Mixed in the Arts
There just isn’t enough conversation about what it’s like being mixed-race - about the fact that regardless of what people are mixed with, mixed-race individuals share similar experiences and struggles. And it can be so easy to forget that we aren’t alone. But simultaneously, there is such beauty in the wide diversity of our stories. In this podcast, Jisel (Waitress, Hamilton) sits down with other mixed artists to chat about their experience being mixed in and out of show biz, offering a safe space for creatives to share their journeys, struggles, and triumphs. And hopefully, this podcast will help strengthen the sense of community for mixed folks everywhere while also proving everyone out there isn’t all that different.
Mixed in the Arts
Ep. 1 - Navigating Mixed-Race Identity w/ Prof. Caroline A. Streeter (part 1)
In this episode, Jisel sits down with UCLA Professor Caroline A. Streeter to discuss the complexities of mixed-race identities.
Professor Streeter offers a nuanced view of navigating identity amidst societal pressures as she shares personal stories from her childhood and examines the influence of popular media on perceptions of beauty and identity. They discuss the unique challenges of growing up in military families, the strategic decisions parents make to protect kids from racial discrimination, the longing for certain physical features, and the impact of mixed cultural heritage.
The episode also covers critical dialogue on mixed-race identities through various historical and academic lenses. We touch on significant milestones like the 2000 U.S. Census and the lifting of anti-Asian immigration barriers in 1965, and how these events have shaped the mixed-race population and identity in America. Professor Streeter shares insights into race and representation in theater and film, and dives into the implications of modern artistic interpretations like "Hamilton: An American Musical." Tune in for the first part of an enriching exploration of race, ethnicity, and cultural representation, and stay tuned for part two of their conversation.
Professor Caroline Streeter - https://english.ucla.edu/people-faculty/streeter-caroline/
NYT Miss Saigon article - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/theater/the-battle-of-miss-saigon-yellowface-art-and-opportunity.html
Mighty Heart casting debate -https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/mighty-heart-casting-stirs-debate-over-race/
Changes made to broadway shows article -https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/23/theater/broadway-race-depictions.html
Never Caught - https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Never-Caught/Erica-Armstrong-Dunbar/9781501126413
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Hello and welcome to the official episode one of Mixed in the Arts. In the introduction episode I said that was episode one. Well, I changed my mind, so, sue me, that one is really going to be called episode zero and this will be the true episode one. I really enjoyed getting transparent about struggling with perfectionism and reflecting on it in the beginning of the last episode, so I decided I'm going to have a little moment of reflection and a quote at the top of every episode. Today's reflection is about editing this very freaking episode. I said I wanted to post an episode every two weeks and here we are, almost a month and a half later. I've been trying not to beat myself up about it, but I've definitely been annoyed with myself and the amount of procrastination that has occurred and the lack of motivation over the last month and a half. I think part of what's taken me so long to edit this episode is a continued fear that it won't be perfect, and the more I put off editing it, the longer I prolong facing the imperfections of the final product, which is like, really, Jisel, we've literally talked about this. So my quote for you today is and now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good. I'm not sure who said it, but it's a very good reminder. And then a friend posted a tweet on Instagram recently that said your first workout will be bad. Your first podcast, hey, hey, will be bad. Your first speech will be bad. Your first video will be bad. Your first anything will be bad. Your first video will be bad. Your first anything will be bad. But you can't make your hundredth without making your first. So put your ego aside and start. And with that in mind, here is my second very imperfect episode and my first guest for you.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:We sat down to record this chat over Zoom back in October of 2023, y'all, which feels like years away at this point. It was while the SAG-AFTRA strike was going on. Just for context, because I think we talk about it in this conversation and I want to include a trigger warning that we do mention sexual violence in this conversation. This chat is going to bleed into episode two being a two-parter, because we talked for hours. We talked for, I think, total four and a half, reaching five hours, and I mean we just couldn't stop talking and gabbing and we touched on the widest variety of topics that I could have imagined. It was everything that I wanted, and more, for this conversation, so I hope you all love it as much as I loved it. The depth of knowledge this guest holds is so inspiring. I really felt like a smarter human by the time we were done.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Her name is Caroline A Streeter. She is an associate professor of English and African American Studies at UCLA. She teaches classes in literature, film, visual art and popular culture. She received her BA in Feminist Studies from Stanford University and PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Santa Cruz, where she studied with Angela Davis, she became a professor in English and African American Studies at UCLA. She has been there since 2002. She has published essays in which she examines literary and visual representations of women of Black and white descent in the United States. Professor Streeter lectures race, gender, visual art and popular culture at institutions such as the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. Professor Streeter's forthcoming book focuses on social media discourses and the male mulatto figure in the US American culture from Barack Obama to Jeremy Meeks, aka the hot felon. So buckle the hell up, because you are in for a treat with my conversation with Professor Caroline Streeter. Hi, welcome.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Hello, hello, Good afternoon Jisel.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Good afternoon. Thank you so much for joining me. I am so excited about this conversation as I have, like, personally, just questions that I've muddled around in my brain and I feel like maybe other people also have thought about these things, so I'm just excited to like talk about it. But first, like, let's get a little personal with however comfortable you are sharing whatever level of information, but how do you identify?
