Q: Are you white
Let’s pretend for a second that this “question” doesn’t come off as vaguely hostile, that I didn’t have to make several police reports last year about people stalking me in person to “see if I looked white”, and that I haven’t received harassment or death threats based entirely on what people assume is my racial identity, as well my actual racial identity. Let’s also pretend that what I look like is some kind of secret, that I haven’t posted about my racial identity openly on this blog and associated media, that I haven’t spoken at events in person as MedievalPoC, and that hundreds of people who’ve read this blog haven’t also witnessed my physical manifestation in the flesh, demonstrating that I am neither a ghost, nor a sophisticated Turing machine barfing out posts into the great void of the internets.
The thing about genocide, both cultural and physical, is that it erases human histories. I’m mostly Native American, I have non-white European ancestry, and I’m something like ¼ white. And since we’re getting personal, I’ll let you in on something: I can never really know my history for sure, not in the way that many other people are able to. That disconnect is a source of constant grief and loss to me, every day that I am alive.
People of Color in the United States have been systematically disenfranchised for centuries. We are told explicitly and implicitly that we don’t have histories, and/or that they aren’t important. We are shown in many ways, through many vehicles, that even now we don’t exist. And in turn, this deliberate destruction of history and identity is used to delegitimize us as human beings.
And if you can’t parse that sentence, let me put it another way: the first time I was asked the question, “What are you?” I was in kindergarten, and the only answer I had then was “I don’t know.”
The great thing about Medievalpoc is that my personal ideologies can be utterly ignored or removed from the content here, since it mostly consists of images, research, and text sources. I do my best to summarize or explain it in order to be accessible to anyone, not just academics. It is meant to be disseminated as widely as possible, adapted for use in classrooms, read for fun, or shared with friends and family. Additionally, I try to show others how they can do their own research, and make better creative choices.
Removing a person’s history and context drastically affects the formation of their sense of self, their sense of identity. It is an injury to their humanity. Connecting other people to this information is, for me, like replacing something that has been stolen or kept away from someone who is entitled to it. For multiple reasons, I most likely will never be able to reconnect with my own history in that way, but trying to help others feel empowered to seize their own does a little bit towards ameliorating that hurt.
These ideas aren’t new, and they aren’t particularly unique.
My father’s father was Filipino-Chinese… My father’s mother was African American-Native American… My mother’s father was German-Danish… My mother’s mother was German… I was born in Brooklyn, New York, but I grew up in Japan…
For once it’s not just black and white. In this compelling chronicle of his journey through life as a multicultural and multiethnic American, Teja Arboleda uniquely and personally challenges institutionalized notions of race, culture, ethnicity, and class. Now, in this book, he fleshes out the depth of his experience as a culturally and racially mixed American, illustrating throughout the enigma of cultural and racial identity and the American identity crisis.
-From the description for Teja Arboleda’s In the Shadow of Race: Growing Up as a Multiethnic, Multicultural, and “Multiracial” American (1998).
I am perfectly capable of seeing that the general idea behind this kind of personal attack is to delegitimize the content here by implying that I have lied at some point about who I am, and therefore am untrustworthy and must surely be capable of all manner of nefarious deeds.
And here’s the thing. None of that holds any water whatsoever. In the end, it’s irrelevant to what this whole project is about. People will quite literally make up anything, say anything, repeat rumors and generally foment drama for its own sake. Or as a scaremongering tactic, a silencing tactic, and an attempt to derail discussions. Or just because they feel entitled to increasingly invasive personal information about me.
They’re not, and you’re not. So then, you might wonder, why did I bother to write this? Simply because while I know all of this is out there, you in particular decided that you just couldn’t allow me to continue ignoring the frankly ridiculous wastes of time time I could indulge in if I were to seek them out. You ignored my repeated requests to respect that, came into my inbox and tried to make THEIR problem into MY problem. Also, sending someone a message like this is rude.
And incidentally, I saw a teaching moment.
Holy shit.
