are held in local jails. In southern California alone, DHS is set to pay almost $57 million to 13 jails. Other state and local governments are also looking at ways to use the “illegal immigration problem” as a means to solve their fiscal crises. From Virginia to Oregon and Pennsylvania, ICE offers governments immigration jails as a job creation and revenue source strategy. ICE has approached different localities to build and, in some cases, run public-private immigrant jails, where investors will reap millions in profits and governments will boost their revenues. Localities also fear losing an ICE detention center; Etowah

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| RACISM County in Alabama faces a ruinous fiscal crisis because ICE is planning to end its contract that pays the county $14,000 a day to jail immigrants. Additionally, SB1070 is costing Arizona huge losses in revenues.

RECORD YEAR OF REPRESSION

Fiscal year 2010 was a record year of repression: the U.S. government deported a total of 392,862 immigrant workers, students, women, and youth—many of whom were longtime residents of the United States. Beyond these individuals, untold numbers of family members were separated, children left hopeless, and neighborhoods and workplaces diminished by the absence of hardworking individuals who contributed significantly to the social, economic, and political fabric of our country.

2010 was also a record year for the detention of immigrants, subjected by ICE to inhumane treatment and conditions. Since 2003, at least 104 deaths have been documented of persons in ICE immigrant detention centers and jails. ICE has some 32,000 jail beds exclusively for persons charged with immigration violations or in deportation proceedings. The DHS runs or contracts with some 350 public and private jails and prisons across the country to detain immigrants who have been arrested for status violations and are awaiting deportation. Many of these facilities are located in

remote areas where there is little or no access to qualified, low-cost immigration legal service providers (there is no guaranteed right to counsel for immigrant detainees as in the criminal justice context). Moreover, the DHS frequently transfers immigrant detainees to new facilities without providing notice to their attorneys or family members. There is little accountability for guaranteeing a prison’s minimal conditions and basic human rights protections for detained immigrants, including access to medical treatment, recreation, and the freedom to worship. [he DHS also _uses- semi-s¢ secret court proceedings to judge, try, and summarily deport immigrants aécused of minor immigration offenses, in gross violation of constitutional rights and due S Women, who make up over half ofall migrants to the United States, have been particularly impacted by the new immigration policing regime. HURRICANE’S database is filled with documentation of abuses committed against immigrant women. (In most instances, women are HURRICANE’S principal monitors and reporters of rights abuses.) In addition to the rights violations and abuses male migrants face, women in migration are subjected to sexual harassment, assault and rape during the arduous border-crossing journey, at work and in ICE detention. For example, ICE jailed over 10,000 immigrant women in 2008; after routine testing, 965 of the women

(nearly 10%), tested pregnant;

many of these women reported being raped during the border crossing. In deportation proceedings, ICE and the courts mete out severe punishment and treatment to women who are mothers and workers, especially, if they are undocumented and Indigenous. In some areas, various U.S. public agencies have taken away and placed into adoption the children of undocumented and Indigenous women. HURRICANE also received reports of immigration jail guards sexually assaulting women detained at the Hutto detention facility.

Another alarming example of impact of the current immigration policing regime is the growing human rights crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2010, a record number of migrants died in the border crossing: the remains of 253 migrants were recovered in the Arizona border alone. (See Coalicién de Derechos Humanos report in Injustice for All.)

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Human rights groups that work on the border to uphold the rights of migrants report that for every migrant dead recovered in the border at least ten others are believed to have disappeared. An average of two migrant deaths are recorded every day; border groups estimate that from 5,000 to 8,000 migrant deaths have occurred since this border control strategy was implemented in 1994. . 1

RECOMMENDATIONS The 2009-2010 HURRICANE report urges the U.S. government to undertake a major shift in immigration policies, to address the patterns of human and civil rights violations, harm and traumatization of immigrants and their communities, and to provide access to the adjustment of immigration status, a process long held at bay by a lack of political will and action at the federal level. Without such a shift, millions of men, women and children residing in this country will continue to face lives of fear, uncertainty and economic

insecurity. There are significant steps that the Obama Administration can authorize, including: * ¢ e e¢ e

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The restoration of due process rights and other Constitutional protections, including an expansion of access to the courts; The suspension of detentions and deportations, other enforcement operations and high profile raids; undertake a high-level investigation and hearings with impacted communities; An end to the policy and practice of jailing persons solely for immigration status offenses, except in cases where there is a high risk to public safety; The prohibition of ICE and local, county, state and federal law enforcement from using all forms of racial, ethnic/nationality and religious profiling; A thorough investigation of complaints of abuses in public and private corporate detention centers and jails housing immigrants; a moratorium on the expansion of detention centers and privately run prisons; An end to all inter-agency and immigration-police collaboration programs; Prohibit local, county, and state governments from legislating immigration enforcement, such as Arizona’s SB1070; The roll back and end to the militarization of immigration control and border communities; end Operation Stonegarden, a federal program for police collaboration with Border Patrol, and Operation Streamline that violates due process, making unauthorized entry a felony with automatic sentencing.

We are disturbed by the lack of congressional action to enact fair immigration policies, and we call on our elected officials in the House and Senate to: ¢

Hold field hearings with members of interior and border communities to document the impacts and abuses caused by U.S. immigration enforcement and border security policies, measures and practices;

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Repeal employer sanctions and stop all E-Verify programs; protect and expand the labor rights of all workers, native and foreign-born; and increase Department of Labor inspectors; Repeal the 287(g), “Secure Communities” initiatives;

Provide and expand options to legal migration, including access to legal permanent residency and citizenship;

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Institute routine programs, including legalization, to adjust the immigration status and provide “green cards” to immigrants, to ensure civil and labor rights, keep families together and reinforce healthy communities.

Finally, we call upon the Administration and members of Congress:

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To address the root causes of displacement and involuntary migration, by promoting and implementing fair trade and sustainable community development policies; To help lead a nationwide condemnation of racial intolerance and xenophobia in keeping with our country’s legal and moral commitment to equality for all.

We further urge the United States to respect and uphold international human and labor rights standards, including the ratification and implementation of the U.N. International Convention for the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.

NEW AFRICANS IN OLD AMERICA

Nunu Kidane Following New York, California has the highest number of immigrants from Africa. Estimated conservatively at 145,453 (American Community Survey 2006-08), the African immigrant community is one of the most undercounted. PAN’s recent mobilization activities for the 2010 Census exposed the complexities involved in counting African community members that are unlike any other. African immigrants organize themselves largely along their national or ethnic identities (as opposed to the assumed continental “African”) and therefore remain in clusters of small groups, fragmented and excluded from traditional mainstream institutions. PAN estimates that the actual size of the African community is at least three times this number. After Los Angeles, the Bay Area in particular is home to a high number of African immigrants. A recent study had an estimate of African immigrants in the Bay Area at 2% of the population; no doubt this figure will increase significantly over the coming years. CLIMATE OF FEAR AND “TRIPLE JEOPARDY”

For the growing population of immigrants from Africa, the recent anti-immigrant raids and attacks have had unexpected impacts, both direct and indirect. Whether or not directly targeted by enforcement agencies, the climate of fear has permeated every association without exception. Prevailing assumptions about African immigrants is that they largely “blend” into existing African American communities and, on the basis of skin color at least, are less likely to be targeted by immigration law enforcement. This is considered, ironically, as one of the few instances where there’s a positive factor on being Black in America. The facts, however, are that African immigrants face the double threat of being Black and immigrant. They are twice as likely to be racially profiled, first on the basis of their skin color and additionally on their status as immigrants. Then, an added factor of “triple jeopardy” comes into play for the large numbers of African immigrants who are also Muslim.

