Interstitial

Photo copyright Wings, 2013, 2014; all rights reserved.

You know that old word game we played as kids (or even as adults):

"Describe yourself in one word."

The idea, of course, was to capture, in one word, as many traits, characteristics, qualities, and values about yourself as possible, in one word. Back then, it changed over time, as our experiences (and our vocabularies) expanded and grew.

For too many years to count, now, though, my answer has remained the same.

Interstitial.

"Occupying the spaces between." 

Between what? It could be anything. Or anyone. Or anywhere.

For me, it's all of those, and more.

I am a mixed-race woman. In this culture, I fit nowhere. America likes everything nice and easy and dichotomous: black and white, and Black and White. Boxed, pigeonholed, compartmentalized. A place for everythingone, and everythingone in its place.

And mostly, the dominant culture can go through life seeing the world in that way.

For us, it's not that simple.

The only boxes, the only pigeonholes, the only compartments we have are those that are not truly ours. We don't fill them up — and yet we overflow them in some sections along the boundaries, crossing and spilling into other boxes and pigeonholes and compartments that everyone else wants to say are "Not Ours." They're not labeled "Mixed." much less are they labeled, for example, "Red/White/Black," which is how my own would read, had it any truth in advertising at all. But this culture doesn't care about truth in advertising. It cares about ease and comfort, particularly ease of mind and comfort of conscience.

And I am a walking, talking, living, breathing existential crisis for both of those things.

We don't do race well in this country. Not just the very concept(s) of "race," not just "race relations," not just "racial integration" or "racial understanding," but the notion that race encompasses so much more than any or all of those things, and so much more than a skin color or a language or an accent or a religious tradition or a style of dress or even a history . . . or even a history of oppression. And when presented with something, someone — a body — that transgresses those boundaries and those lines and those neat little boxes and pigeonholes and compartments . . . everybody is suddenly out of sorts.

Not just the white folks. The black folks and brown folks and red folks and yellow folks, too.

We are not theirs, and they are not ours, at least as they all see it. They don't claim us; we don't belong. Oh, sure, there are exceptions. For example, it's actually quite rare these days to find Red and Black folks who are truly full-blooded, once you get beyond a certain generation past. But if you look more or less full-blooded, and have grown up immersed in your culture with people like yourself, then you generally get the benefit of the doubt.

But heaven forbid that you're born with a recessive gene, or that you were adopted out, or that you grew up integrated, whether by chance or choice on your ancestors' part, into a culture not your own.

Yes, I know. So-called #firstworldproblems. Especially for someone like me, who, on my least "integrated" day, nonetheless could pass for white, nearly anywhere, anytime, no questions asked.

I benefit from unearned white privilege in all the ways that white folks do, and "unearned" also in the sense that white folks don't.

Because our society gazes upon these matters skin-deep or less, and whatever comforting and comfortable snap judgment it can make based on what it thinks is the obvious color of skin, well, that's who I must be.

And woe to the mixed-race person who transgresses, defies that.

Oh, I'm acutely aware of my own privilege. Unasked, unearned, it doesn't matter; it's mine even though I don't want it. And I'm acutely aware that, in this society, people of color who are not mixed-race — or, rather, who are perceived not to be mixed-race —have a much harder time of it on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis. They cannot "blend in" to the dominant culture, and while they likely don't want to, not having the option certainly makes existence less convenient.

I'm also acutely aware of the degree to which "intermarriage" has been used, both historically and yet today, as an instrument of extermination, of genocide. Genocide of peoples, genocide of cultures, genocide of languages. [The same is also true, in some instances, of cross-racial adoption, but that is a topic for another day.] And, yes, I used the polite term, "intermarriage," but too often, it's just plain old rape. Yes, it's. Present tense. It's not merely a historical phenomenon in this country, particularly not when Facebook gives its tacit endorsement to sites like one promoting so-called "intermarriage" as a way to get rid of people of color and "make white natives [sic] for Jesus.] This is the here and now, folks.

So when I read something like this, my heart gets just a little bit heavier. Because I have not the slightest doubt that the piece to which it refers has issues, as they say, nor that Slate's motives and execution were anything but those of anti-racism allies in publishing the piece in the first place. But to see, without the slightest hesitation or second-guessing of himself, the author of the linked piece, himself a Black man, use "human zoo" and "mongrelization" in his very title . . . well, thanks for buying into the white racist cant of the last 500 years on this continent to refer to  . . . well, people like me.

I have no answers. And I expect no sympathy. That's not what this is about anyway. To the extent it's about anything at all, it's simply about expanding understanding: my own; other people's; people of single-race ancestry; other people, like me, of mixed-race backgrounds. I'm not asking anyone to do anything in particular, to take any action beyond, perhaps, thinking a bit about these issues. Thinking beyond what's comfortable and familiar.

I have my own demons to address, my own ancestral guilt to expiate. I know too well the poison of passing, attractive though it may be (and "safe" though it may have been, at least in the sense of physical security and bodily autonomy). I understand why, perhaps, no racial group of which I am a part and that is simultaneously a part of me would want to claim me and mine: not only for having benefited illegitimately of ancestral denial, but for the denial itself. For leaving rather than staying. For turning our family's back on its constituent parts and pieces in favor of the perceived advantages of being "officially" recognized, under the very public and probing gaze of the dominant culture, as something that we were not. And, of course, for the sins of some of ours, who donned the cloak of the dominant culture a little too eagerly, wrapping themselves happily in the vicious racism turned against their very own.

Because we may not be comfortable to see, or acknowledge, or try to understand, but we exist. We exist in the spaces between, beneath the light and above the shadows.

We are.





Copyright Ajijaakwe, 2014; all rights reserved.