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Yeah, sure, well, I identify as mixed race and I always have I have. My mom is French and I was born in France and my dad is African American. And so I think, because I come from an intact mixed race family right, with two parents and a sister, and I didn't grow up knowing both sides of my family equally, but I did know about them, I met both sets of grandparents, et cetera, et cetera. So I've always identified as mixed race, but at the same time, I also have always experienced the one drop rule right, which is that African Americans, no matter how distant their black background, are considered black. And my sister is darker skinned than I am. So, you know, I've never thought of myself as necessarily looking white, you know. I can't even imagine what that means, you know. But I know that people don't always recognize me as being either Black or not white. That's kind of the words I end up using are not white, because I think that's not quite the same as white and not quite the same as Black. So my sense of myself has always been that not only am I mixed race, but I identify as Black in terms of.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:I think that any time that you have a relationship with an aspect of identity that is considered inferior or that is oppressed. There is a tendency to inhabit that proudly because there's nothing to be ashamed of, right? By the same token, I will say that my dad grew up in the segregated South, and so he felt that his attitude, and my mother's attitude too, about my sisters and my identities was not necessarily that helpful. Right, they didn't talk about race. Their attitude was we were extraordinary individuals. Right, you know, with these two parents we could be whatever we wanted and they weren't going to tell us how to identify, and that's not very helpful to a child you know yes.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:So, like when we were growing up, my dad was in the military and we were on Air Force bases and my sister, like I said, she's this, she's not really that much darker than I am, but you know how it is like I sort of become virtually white and she becomes visibly black as far as the visual register is concerned. Yeah, so she was a brown and we and we grew up in California part of the time, so she was a brown little girl. We both get browner, you know, in the sun, with black hair, and I'm my color. I was a bit darker than I had all brown hair when I was young and we went to church.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:My mom was Catholic, my dad was not religious, but we went to church and my sister, who was at the time, she was three years old and she would say everybody's looking at me, everybody's looking at me, and that's true because people stared at us all the time, no matter where we went, right. But my parents said no, they're not, nobody's looking at you. No, they're not, you know. And so my sister and I talk about it now that I think parents try to normalize things for children when things are not normal.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Right, so true that it's sometimes not actually helpful to pretend that these things aren't a visible difference or to pretend that other people aren't going to notice these things about us, when that's the world we live in and we get their intention, and it's very, a very sweet intention, right, like, oh, you're just my little girl, like that's, that's all, nothing else matters. Like in a world where it does matter and is is not end up ending up being entirely helpful, I I want to ask was there a moment, if you're saying your parents didn't really talk about race, was there a moment if you're saying your parents didn't really talk about race? Was there a moment in your childhood that you remember your earliest memory of, like realizing that race was a thing, realizing what race was, and that you were somehow different in that? Does that question make sense?