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The recent immigration raids in homes and workplaces largely exposed in the Spanishspeaking and other Latin American-origin communities set off a wave of fear in the African immigrant community. Less known and less visible, the sense of fear that reverberated across African immigrant communities left them with no access to information or resources. Consequently, new Africans whose status may be questionable are less likely to be engaged in civic activism or join in community organizing for fear of “not returning home.” Individuals have expressed being paralyzed with the fear of being picked up by ICE while out on a casual errand, and separated from their children or families. RACIAL AND RELIGIOUS PROFILING Still, the most common experience of negative encounters with police is of African men who report being constantly stopped for “driving while Black.” Incidents of being stopped (usually for no reason or weak reasons) have been mentioned on more occasions than can be_counted. Many are professionals who work in corporate offices and commute long distances and are likely to experience this multiple times. This fits the standard practice of racial profiling commonly experienced by African American men. The new African immigrant, however, does not have the advantage of contextualizing the experience in the history of race and racism in this country. Many express a sense of feeling targeted, frustrated and at odds with what they consider to be violations of principles of fairness, which they expect from this country. Additionally, once police stop and question them, their foreign accents identify them as immigrants, leaving them vulnerable to detention if they are unable to prove their “legal” status. Other shared stories include Somali women in the Santa Clara County, where the largest concentration of Somali communities resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. Highly visible in their traditional veils, the women express a sense of fear in the way they are regarded daily. They are asked to present documents of their status when registering their children at schools or receiving treatments in hospital/clinic. Nunu Kidane is the coordinator for Priority Africa Network (PAN), an Africa-promoting/ African immigrant community mobilizing grassroots organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

SOUTH ASIAN WORKERS ORGANIZE FOR THEIR RIGHTS AGAINST ABUSIVE EMPLOYERS IN NEW YORK

Ayesha Mahmooda The South New York restaurant, end abuses

Asian community has the second largest number of undocumented people in City after Latinos. AtDRUM—Desis Rising Up & Moving, South Asian retail, construction, and domestic workers along with taxi drivers are organizing to they face every day and win better working conditions for all immigrant work-

ers... . The worker leaders build alliances with Latino worker centers, labor unions, the

NY State Department of Labor’s new Wage Watch program, and attorneys who file wage claims.

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| RACISM Through a series of meetings, surveys and community research, DRUM’S worker mem-

bers identified common issues in local industries and reported the following abuses: ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

Working long hours without overtime pay; Substandard iow wages, violating minimum wage protections; Employer mistreatment of workers, including unsafe worksite conditions, undermining their health and safety; and Employers and owners blacklisting workers who speak out in the industries.

FATIMA’S STORY

At an early morning DRUM Worker Committee meeting, a Bangladeshi retail store worker named Fatima (not her real name) spoke out about the exploitative conditions at the Jackson Heights clothing stores where she worked. She described how the bosses paid low wages or no back wages, made them work long hours, and harassed them constantly. The store owners instilled fear in the workers, making it hard for her and her co-workers to speak up who were afraid of losing their jobs. She spoke about how difficult it felt for her and her co-workers to stand up for their rights because they are undocumented women. One day in December 2009, Fatima’s boss ordered her to get supplies from his other store across the street. As he rushed her out the door, he began to yell at her to hurry up as she crossed the busy street. Scared and pressured, Fatima got hit by an oncoming car and was thrown 15 feet away. She lay on the cold sidewalk in severe pain, unable to move her shoulder. With the help of some bystanders, Fatima managed to walk back to her store to call 911 for an ambulance and to file a police report. But her boss immediately threatened her as well as ail her co-workers in the store, saying that if they called 911, he would get in trouble for having undocumented workers and they would get deported. He also threatened to fire anyone who tried to call 911. After some bystanders and customers persuaded the boss, he allowed Fatima to call a cab and go to the hospital. At the hospital, doctors told Fatima that she would need surgery to get her shoulder working properly again. Since Fatima had no insurance to pay for the surgery, the hospital advised her to file a police report against the driver and receive some money to pay for her medical expenses. The next day at work, Fatima’s employer threatened to fire her again if she reported the incident to police. She went to the local police station anyway; police told her she could not file a report without the license plate number of the vehicle that hit her, which she did not have. The following day she went to the police station again to ask for a report, but police again told her that they could not do anything without the license plate number. When she asked again if they could look at the security cameras near the area where she was hit, they rudely refused, telling her that she should go back to her country if she did not like it.

Later that same day, the boss fired Fatima. She was never able to file the police report and never received the surgery. Unfortunately, thousands of undocumented immigrant

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workers in Jackson Heights and New York City face similar abuses and exploitation by their employers coupled with active neglect by law enforcement who fail to protect their rights. Fatima became a leader and founding member of DRUM Workers’ Committee and has reached out to dozens of other workers in similar situations. . . .

FIRE AND ICE:THE RETURN OF WORKPLACE IMMIGRATION RAIDS At the end of February immigration agents descended on a handful of Japanese and Chinese restaurants in the suburbs of Jackson, Mississippi, and in nearby Meridian. Fiftyfive immigrant cooks, dishwashers, servers and bussers were loaded into vans and taken to a detention center about 160 miles away in Jena, Louisiana. Their arrests and subsequent treatment did more than provoke outrage among Jackson’s immigrant rights activists. Labor advocates in California also took note of the incident, fearing that it marked the beginning of a new wave of immigrant raids and enforcement actions in workplaces. In response, California legislators have written a bill providing legal protections for workers, to keep the Mississippi experience from being duplicated in the Golden State. Once the Mississippi restaurant workers had been arrested, they essentially fell off the radar screen for several days. Jackson lawyer Jeremy Litton, who represented three Guatemalan workers picked up in the raid, could not get the government to schedule hearing dates for them. He was unable to verify that the other detained immigrants were being held in the same center, or even who they were. The Geo Corporation, formerly known as the Wackenhut Corporation, operates the LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena. Geo’s roots go back to the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which became notorious in the nineteenth and first half of the 20th century for violent assaults on unions and strikers. Today Geo operates 16 immigrant detention centers around the country, according to its 2015 annual report. It runs privatized prisons as well, some of which have been investigated by the federal government after allegations of bad conditions and understaffing. The LaSalle facility has 1,160 beds. Litton says it is normally full, so taking in an additional 55 detainees would result in severe overcrowding. The use of Jena’s immigrant jail to hold workers detained in workplace raids has a bitter history in Mississippi. In 2008 481 workers were arrested at a Howard Industries electrical equipment factory, in Laurel, Mississippi, in the middle of union negotiations. They, too, were taken to the LaSalle detention center. There they were fed peanut butter sandwiches at mealtimes, and according to Patricia Ice, attorney for the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), “There weren’t even enough beds and people were sleeping on the floor.” Eight workers detained in that raid were charged with aggravated identity theft in federal court, for having given a false Social Security number to the employer when they were hired. “This latest raid is causing a lot of fear in our community,” says MIRA director Bill Chandler. “There’s fear everywhere now because of the threats from Trump, but here in Mississippi our history of racism makes fear even stronger.”

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| RACISM UNDOCUBLACK AND NILC SEEK TO UNCOVER THE TRUTH BEHIND TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TPS DECISION WASHINGTON --— Days before the Trump Administration announces whether it will re-authorize Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian migrants, civil rights and social justice leaders emphasized the importance of the program for Haitians in the United States and in Haiti, as well as for the national interests of both countries.

