HOW I GOT TO CRITICAL RACE STUDIES
Mixed Up
As far back as I can remember, I had a problem with race. It wasn’t just that my mom was from Indonesia and my dad’s ancestors were from Europe. It wasn’t something about their past or their cultures that made it hard for me. It wasn’t ethnic or linguistic at all. It was something immaterial yet so completely real about me–my mixedness of my origins that supposedly made me a clash of character, intellect, mental and emotional temperament, and so many other things that were preprogrammed in me because of my race.
Just like everyone around me, I thought race was something you got from your genes. You inherited your race from your parents who inherited their race from their parents, and on and on and on. The world had myriad ethnicities and cultures that any one family might tout and treasure or, by contrast, downplay and deny. Your race, however, was something you had no say in. And it was written in all you thought and did.
Back in the ’80s, I was called Pacific Islander by my educators and parents and Asian by my peers. I was never referred to as White, even though everyone knew that my dad was Euro-American, because White was reserved for people who had no other racial heritage. Despite being categorized with one race according to the protocol that everyone followed, I was also seen as biracial and treated as such, and as a result I became exceptionally alien.
Deep Divides
This set off several formative schisms for me as I entered the public education system. First, my official or formal race split into two mutually exclusive classifications: Pacific Islander and Asian. Second, this formal classification split from my colloquial race: Asian and Pacific Islander versus Mixed. There was no way to reconcile these divergences and so I lived every day in fear and shame about how I appeared to others and what I was really like inside.
On top of all this, my colloquial status as Mixed Race split me into two more qualities: Other, as in “other than White” a.k.a. “non-White,” and Other, as in “other to All.” I wasn’t just non-White but also non- anything and everything. I was split into a Person of Color (what is today called “BIPOC” for Black, Indigenous, Person of Color but was then called Brown) and an Alien. As I moved from elementary school to middle school and then high school, I gained solidarity with other students of color and I developed a pride in my brownness and otherness. But I was also held at a distance from everyone. Until I befriended another mixed race girl.
Learning to Ask Why
Aaira was going through a lot of the same things as me. For one thing, her parents were struggling financially like mine were, with her mom single-parenting and working around the clock. But it was our complicated racial identities that brought us together. Aaira’s dad was African American and her mom was Arab American. With coffee colored skin tones and tight brunette curls, she was unmistakably African American. But she also looked different than our Black peers, our Latinx peers, and pretty much everyone in our world. She was Other and Alien just like me. But unlike me, she was sick of it.
I was used to being bullied for being Brown. I was used to being shunned because I was Mixed. And my life, like hers, was crippled by the systemic racism that kept my mom and her dad down. But I hadn’t experienced the blatant in-your-face racism that she was continually confronting in our high school, especially from our teachers. Aaira was an exceptional writer and communicator, but in our humanities classes where teachers had more leeway in assessing a student’s work, anti-Black teachers deemed her “low-performing” and placed her in Remedial classes that only went over the basics. Meanwhile in our science and math classes where teachers had less input on placement, she was found to be “high-performing” and in need of Advanced Placement curriculum.
It was infuriating to see her bounce from one kind of learning environment to the next. One minute she was being told to do basic grammar with students in our school’s ESL (English as a Second Language) program. The next minute, she was calculating trigonometric ratios with the Honor Roll. We started to notice how White and privileged the people were in our Advanced Placement courses. When we heard some students spouting racist and anti-queer epithets one day, we fought back, standing up for ourselves and our Brown peers.
From that day on, we turned the tables on the racists in our lives. We came to class ready to ask them point blank what they thought about various stereotypes, to really out them as racists. We didn’t feel that we could challenge the teachers, but we were growing critical of them too. We kept our ears and eyes open for injustices. And though we didn’t have the language of microaggressions or macroaggressions, we knew that we would forge careers dedicated to social justice. For all the immigrants, people of color, and socially immobile in our families and amongst our friends, college was a place where we would finally ask why.