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Yes, yes, that question absolutely makes sense.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:There was a slight Zoom connection error here, so she said she can't really remember a time where she wasn't conscious of race.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:That's probably because I grew up with my French family.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:So when I was born in France and then we lived in a military base in Germany, and my grandmother in particular, really, you know, she loved us, really loved us Right, we were very close to her, but she was very self-conscious about my dad being Black.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:When I was young and I especially remember this with my sister, but even before that, I remember my grandmother's intense self-consciousness about us being different because we were American and we were also Black, and so my mom is from a fairly small town and it's the kind of place where, you know, europeans go out to buy their food and then they cook it. Right, they buy it at the market and then they cook it. And so whenever we were in France, we went out with my grandmother to buy the food and then we, you know, went back home and she always talked to all the people in the street and she'd say we, you know, went back home and she always talked to all the people in the street and she'd say oh, you know, these are my granddaughters. Oh, my, I'm Simon, your granddaughters are here, you know, you must be so happy. And she'd say yes, and then she'd say their father's black. You know like he is a wonderful person.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Wow, make sure to throw the caveat in there. He's great, but Right.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:So it was always brought to our attention, and even visually, right, like okay, so I can remember, when my sister was born, I was four years old and by that time, like I said, I don't remember not realizing that there was a difference, right, because my dad spoke English and my mom spoke French and my dad speaks French, but I spoke both languages and I knew that they looked different, although I didn't think of them racially at when I was four, Right, but they did, you know, look physically different and I've always had really frizzy hair. So that's kind of part of my identity is knowing that I had this hair and that my mother had to kind of deal with it, you know, and when my sister was born, she was brown and I never thought of her as, oh, she's brown, it's like that's just Vicky, right. But when she, after she was born, people started looking at us and not believing that we were sisters, right. So how can you know? Wait a minute, you know your eyes are blue and your eyes are brown and she's light and she's dark.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:So it was really people calling attention to our difference that always kind of seeded in me that I was different, right, you know that I was different and I feel like I, I think, like most kids, I grew up wanting to be just one thing, and I didn't necessarily think that that meant white. But I knew that. You know, when I was a little girl, I loved princesses, you know, cinderella, et cetera, and all of the imagery was blonde haired, blue eyed princesses. So I used to wish for those kinds of features, even though I didn't think of it as wanting to be white. You know what I mean.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Yeah, I did the same thing, similar thing, pretty much. My favorite princess was aurora in sleeping beauty and I just wanted her gorgeous, blonde, long, just waved hair, and I don't know how old I I became when it finally was like, oh, that is white, like those features are white features, so that's I want. I want to look white. When I was very small six, seven it was just, oh, I just want those features, I don't have them and I want those and those look pretty because, all of the people who are told that they're pretty, look like that.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:And what's your background?
Jisel Soleil Ayon:My father was born and raised in Mexico, and my mother is African-American, who also she was an Air Force brat.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:So she grew up on an Air Force base her whole life, okay, okay. So we have a really similar similarity in terms of being mixed culturally as well as nationally as well as racially. Are you a dual national?
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Technically I actually just found this out, probably a couple months ago my mom was like, yeah, you have a. We were talking about a friend who she's tri-national, she's got a passport for America, she's got citizenship in Ireland and in England. And my mom was like, yeah, you well you're, you know, you have dual citizenship here in Mexico. And I was like what I never knew that you didn't.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:I didn't realize, just because my dad was born and raised there, that I also get that. And she was like yeah, if you want to do the paperwork, you can get a Mexico passport.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:And I was like wait, how am I just now?
Jisel Soleil Ayon:you know today, years old, when I find out that I can actually have legitimate dual citizenship there. But yeah, and it's interesting that you say you know culturally too. Here I explained to the professor that my mother was one of two, maybe maybe three other Black families on the base. In my intro episode I did say that she was the only family and my mom listened to the episode and corrected me. But she really was only one of maybe two. She said Maybe three. So for the most part she really was isolated when it came to being around other African Americans.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Were they only in the US?
Jisel Soleil Ayon:No, they lived in Turkey, they lived in the Philippines, they lived in yeah there were a couple overseas countries that they were in.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:And so my mom, she never got that like quote unquote Black culture, yeah, so then I didn't have any of that like, oh, all of the African-American movies you know, like, oh, these, you know, all Black people know these movies, and I'm like I've never seen any of those because my parents, you know my mom didn't show me any of those Things like that where I feel like I missed out on some cultural pieces because she didn't have those cultural pieces growing up.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:And do you know if your mother was the? Was her father an officer in the military?