The call for reauthorization of TPS for Haitians comes after the Associated Press last week exposed leaked emails from high-ranking DHS officials requesting data on Haitian nationals’ use of public benefits and crime rates. Although DHS officials have denied any connection between these requests and the timing of their decision, the news sent shockwaves through the Haitian community. UndocuBlack and NILC filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the agencies involved in the adjudication process to uncover the administration’s decisionmaking. Those agencies are the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the DHS sub agencies U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

On a conference call with reporters Wednesday, representatives for the National Immigration Law Center, the UndocuBlack Network, the Black Alliance for Just

Immigration (BAJI), and the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) urged the administration to extend the program beyond its current July 22 expiration, noting that recovery efforts following the devastating 2010 earthquake and, more recently, Hurricane Matthew in 2016, have been uneven. Lys Isma, a student who works in a Biology Genetics lab at her University in Florida, described the consequences of the 2010 earthquake for her and her family and what could happen to them if TPS for Haiti is not renewed. Isma is a member of UndocuBlack who has lived in the United States since she was nine months old. “It shouldn’t be an easy decision to send somebody to the poorest country in this half of the world, where they don’t have any memories and where they can hardly speak the language,” Isma said. “Where you live should never determine if you live.” TPS gives individuals from designated countries temporary permission to live and work in the United States on humanitarian grounds if they are here at times of great natural disaster or civil strife in their home country. Thirteen countries, including Haiti, are currently designated for TPS. According to media reports, 58,000 Haitians stand to lose TPS and would be forced to return to their ravaged homeland if the designation is withdrawn. The Trump administration has until May 23, 2017, to announce its decision. Tia Oso, National Organizer at the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), said: “TPS for Haiti is a vital program, not just for the Haitian community, but for everyone that lives and works alongside them in Boston, Miami, Brooklyn and beyond. The Black Alliance for Just Immigration is calling on everyone to stand with the Haitian diaspora in the U.S. and fight for TPS, and condemn the Trump administration’s racist, xenophobic witch-hunt against Haitian TPS holders and other immigrants.” . . .

Alvaro Huerta, Staff Attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, said: “TPS has been an economic

lifeline to Haitians both here in the United States and

in Haiti. Haitian-Americans have built economic and social ties to this country, and they have friends and family here. These ties would be severed if these individuals

SELECTED REPORTS

lost TPS designation, and the economic ripple effects would extend far beyond TPS holders themselves. We are deeply concerned that the rules for TPS may be shifting for Haitians, and we want to know why.” Jonathan Jayes-Green, Network, said:

Co-Creator

and

National

Coordinator

of the Undocublack

“Renewing TPS is about maintaining the dignity of human lives and protecting their choice to migrate to avoid extreme circumstances in Haiti and live. We’ve seen the extraordinary measures and the discriminatory factors the administration is taking into consideration while weighing this decision. As Black immigrant communities, we are very aware of how agencies, organizations and institutions have sought to equate Blackness and poverty with criminality, and used that mantle to deny our communities of our human rights. That’s why today we took the unprecedented step of filing this FOIA Request, our first as an organization.”

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Finding My Eye-dentity Olivia Chung I watched the spoken-word group I Was Born With Two Tongues perform and was inspired by their style of reflecting on personal experiences. This piece flowed from my desire for selfexpression and hopes of challenging other Asian American girls to question their definition of beauty. I am a second-generation Korean American, born and raised in a loving family in Silver Spring, Maryland. Currently, I’m a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, pursuing interests in activism, writing, and hip-hop. My ultimate goal is to keep it real and selflessly live for the Lord. Olivia, you wanna get sang ka pul? I’m driving my mother to work, when she randomly brings up the eyelid question. The question that almost every Korean monoeyelidded girl has had to face in her life. The question that could change the future of my naturally noncreased eyelids, making them crease with the cut of a cosmetic surgeon’s knife. You know your aunt? She used to have beany eyes just like you! She used to put on white and black eyeliner every morning to make them look BIG. Then she went to Korea and got the surgery done. Now look! She looks so much better! Don’t you want it done? I would GO TE ax, I think this is about the 346,983,476th time she has brought this topic up. Using the exact same words. You would look so much more prettier with bigger eyes! she says. You know, because they look kind of squinty and on top of that you have an underbite, so you look really mean... She explains while narrowing her eyes and jutting out her jaw in emphasis of her point. A couple of years ago, I would have taken her suggestion seriously. I remember reading a section of Seventeen magazine, where the once-did-funky-makeup-for-100-anorexicwhite-girls-on-runways beauty expert revealed the secret to applying eye makeup. As a desperate preteen girl seeking beauty advice, I remember it perfectly. Put dark shadow right over the eyelashes, light powder all over, medium shadow over the edge of the crease of your eyelid. That’s where I always tripped up. Crease? Umm... excuse me? These so-called beauty experts never gave me enough expertise to figure out how to put makeup on my face without looking like a character in a kabuki play. I tried to follow the beauty experts’ advice. But I decided it wasn’t working when people asked me if I had gotten a black eye. My friends suggested training my eyelids to fold with tape. My mother did that and now she has a real crease, one of my friends told me. I, however, never learned the magic behind that, and always felt too embarrassed to ask. Another friend once excitedly showed me how she had bought a bottle of make-your-own-eye-crease glue from Korea. I let her try it on me too. I could barely open my eyes, thanks to the fierce stinging sensation resulting from the glue that got on my eyeball. And when I finally did take a quick glimpse of myself in the mirror, I saw a stranger with uneven eyelids. The first time I remember being insulted was when I was little. . . . In kindergarten, I believe. Oh, it was classic. A little blond kid pulled the edges of his

eyes out, yelling, Ching chong chinaman! 1, being new to this game, could only make a

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weak comeback. I’m not Chinese. .. . I’m KOREAN. I remember feeling a confused hurt, realizing that I looked different and not understanding why being different was bad. Couldn’t we all just get along? I had learned that God loves people as they are, as different as they are. I learned that He looks at the heart, and that it really doesn’t matter how a person looks. I think my belief in this, combined with my fear of a sharp object cutting the skin above my eye, kept me away from the sang ka pul surgery. Yet, I continued to receive comments on my “chinky” eyes, and I always emerged from these situations feeling confused and angry . . . without ever really knowing why. Why couldn’t I be accepted with my so-called chinky eyes? Why in the world were they even called “chinky” eyes? If they meant to insult Chinese, all the Chinese people I knew had huge eyes. With the crease. As I grew older, the childish “ching chong”s came with less frequency. Still, the magazines continue to give me unhelpful directions on how to apply makeup. Still, I witness my own friends getting the surgery done in an effort to be “more beautiful.” Still, my mother continuously confronts me with the dreaded eyelid question. You wanna get sang ka pul? I always answer her with an are-you-crazy? but simple no. All the things I wish I could have told her come flowing on this page with my pen... . Umma, my mother, don’t you see that my noncreased eyes are beautiful? Asian eyes are beautiful. Your eyes are beautiful. My eyes are beautiful. Asian is beautiful. After all these years of wanting to open up my eyes with tape and glue and surgery, I have opened up my eyes to a different definition of beauty. A broader definition of beauty, one that embraces differences and includes every girl, who can hold her head up, sang ka pul-less and chinkyeyed, because being Asian is beautiful.

18

eS (9 Identification Pleas Eric Gansworth

So it’s the summer of 2002,...in the town of Del Rio, Texas, perhaps one of the last places on earth I thought I would be engaged in an identity crisis....I am here with a friend, Donnie, who has a piece of land in this small border town. ...He asks me if I want to cross the border into Acufia, as it is right there. Though the temperature is over a hundred degrees, we walk across the bridge above the Rio Grande into Mexico. On the exact border, large metal pegs mar the full surface of the pavement, gleam in the heat, and announce the change of country in full-size versions of that dotted line one sees on maps. Here, trucks pull up, from the United States’ end of the bridge, and stop, right on the dotted line. Other trucks meet them on the Mexican side. The drivers descend from their cabs and carry large boxes from the cargo areas of the United States trucks to those of the Mexican trucks. The border guards sit disinterested, watch this transaction under the bright sun, so I take a cue from them that this activity is nothing worth noting, and move on. While it was an unpleasantly hot walk across, I see little justification for a bus to make the trip, and again Donnie clarifies that sometimes it is less of a hassle for Mexicans to cross the border if they use the bus instead of walking the bridge.

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| RACISM We leave Mexico a few minutes later, on the bridge’s north-bound sidewalk, again stepping on the hot metal pegs, delineating one place from another. Below us, the Rio Grande seems more like the Rio Average, a muddy stream surrounded by dense growth of cane, and above the sidewalk overlooking the river, heavy-gauge steel mesh curves inward on sturdy beams nearly encircling us overhead. This architectural feature is designed to dissuade jumpers from making the five-story leap into the river or thick brush below. Donnie mentions that people have made the attempt and that random surveillance cameras are mounted in the cane—all of this to keep people from entering the United States in inappropriate fashion. . . . We arrive at the [immigration] office and are both relieved that it is air-conditioned. Donnie shows his license to the officer, who waves him on, and I reach into my pocket, pull out my wallet, and wonder how many minutes it will take for Donnie’s truck cab to

cool down. Opening the fold, I am momentarily confused by the version of my face staring back at me from the plastic card in the easiest access slot. I am almost ten years younger, wearing enormous late-eighties glasses, my hair is long, wavy, and pulled back, and behind me the lush foliage of a reservation road fills the rest of the image. It is my tribal identification card, documenting my name, birth date, clan, tribe, reservation address, blood quantum, and the signature of the man on the reservation who officiates on such matters, next to my own signature. Mine is a little more complicated than some, but not unfathomably so. I am a member of the Onondaga Nation, .... The back of the card lists several agreements with the United States, asserting the sovereignty of the Haudenosaunee, the league of six nations to which both the Onondaga and Tuscarora nations belong, known in the United States as “the Iroquois.” The card itself is not confusing to me, of course, but it usually rests in my wallet behind a document I tend to need much more frequently: my driver’s license. My license is nowhere to be found within the wallet, and then I suddenly can see the card in my mind, can picture its exact location, and thus can confirm it is not on my body... . Since September 2001, . . . the most consistent change has been nearly relentless requests for my identification from airport personnel. To make things easier on myself and on those asking, I have gotten a “flight wallet” the size of an airline ticket, and in this I keep my boarding pass, frequent flyer card, and, yes, while I am traveling, my driver’s license. The flight wallet, at the moment I approach the immigration officer, sits approximately a hundred yards away, in Donnie’s truck, across the road, but more important, across the border. “Identification?” the officer asks, and J hand him my Native American Identification Card. He looks at it, tosses it down, and looks at me, smirking. “Now,” he says, ... . “Now,” he repeats, snapping the card on his desk this time, perhaps for emphasis, as if he had gotten an ace in a game of solitaire, “do you have any real ID?” I am what you might call ethnicaily ambiguous in appearance. Over the years the odd looks, vague frowns, and unasked questions have become the routine. It has been kind of interesting, existing as a walking, breathing Rorschach test for others’ perceptions and stereotype templates. pohereemyeerennicricensiemicelion ‘ane Middle E LaweliernRerssienr-POTmtt,

ino.

The

first time it happened was in a men’s room at a concert, when a drunken patron at the next urinal insisted I was a member of Los Lobos, the band whose set had finished about a half hour before. .. . The less glamorous mistake with my ethnicity happens nearly every time I am in the Southwest. This stands to reason, as Mexicans are Indians across the border, in essence, and we are the same in that we had very different, unique cultures before colonialism came along and divided us up with those stainless steel rivets in the bridge. I was born and raised on a reservation in western New York State, a small place, home to fewer than two thousand people. Many of those people claim full-blood status, though

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some are blond, some have blue eyes. ... My complexion is slightly dark, and deepens easily in the summer, so that by the end of June, even with minimal exposure, I usually sport what used to be called “a savage tan.” My eyes are dark brown as well, and my hair appears to be black most of the year, but by late summer dark red highlights have burned into it. My body also reveals other telltale signs that prevent me from claiming full-blood status. I have genetic qualities that allow me to grow a beard and a mustache, and I have

chosen to cultivate those traits. ... My hair was long a fair amount of my childhood and through adolescence—though not the long, straight Lakota hair all Indians are supposed to have. It seems many eastern

Indians have a rougher textured hair, and mine falls into this category. No matter how much I might brush my hair out every morning, invariably I looked less like any Indians in Edward Curtis photographs and more like Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead, .... On the reservation, as in many other places, hair is a political statement. I learned this reality early. One of my brothers, Lee, ... began growing his hair long in the late 1960s, before he burned his draft card but after our oldest brother had been shipped out to Vietnam. Lee was suspended from high school a number of times for having his hair too long, until one time my mother grew tired of his forced removals, took him to school herself, grabbed an idle white kid in the hallway whose hair was longer than my brother’s, and dragged them both into the office to confront the principal with this discrepancy. My brother was reinstated, but one of his instructors insisted he had missed too much time in

his suspensions to graduate, so he went to summer school, but he did it in long hair and graduated in August. He is not the first member of my family to have an educational institution concern itself with his hair. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Dawes Act was in full swing, and my grandfather’s parents were persuaded by government agents to allow their son the great privilege of attending one of the Indian boarding schools. They claimed that he would have a much better chance of surviving in the world if he could learn a trade in the broader culture. He learned to play a western instrument, the piccolo, I believe, and eventually remembered nothing about water drums but was well versed in snare and bass... . Through college I had kept my hair in various stages of long, but it always looked wild, ....In graduate school I got rid of it all and kept a reasonably short style through that period, until I graduated and got past my first set of job interviews. As I began teaching at the college a few miles from the reservation where I grew up, my hair was still fairly short, appropriate for the era, the early 1990s, but as soon as I signed the contract I let it grow back out, and in 1998 my braid was about a foot and a half long, when I decided to get rid of it.

Other, strangely resonant events occurred in the few months following that, and I finally decided that while I could not stop the perpetuation of this stereotype, I did not have to be a contributing member. Tying off both ends of my braid, I cut it off in 1999, reduced my hair to a flattop, and grew my mustache to join the goatee at the same time. The braid is in my top-right desk drawer, where I keep it to remind me of where I have been. Here, at the border, I am suddenly in Los Lobos land again, and my tribal identification is not good enough. National identification papers, it seems, are good enough documentation for the United States from every other nation except those housed within its borders. Haudenosaunee law stipulates we are not citizens of the United States, regardless of any federal laws on Indian citizenship. I am still not sure what the full dynamics are here. Perhaps it is not that our ID cards are not legitimate enough, but instead that braidless and hairy, I am not legitimate enough for my ID. This officer, I see, stares at me, is certain my name is Pedro, Hector, Jesus, and as a result of this perception he wears his illegal alien

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| RACISM Polaroid sunglasses. Regardless of what might or might not be in my pocket, he has decided it is all right to treat me with disdain because I have been forward enough to attempt crossing borders without swimming my way in, and am merely getting what I deserve. My faculty ID card looks promising. It is contemporary and formal, professionally laminated, and even has a bar code on it... . | hand this over and the officer looks at it.

He rapid-fires questions at me. Suddenly [ am taking a pop quiz on the academic calendar where I teach—when were finals, when was graduation, when does the school year begin, how many courses do I teach, and then it comes: What in Acufia, Mexico could possibly interest a college professor from New York? This question is so odd, so full of his emptiness, that no answer I can give short of “cheap dentistry,” “stuffed armadillos,” or “controlled substances” would be satisfactory. Back to the wallet. My driving license convictions card surfaces next. This has my New York State license number on it, and a spotless driving record, I might add, the entire convictions section blank. The officer rejects this offer as well, observing it has no photograph. I suggest he can match the names from this to my other documents, and he merely raises his right eyebrow in a knowing way... . Finally I remember that the attendants at the gym where I work out insist on picture ID, in addition to their own issued membership card, every time I enter. . .. We solved the dual ID show by photocopying my license and taping it to the gym card. I rifle back through the less-convincing documents in my wallet and find the card, my shoddily photocopied license taped to it, and I am in luck; the numbers are visible, and more important, they match the numbers on my convictions record. I feel like a lotto winner as we compare numbers, the

officer and I, and he is satisfied enough to run them through his international-criminaldriver’s-license database and see, indeed, that I do live in western New York, or at least that

someone who looks remarkably like me does. He gathers my variety pack of ID cards, hands My braid is seventeen hundred miles from where I am as I leave the air-conditioned ee and head out into eu West Texas sunee ee ed

American Hijab Why My Scarf Is A Sociopolitical Statement, Not A Symbol Of My Religiosity Mariam Gomaa | remember donning the hijab for the first time three years ago. I say it was the first time, but really it was one of many times that I had slipped it on, standing in front of the mirror and adjusting the folds of fabric around my face. Yet this time was different. Rather than take it off after prayer or a visit to the local masjid (mosque), I was hoping to wear it regularly.