Jisel Soleil Ayon:He was a colonel.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Okay, yes, see, there you go. Had he been enlisted, she would have been around a whole lot more Black people. But he was an officer and it's really interesting because and who liked to be in band and things like that, he could see that I was moving into wider and wider circles because I was with the officer's kids and he didn't tell me this until later. But that's part of the reason he decided to leave the military when he did, which was when I was 14. Wow, because he felt that as I move forward in these circles, I would be discriminated against because of not being the only kid of color.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Yeah, and when did he tell you? When did he end up telling you that that's why he did it?
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:I think, that's a really good question. I'm not sure I would say that. Sometime when I was in college, I think, is when he told me I was probably in my 20s Because, you know, among the military people in Germany, right, that's where we lived a lot. And there were other mixed race families, again among the enlisted people, there were a fair number of white American and black American GIs that were married to German women and to French women. And I even had, actually in grade school, when I was in about the seventh grade, there was another mixed race kid with a German mom and a Black dad named Rudy, who was my classmate and we both participated in this panel about race and difference and identity.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Wow, yeah, so this is the thing that Air Force. In my, our experience the Air Force was really very like, aware of race and ethnicity. You know, they wouldn't have stationed my father in a place below the Mason Dixon line before 1967. They wouldn't have stationed him, father, in a place below the Mason-Dixon line before 1967. They wouldn't have stationed him in a place where he couldn't have his wife and his kids.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:But I wonder if that world of I mean I think that that world of officers was way more white and probably less, maybe felt less of an imperative to talk about race, felt less of an imperative to talk about race, and the fact that he was conscious that he specifically did not want you to be discriminated against and solely surrounded by he didn't want you to be, you know one in the class Exactly.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:He didn't want me to be the only non-white kid participating in things that were, you know, for the smart kids.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Yeah, and for me we had a moment for like beginning or beginning or very middle of high school, my dad's job changed locations and he wanted to move us in Southern California, not ultimately too far, but from Long Beach area to Orange County down to like Irvine and my mother mother specifically said absolutely not yeah, I am not having my kids around the affluent and we're, you know, we're lower middle class, so you know we haven't had.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:We've been very grateful, very, very lucky and have been well enough off on my whole childhood. But we're not, you know, affluent and and that area is for anyone who's not? Familiar is is much more affluent and she was like I don't want her. For her it was more money than it was race, but I think that that's slightly.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:you know hand in hand with race in class and and so she was like, yeah, I don't want my kids to to be worried about what they're wearing every day and and be worried that they they need the latest thing, and I don't want them to be stressed about that when they should just be worrying about school and worrying about being a kid and and all that stuff.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:And again, I think I was by that time probably around sophomore year or something. But she told me later as well. She was like, yeah, we were gonna move to seal beach. And I told your father no, I'm sorry, you're going to have to just deal with the longer commute. I'm not raising my kids there.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Yeah, yeah, we had a really similar experience too. We actually lived. When my sister was in high school, we lived in Mission Viejo.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Yes, my, my poor sister.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:I was in college at the time. She was the one who had to go to high school there. Then they ended up in Riverside County in Moreno Valley, which was way more diverse, but she had that experience of being, you know, the non-white teenager in Orange County and I don't think it was easy.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Once my mother told me that that was a decision she made, I was like thank you because, I wouldn't have had a say, obviously, and I think it would have been yeah, and Long Beach is pretty diverse. I'm really grateful to have been there.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:It's a really great diverse area wow okay, so we've kind of talked about like my next question would have been like background and how'd you find yourself, where we sort of have been talking about that. So basically I guess, how did you find yourself to where you are now in terms of like you landed on? I am ethnic studies, like I'm gonna study ethnic studies and and cultural studies, af African American studies, all that stuff.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Yeah, so I was a feminist studies major as an undergraduate. Even at that time I was not looking at mixed race literature per se, but mixed race identities was always something that was very interesting to me. You know, what we would come to call intersectional identity was already something that I was looking at in terms of feminist studies when I started graduate school. I would say that one attraction to graduate school was teaching, because I actually designed a course in mixed race and popular culture. So I started graduate school in 93. So this was the 90s, and the 90s was the time when the movement for changing the US census right the 2000 census was the first census in which Americans were able to check all the races that applied and they would all be counted and aggregated right. So that whole just choose one, the resistance to just choose one is something that I was aware of and it's also a matter of the post-1967 coming of age right. So I'm a bit older than that cohort of people.