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It was sometime in winter during my freshman year of college at Northwestern, and I had spent my first three months of college searching for my place among thousands of students. Like any freshmen, I had several identifying factors that felt true, things that I felt could not go unmentioned as I sought out the people who would become my closest friends. These included everything from my taste in books and music to my leftist political stance, but also my religion. Asa Muslim growing up ina post 9/11 world, I was accustomed to misconceptions about my religion, my race, and my identity. I was acutely aware of the way I navigated the world as a brown body, and how experiences of hate and injustice only magnified themselves when my mother (wearing hijab) or my sister (darker with characteristic African hair) accompanied me places. My body, in spite of its brown shade, was still in the liminal world of racial ambiguity, a place where I could pass into whiteness when it seemed convenient. There were few markers of my race and my religion. In spite of this, however, I had often felt that my religion was not something to be shed or stifled and hidden for the sake of others, for the sake of their comfort. I did not shy away from my heritage, my deeply Egyptian roots, the pride I felt for Africa and Arabia and Islam. They were the places that made me a blank-American, someone different.

That day in winter, as a lonely and homesick freshman, I remembered that being different was far from wanting or choosing to be different. That in fact, I was not in control of my narrative so long as I still sought the acceptance of those who might never want to understand me. My desire to wear hijab increased in that moment. Hijab became a symbol of my rejection of white-passing (or at the very least racial ambiguity), a privilege I was distinctly aware I had, and that I knew was not afforded to many of my fellow non-white Americans. While hijab has historically had a reputation of being a number of things to “the West,” rebellion has rarely been one of them. Certainly among many Muslims and in many Muslim nations it is often considered a sign of piety, or at the very least culture and respect. Yet rebellion, or perhaps a better word is resistance, is one of the many reasons many Muslims wear hijab. In fact, in the 1970s and ’80s, after a period of secularism, many Muslim majority countries were undergoing an Islamic revival, where the society (not the political regimes) responded to its conditions by adopting religion again. It was a reversal of the Westernisation approach, undermining the belief of my grandparents’ generation that the West was strengthening Muslim nations. My mother describes choosing the hijab in college during the ’80s, a little after this revival. Her parents, the previous generation, rejected her decision; theirs was an era where few women wore hijab, where much of the traditional clothing was left behind in favor of western attire... Many American Muslims wear hijab much like the women of the Islamic revival, as a response to the changing times and a rejection of Western influence. While it seems counter-intuitive to wear hijab in a world that increasingly has a negative perception of Muslims, particularly when the consensus among many American Muslims is that one can be religious with or without it, there is a significant presence of American Muslim women wearing the hijab as a strong sense of identity. As one of these women, I know and have insight into a representation of hijab that is rarely portrayed—a representation that I call the American hijab, the antithesis and retaliation to whiteness and the American media, and a nod of solidarity to other people of color. In this sense, hijab, rather than strictly being a religious decision, is also a sociopolitical choice and representation. In spite of, or rather in response to the negative portrayal of Muslims by those (Muslims and non-Muslims) who seek to define our narrative as one of barbaric killing and atrocity, women choose hijab—a piece of cloth that declares their identity as Muslims while simultaneously expressing their individual identity as smart,

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| RACISM driven, successful, and independent. A simple yet powerful message. A way in which Muslim women can reclaim their narrative. In choosing to wear the hijab, American Muslim women reconstruct the narrative of Islam in America. More importantly, they define American Islam and celebrate its rich cultural treasures: Islamic songs by Cat Stevens after his conversion, legendary icons like Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, a deep sense of community that transcends immigrant heritage to become a new national heritage of its own, a style of hijab and clothing developed to bring together Islamic tradition from across the globe. This American Islam has blossomed in many forms: the Mipsters (Muslim hipsters), Muppies (Muslim Urban Professionals), IMAN (Inner-city Muslim Action Network), and many more coalitions of young Muslim Americans who bring together their cross-cultural heritage—their America and their Islam—and share it with the world on a daily basis, through creative productions, concerts, health clinics and activist movements. While each coalition and organization has its own goals, they share a young, vibrant population of men and women alike with a common religious ideology, but also a sociopolitical identity. . . . In their defiance of social convention, American Muslim women wearing hijab have paved the way for others and developed a sense of social consciousness and social justice among themselves. While this story of resistance may seem new, it is not unique to Muslim women. It is a story that rings true for many individuals of color, whether it manifests itself as choosing to don an afro or to participate in the traditions of our non-American ancestors. It is the story of rejecting social pressure, of rejecting the influence of western media and the western world, and of choosing to openly and clearly declare our difference in a society that readily rejects us as part of its narrative. The choice is embracing that difference and declaring it before anyone else can. This often means representing entire worlds, but it also means liberation from the pressures that society imposes with respect to beauty, identity, race, and culture. At the end of the day when I have fears about continuing to represent my faith without trepidation, I remember that I wear my hijab for the empowerment it grants me in declaring where I stand in a world that—more often than not—is in opposition to all that I am.

Ind

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My Tongue Is Divided into Two Quique Aviles ... As far back as I can remember, the promise of English was part of my life. ... In 1969, when I was four, my mother borrowed money from her mother to travel to the United States as a tourist. Her real intention was to stay in the States, get a good job, and offer her children a better life. She made a promise to bring us, her four children, one by one—starting with the oldest and ending with the youngest, which was me. . . .

My tongue is divided into two by virtue, coincidence or heaven

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words jumping out of my mouth stepping on each other enjoying being a voice for the message expecting conclusions... Pve learned English in three different phases.

PHASE ONE: CURIOSITY AND WONDER Having a mother who was in the United States meant that my brothers, my sister, and I got American gifts with words in English each time she came home. .. . I would sit with a dictionary and struggle to make out a few words so I could know more about my mother’s new world. In the mid-1970s, the Salvadoran Education Department brought “Televisi6n Educativa” to schools across the country. With it, came televised English classes... .

my tongue is divided into two into heavy accent bits of confusion into miracles and accidents saying things that hurt the heart drowning in a language that lives, jumps, translates. . . Like most kids anywhere in the world, American music and television were also my English teachers.... My family was only the second family in our whole town to own a television. . . . |would watch Kojak, Mission Impossible, and Starsky and Hutch—swallowing up English, aspiring to be cool, and knowing that my mother had my ticket on layaway. In late 1978, I had a political awakening. My country was ruled by the military and their martial law against ideas. I was 13 years old and joined the student movement. We demanded

books, chalk, better teachers, and cleaner bathrooms.

In the revolutionary

fervor of those days, the coolness of English was ruined by Marx and Lenin. The language that fed my wonder and curiosity was now, according to my comrades, the language of the enemy of Yankee Imperialism. It was no longer cool. The next thing I knew, I was on a plane to the United States to save me from the death squads. My tongue is divided by nature by our crazy desire to triumph and conquer this tongue is cut up into equal pieces one wants to curse and sing out loud the other one simply wants to ask for water...

PHASE TWO: FRUSTRATION AND NEED (HOW ENGLISH BECAME MY IMPERIAL LIBERATOR) In the fall of 1980, I started 9th grade at Francis Junior High in Washington, D.C. Kids from Central America were coming into the school in droves every week. We were thrown into English as a Second Language (ESL) classes where Mrs. Padrino taught us . . . to say,

~S —s

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| RACISM “Hello, how are you today? I am fine, thank you,” in crisp English. On weekends, I went to rallies and protests—ESL classes for leftists. There, I got to repeat “No draft, no war/US out of El Salvador!” .... By this time, I was beginning to understand that English was not just one language. At school, I became friends with Pichi, a chubby white Puerto Rican who . . . spoke three languages: Puerto Rican Spanish (which I barely understood), formal English (which I was beginning to understand), and Black English (which I now understood I needed to learn in order to survive). Pichi became my real ESL teacher:

tongue English of the funny sounds tongue funny sounds tn English tongue sounds funny in English tongue in funny English sounds It was Pichi who gave me a copy of Puerto Rican Obituary, a poetry book by Pedro Pietri, one of the first and most influential of the Nuyorican poets of the 1970s. I had been writing poetry since I was ten years old, mainly rhyming, cheesy love poems. This book changed my life... . It introduced me to the possibility of words as a weapon. I started mixing my anger, my Spanish, and my limited English into poetry. ... But English began to feel good. I began to feel that it was something I could use as revenge. When it was time for me to start high school, I decided to audition for the Theater Department at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. With my angry, broken English, I made an impression and got in. My first year was very hard. I was the only Latino in the whole school of more than 400 students. Rosemary Walsh, my acting teacher, would tell me, “You’re a good actor, but I can’t understand what the fuck you’re saying. We’re gonna work on you.” .. . My second year at Ellington, I was assigned to speech classes. We studied phonetics and the anatomy of our sound-making factory: the mouth, the throat, the vocal chords, and the diaphram. These classes consisted of repetitive speech exercises, such as:

“Theophilus thistle, the unsuccessful thistle sifter, while sifting a sieve of unsifted thistles thrusts three thousand thistles through the thick of his thumb...” “Unique New York, Unique New York, Unique New York .. .” So, here I was, thinking that I was making so much progress with my English, I could move to New York or L.A. and make it big. my tongue is divided into two a border patrol runs through the middle frisking words asking for proper identification checking for pronunciation...

By my senior year I had become a punk rocker, a combat-boot wearing rebel. I realized that there were no parts for me in traditional theater, that if I wanted to be an actor, I would have to write my own parts. With that realization, I began a deeper, artistic relationship with the English language. My new teachers became Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, Lucille Clifton, and Alice Walker—black writers who were using language to say that we

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are beautiful, that we deserve things. I began to write monologues for characters that came from my life. As I began to develop my own voice, English became my imperial liberator.

PHASE THREE: SUBTLETY AND PAYBACK I am still learning English. El inglés. . . . Since the mid-1980s I have been writing and performing one-person shows that weave together poetry and monologues in English. Latinos often ask me, “Why don’t you do more in Spanish?” I often respond, “Because you all don’t pay my rent.” But the real answer is: payback. I use English to challenge English speakers to question their assumptions about us Latinos, about each other, and, in these xenophobic times, about immigrants in general. I use it to poke, prod, question, and make people feel uncomfortable. I always read my poems from a music stand (I have very few of them memorized), and whenever I leave my house for a gig, carrying my music stand to the car, I always feel that I am carrying

my machete. Words are my weapon. They are also the way I build alliances. I have learned that building trust with someone who is different from you in this country is all about mastering their own version of the English language. Most of my work in D.C. has been with black kids. I go into classrooms and use theater improvisation as a tool for encouraging kids to write about their lives. Most kids want to do improvs about drugs and guns, the thug life. I challenge them by asking, “Does your momma love you? Do you smile? Do you laugh? Are there tender moments in your life?” For the majority of kids, the answer is yes. So I challenge them to create skits about those soft and tender moments and then to write poetry about it. I challenge them not to fulfill society’s expectations of poor kids by being drug dealers and thugs. And I always tell them, “Ain’t nobody gonna sing our song, so we might as well sing it ourselves.” For me, learning English has been about learning to sing my own song. my tongue is divided into two my tongue is divided into two I like my tongue it says what feels right I like my tongue it says what feels right —

21

Letter to My Son Ta-Nehisi Coates Son,

Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body.

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| RACISM But by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history. .. . Democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies—torture, theft, enslavement—are specimens of sin, so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. ... At the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term people to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. As for now, it must be said that the elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through wine tastings and ice-cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land. That Sunday, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of a 12-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about “hope.” And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. ... When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that

moment, I was sad for you. That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 p.m. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I write you in your 15th year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.

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There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life. I have sought the answer through my reading and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother. I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths. And yet I am still afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and

full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired. .. . My father was so very afraid. J felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear. When I was 6, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done—he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice—“Either I can beat him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit. What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us.

And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which

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| RACISM is to say, for furthering the assault on your body. But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can protect you only with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or succeeded at something much darker. . . . Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television in my living room. In the evenings I would sit before this television bearing witness to the dispatches from this other world. There were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, their only want was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak. That other world was suburban and endless, organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice-cream sundaes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and endless lawns. Comparing these dispatches with the facts of my native world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. | knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And | felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape. The culture of the streets was essential—there was no alternative. I could not retreat into the church and its mysteries. My parents rejected all dogmas. We spurned the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be white. We would not stand for their anthems. We would not kneel before their God. “The meek shall inherit the earth” meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail. My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box. ... Fear ruled everything around me, and I knew, as all black people do, that this fear was connected to the world out there, to the unworried boys, to pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns nightly beamed into our television sets. Every February my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual review of the civil-rights movement. Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence? Some things were clear to me: The violence that undergirded the country, so flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate violence of the streets were not unrelated. And this violence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design. But what exactly was the design? And why? I must know. I must get out ... but into what? I saw the design in those boys on the corner, in “the babies having babies.” The design explained

everything, from our cracked-out fathers to HIV to the bleached skin of Michael Jackson.

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I felt this but I could not explain it. . . . 1was haunted by the bodily sacrifice of Malcolm. I was haunted because I believed that we had left ourselves back there, and now in the crack era all we had was a great fear. Perhaps I must go back. That was what I heard in the rapper’s call to “keep it real.” Perhaps we should return to ourselves, to our own primordial streets, to our own ruggedness, to our own rude hair. Perhaps we should return to Mecca. Now, the heirs of slaveholders could never directly acknowledge our beauty or reckon with its power. And so the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, on television shows, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black fourstar general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was “white,” I understood him to say, and so Tolstoy “mattered,” like everything else that was white “mattered.” And this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some

legitimate Christian use? ... “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons. There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all of history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. ... They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people. And what did that mean for the Dreamers I’d seen as a child? Could I ever want to get into the world they made? No. I was born among a people, Samori, and in that realization I knew that I was out of something. It was the psychosis of questioning myself, of constantly wondering if I could measure up. But the whole theory was wrong, their whole notion of race was wrong. And apprehending that, I felt my first measure of freedom. This realization was important but intellectual. It could not save my body. Indeed, it made me understand what the loss of all our black bodies really meant. No one of us were “black people.” We were individuals, a one of one, and when we died there was nothing. Always remember that Trayvon Martin was a boy, that Tamir Rice was a particular boy, that Jordan Davis was a boy, like you. When you hear these names think of all the wealth poured into them. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the day care, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken,

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| RACISM shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white. . . . But American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. .. . Historians conjured the Dream. Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure stories. John Carter flees the broken Confederacy for Mars. We are not supposed to ask what, precisely, he was running from. I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black. Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this. I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings. The soul was the body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden. And

the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stovewood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn. It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the

mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization. “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below. You and I, my son, are that “below.” That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people Lt

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who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.... I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning. That wisdom is not unique to our people, but I think it has special meaning to those of us born out of mass rape, whose ancestors were carried off and divided up into policies and stocks. I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in

her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved.

She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains. You must struggle to truly remember this past. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance— no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no natural promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know, each day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise. I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive

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‘ey,

movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold. ...

But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people whom you shouldn’t. Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson—not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson. But the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd... . I am sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be. And I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact. I am speaking to you as I always have—treating you as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

22

My Class Didn’t Trump My Race Using Oppression to Face Privilege Robin J. DiAngelo I grew up poor and White. Although my class oppression has been relatively visible to me, my race privilege has not. In my efforts to uncover how race has shaped my life, I have gained deeper insight by placing race in the center of my analysis and asking how each of my other group locations have socialized me to collude with racism. In so doing, I have been able to address in greater depth my multiple locations and how they function together to hold racism in place. Thus my exploration of what it means to be White starts with what

MY CLASS DIDN'T TRUMP MY RACE

it means to be poor, for my understanding of race is inextricably entwined with my class background. I now make the distinction that I grew up poor and White, for my experience of poverty would have been different had I not been White. For Whites that experience

oppression in other areas of our lives (such as class, gender, religion, or sexual orientation), it can be difficult to center a location through which we experience privilege. When leading discussions in multicultural education courses, I find that White students often resist centering racism in their analysis, feeling that to do so invalidates their oppressions. These students also feel that these oppressions make them “less” racially privileged. However, rather than ameliorating my race privilege, my oppressed class location was a primary avenue through which I came to understand what being White meant. As I work to unravel my internalized racial dominance, I have found two key questions useful:

1. 2.

How does internalized dominance function collectively for Whites, regardless of our other social locations? How did I learn racism specifically through my class (or rather) oppression?

I was born to working class parents; my father was a construction worker and my mother was a switchboard operator. When I was 2, my parents divorced and my mother began to raise us on her own; at that point we entered into poverty. I have never understood people who say, “we were poor but we didn’t know it because we had lots of love.” Poverty hurts. It isn’t romantic, or some form of “living simply.” Poor people are not innocent and childlike. The lack of medical and dental care, the hunger, and the ostracization, are concrete. The stress of poverty made my household much more chaotic than loving. We were evicted frequently, and moved four to five times a year. There were periods when oatmeal was the only food in our house. I had no health or dental care during my childhood, and today all of my front teeth are filled because by the time I was 10 they were rotten. If we got sick, my mother would beat us, screaming that we could not get sick because she could not afford to take us to the doctor. We occasionally had to live in our car and I was left with relatives for 8 months while my mother tried to secure housing for us. My teacher once held my hands up to my fourth-grade class as an example of poor hygiene and with the class as her audience, told me to go home and tell my mother to wash me. I used to stare at the girls in my class and ache to be like them; to have a father, to wear pretty clothes, to go to camp, to be clean and get to sit with them. I knew we didn’t have enough money and that meant that I couldn’t join them in school or go to their houses or have the same things they had. But the moment the real meaning of poverty crystallized for me came when we were visiting another family. As we were leaving I heard one of their daughters ask her mother, “What is wrong with them?” I stopped, riveted. I too, wanted to know. Her mother held her finger to her lips and whispered, “Shhh, they’re poor.” This was a revelatory moment for me. The shock came not just in the knowledge that we were poor, but that it was exposed. There was something wrong with us, indeed, and it was something that was obvious to others and that we couldn’t hide, something shameful that could be seen but should not be named. It took me many years to gain a structural analysis of class that would help shift this sense of shame. I begin this narrative with my class background because it so deeply informs my understanding of race. Fro early age I had the sense of bei n_outsider;-I was acutely

aware that I was sO

RR ace

es eo ae eee

TE that there was something

“wrong” with me. But I also knew that I was not Black. We were at the lower rungs of society, but there was always someone on the periphery, just below us. I knew that “colored” people existed and that they should be avoided. I can remember many occasions when I reached for candy or uneaten food laying on the street and was admonished by my grandmother not to touch it because a “colored person” may have touched it. The message

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| RACISM e_ irony-heris was clear to me; if a colored person touched something it became dirty. The homelessclothes, torn hygiene, poor me: on visible clearly that the marks of poverty-were

nolbaice: Woerieatelcomments suchas my grandmother’s, a racial Other was formed

in my consciousness, an Other through whom I became clean. Race was the one identity that aligned 1me with the other girls in-my-school. _

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“T left home as a teenager and struggled to survive. As I looked at what lay ahead, I

could see no path out of poverty other than education. The decision to take that path was frightening for me; I had never gotten the message that I was smart and academia was a completely foreign social context. But once I was in academia, I understood that a college degree is not conferred upon those who are smarter or who try harder than others, it comes through a complex web of intersecting systems of privileges that include internal expectations as well as external resources. In academia, racism, a key system that I benefit from, helped to mediate my class-based disadvantages. Upon graduation, with my degree in sociology and a background in adult education, I answered a call for diversity trainers from a state department that had lost a civil rights lawsuit and been mandated to provide 16 hr of diversity training to all their employees. They needed 40 diversity trainers to train 3,000 people. Looking back from where I am now, I see how naive I was when I started that contract. I thought that being “liberal” qualified me because after all, racists were people who didn’t have an open mind. I had an open mind and was thus not a racist, my reasoning went; these employees just needed help opening their minds too. As happens all too often, those in the position to hire me (primarily other White people) did not have the ability to assess the qualifications of someone leading discussions on race, and I was hired, along with 39 other people from a range of backgrounds. I was completely unprepared for the depth of hostility and the disconnection from racial realities that I encountered from White people in these trainings. It was unnerving to be in a room composed exclusively of White employees and hear them bitterly complain that because of Affirmative Action, White people could no longer get jobs. That White employees would feel free to express this hostility to my coleader of color (who was racially isolated in the room) was another piece of the puzzle I was yet to put together. Even more significantly, the training teams were always interracial, and the very dynamics that I sought to enlighten

my participants on were actively manifesting between my cotrainers and myself. Over time, I began to see racial dynamics more clearly, and after many years in the field, along with much personal work and some very patient mentors, I became more grounded in the dynamics of racialized knowledge construction. These trainings provided an extraordinary opportunity to observe first hand the processes by which a White racial identity is socially constructed and privileged, and the mechanisms by which White people receive and protect that privilege. I also reflected on my own responses to the ways in which I was being racially challenged, for unlike the middle class culture of academia that I found foreign, the culture of Whiteness was so normalized for me that it was barely visible. | had my experience of marginalization to draw from in understanding racism, which helped tremendously, but as I became more conversant in the workings of racism I came to understand that the oppression I experienced growing up poor didn’t protect me from learning my place in the racial hierarchy. Since those early days, I have led dialogues on race with police officers, social workers, teachers, and in both the private and government sectors. I recently completed my dissertation on how White student teachers reproduce racism in interracial dialogues about race. As I look at the world now, I see racism as ever-present and multidimensional. I realize that poor and working class White people don’t necessarily have any less racism than middle or upper class White people, our racism is just conveyed in different ways and we enact it from a different social location than the middle or upper classes. As I reflect back on the early messages I received about being poor and being White, I now realize that my grandmother and I needed people of color to cleanse and realign

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us with the dominant White culture that our poverty had separated us from. I now ask myself how the classist messages I internalized growing up lead me to collude in racism. For example, as a child who grew up in poverty, I received constant reminders that I was

stupid, lazy, dirty, and a drain on the resources of hardworking people. I internalized these messages, and they work to silence me. Unless I work to uproot them, I am less likely to trust my own perceptions or feel like I have a “right” to speak up. I may not attempt to interrupt racism because the social context in which it is occurring intimidates me. My fear on these occasions may be coming from a place of internalized class inferiority, but in practice my silence colludes with racism and ultimately benefits me by protecting my White privilege and maintaining racial solidarity with other White people. This solidarity connects and realigns me with White people across other lines of difference, such as the very class locations that have silenced me in the first place-f am also prone to use others to elevate me, as in the example with my grandmother. So although my specific class background mediated the way I learned racism and how I enact it, in the end it still socialized me to collude with the overall structure. It is my observation that.class dictates proximity between or. Poor Whites are most often i proximity to people of color because they tend toshare poverty. I hear the term “White trash” frequently. It is not without significance that this is one of the few expressions in which race is named for Whites. I think the proximity of the people labelled as White trash to people of color is why; race becomes marked or “exposed” by virtue of a closeness to people of color. In a racist society, this closeness both highlights and pollutes Whiteness. Owning class people also have people of color near them because people of color are often their domestics and gardeners—their servants. But they do not interact socially with people of color in the same way that poor Whites do. Middle class Whites are generally the furthest away from people of color. They are the most likely to say that, “there were no people of color in my neighbourhood or school. I didn’t meet a Black person until I went to college” (often adding, “so I was lucky because I didn’t learn anything about racism”). Looking specifically at how class shaped my racial identity has been very helpful to me in attempting to unravel the specific way I manifest my internalized racial superiority. I am no longer poor. Although I still carry the marks of poverty, those marks are now only internal. But these marks limit me in more than what I believe I deserve or where I think I belong; they also interfere with my ability to stand up against injustice, for as long as I believe that I am not as smart or as valuable as other White people, I won’t challenge racism. I believe that in order for Whites to unravel our internalized racial dominance, we have two interwoven tasks. One is to work on our own internalized oppression—the ways in which we impose limitations on ourselves based on the societal messages we receive about the inferiority of the lower status groups we belong to. The other task is to face the internalized dominance that results from being socialized in a racist society—the ways in which we consciously or unconsciously believe that we are more important, more valuable, more intelligent, and more deserving than people of color. I cannot address the interwoven complexity of other White people’s social locations. However, after years facilitating dialogues on race with thousands of White people from a range of class positions (as well as varied gender, sexual orientation, religious, and ability positions), and bearing witness to countless stories and challenges from people of color about my own racism and that of other Whites, I have come to see some very common patterns of internalized dominance.

These patterns are shared across other social positions due to the bottom line nature of racism: Regardless of one’s other locations, White people know on some level that being White in this society is “better” than being a person of color, and this, along with the very real doors Whiteness opens, serves to mediate the oppression expertenced in those other social locations-tn-the next sectior-of this-article, L-wilt identify several of these patterns of internalized dominance that are generally shared among Whites.

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| RACISM WE LIVE SEGREGATED LIVES Growing up in segregated environments (schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, media images, historical perspectives, etc.), we are given the message that our experiences and perspectives are the only ones that matter. We receive this message day in and day out, and it is not limited to a single moment, it is a relentless experience. Virtually all of our teachers, history books, role models, movie and book characters, are White like us. Further, as White people, we are taught not to feel any loss about the absence of people of color in our lives. In fact, the absence of people of color is what defines our schools and neighborhoods as “good.” And we get this message regardless of where we are oppressed in other areas of our lives. Because we live primarily segregated lives in a White-dominated-sociéty, we receive little or no authentic information about racism and are thus unprepared to think critically or complexly about it. Although segregation is often mediated somewhat for poor urban (and other) Whites who may live near and have friendships with people of color on the microlevel, segregation is still operating on the macrolevel and informing our collective perspectives and what is deemed the most valuable of “official” knowledge. Whites from the lower classes who may have more integrated lives on the micro level still receive the message that achievement means moving out of poverty and away from the neighborhoods and schools that define us. Upward mobility is the great class goal in the United States, and the social environment gets tangibly Whiter the higher up one goes, whether it be in academia or management. Whiter environments, in turn, are marked as the most socially and economically valuable. Reaching towards the most valuable places in society thus entails leaving people of color behind.

WE ARE TAUGHT IN OUR CULTURE TO SEE OUR EXPERIENCE AS OBJECTIVE AND REPRESENTATIVE OF REALITY The belief in objectivity, coupled with setting White people up as outside of culture and thus the norms for humanity, allows us to see ourselves as universal humans who can represent all of human experience. People of color can only represent their own racialized experience—that is, Robert Altman is a film director whose work is expected to relate to everyone, Spike Lee is a Black film director whose films are from “the Black” perspective. But there is no objective, neutral reality. Human objectivity is not actually possible, but as long as we construct the world as if it is, and then ascribe it only to ourselves, we keep White experience and people centered and people of color in the margins.

WE ARE RAISED TO VALUE THE INDIVIDUAL AND TO SEE OURSELVES AS INDIVIDUALS, RATHER THAN AS PART OF A SOCIALIZED GROUP Individuality allows us to present ourselves as having “just arrived on the scene,” unique and original, outside of socialization and unaffected by the relentless racial messages we receive. This also allows us to distance ourselves from the actions of our group and demand that we be granted the benefit of the doubt (because we are individuals) in all cases. Thus we get very irate when we are “accused” of racism, because as individuals, we are “different” from other White people and expect to be seen as such. We find intolerable any

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suggestion that our behaviour or perspectives are typical of our group as a whole, and this ensures that we cannot deepen our understanding of racism. Seeing ourselves as individuals erases our history and hides the way in which wealth has

accumulated over generations and benefits us, as a group, today. Further, being an individual is a privilege only afforded to White people. By focusing on ourselves as individuals, Whites are able to conceptualize the racist patterns in our behavior as “just our personality” and not connected to intergroup dynamics. For example, I might be an extrovert and cut people off when I am engaged in a discussion. I can say, “that is just my personality, I do that to everyone. That is how we talked at the dinner table in my family.” But the moment I cut off a person of color, it becomes racism because the history and the impact of that behavior for both of us is different. The freedom to remain oblivious to that fact, with no sense that this obliviousness has any consequences of importance, is White privilege (racism). If we use the line of reasoning that we are all individuals and social categories such as race, class, and gender don’t matter and are just “labels” that stereotype us, then it follows that we all end up in our own “natural” places. Those at the top are merely a collection of individuals who rose under their own individual merits, and those at the bottom are there due to individual lack. Group membership is thereby rendered inoperative and racial disparities are seen as essential rather than structural. Thus the discourse of individuality is not only connected to the discourse of meritocracy, but also with the Darwinism of the “bell curve.” It behooves those of us oppressed in other places of individuality to understand group membership, for the discourse of individuality may benefit us in terms of racial privilege but ultimately holds all of our oppressions in place.

IN OUR DOMINANT POSITIONS WE ARE ALMOST ALWAYS RACIALLY COMFORTABLE AND EXPECT TO REMAIN SO We can often choose if and when we will put ourselves into racially uncomfortable situations, and most of our lives have been advised not to do it because it is “dangerous.” Thus racial comfort becomes not only an expectation, but something to which we feel entitled. If racism is brought up and we become uncomfortable, then something is “wrong” and we blame the person who triggered our discomfort (usually a person of color). Because racism is necessarily uncomfortable, insisting that we remain comfortable guarantees we will never really face it or engage in authentic dialogue with others about it. Whites often confuse comfort with safety and state that we don’t feel safe when what we really mean is that we don’t feel comfortable. This trivializes our history of savage brutality towards people of color and perverts the reality of that history. Because we don’t think complexly about racism, we don’t ask ourselves what safety means from a position of dominance, or the impact on people of color for Whites to complain about their safety when merely talking about racism.

WE FEEL THAT WE SHOULD BE JUDGED BY OUR INTENTIONS RATHER THAN THE EFFECTS OF OUR BEHAVIOR A common White reasoning is that as long as we didn’t intend to perpetuate racism, then our actions don’t count as racism. We focus on our intentions and discount the impact, thereby invalidating people of color’s experiences and communicating that the effects of Lo

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