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:But in the 90s when I started in graduate school, I was in ethnic studies programs with other mixed race people. Some of my best friends were they were working mostly in sociology, but they were mixed race and we started a group together to think about mixed race scholarship and what that would look like. And at Berkeley there was a professor named Terry Wilson. He was a Native American studies professor and he created the first class on people of mixed ethnicity in the United States, the first class in the UC system, and at that time in 93, it had been taught for almost 20 years. And in addition to teaching the class, he also people you know there were.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:There were student groups on campuses, mixed race student groups also exploring identity and doing things like creative writing. So the first academic conference on mixed race happened around 1990. And even though I wasn't in graduate school yet, I went to the conference and found out about the combination of both academic work and creative work that people engaged in mixed race identity were doing. And there was also a popular. So there was a coming of age part where people are in their 20s and 30s who are now from these legal relationships. And there was also, you know, in 1965, the United States finally lifted all of the anti-Asian immigration. Asian immigration had been limited since 1917. So in 1965, they finally lifted all of those barriers to Asian immigration.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:So the growth of the Asian American community also came along with the growth of a mixed race Asian American community. Right, the fact that I really liked teaching and I was interested in the topic and there was my own family background not so much my immediate family background of my parents, but actually in my father's heritage there were white relatives and I was really curious about that, because I was curious about my own physical features. Right, my mom has dark hair and brown eyes, my dad has dark hair and brown eyes, I have kind of blue, gray eyes, and so I knew I had to have a recessive from both sides. Right, that's the only way I can look the way I look. And so I had a great grandmother on my father's side. She was my father's mother's mother. Okay, I lived to be 104 years old, wow, and I did a bunch of research with her in the nineties. She was the only member of my dad's family who would talk explicitly about mixed race, because the religious black, southern people in my father's family right, if you had asked them, I would ask my great aunt you know, aunt fell, how did we get the name Streeter? And she'd say honey, every child is a child of God, because, as it turns out, streeter is not a name we inherited from a paternal ancestor.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:We had a maternal ancestor on my father's side who had children with a white man. So she was I don't remember which generation of great. I think she was a great great grandmother. She had children with a white man and my grandfather is from that line of children. My grandfather, I guess technically he would have been 25% white because he had a white grandfather. His own father was biracial, white father, black mother in North Carolina, greenville, in Pitt County. My great grandmother, who was on my dad's mother's side, actually knew all these people, right, like it's a small place, they all grew up together. She actually knew that white man. She didn't know him, know him, but she saw him because she knew his kids, right, she knew these four kids that he had with Gracie, this African-American woman, and she knew that that was. She went to school with one of these girls. That was her dad, right, mr Wichard was her dad and Streeter was the name of another man that this female ancestor of mine had children with. He gave his name Streeter to my ancestors.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:To all the children that's right.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Wow, when you start to look at, as you know, probably right, when you start to look at the African American experience, that experience of mixed race, it starts with the fact that female slaves were owned, right. So their sexuality was owned like everything else, and they were not only subjected to rape and you know the imperative to have sex with their owners, but they were also bred right With other African-American men. So the collective experience under slavery was this experience of not being able to protect a woman's sexuality. And especially after the slave trade stopped, the United States stopped participating in the international slave trade in 1808. So, by the time, so that meant from then on, you were just reproducing your own slaves, right, when Frederick Douglass wrote his narrative in 1845, he actually said you know, there's a whole race of American slaves that are being born that look really different from the people who first came from Africa, and that's because our fathers are our masters. Our fathers are our masters, you know, yeah. So that aspect of African-American existence in the US informs what I do, because, you know, the post-slavery experience of Black women was still a compromised experience, right, like, did my female ancestor choose to have sexual relations with this white man? Maybe, but it was a compromised situation. You know, and and because of the way laws against interracial marriage support white supremacy, so the way that the laws worked in places like North Carolina, this gentleman who had children with my ancestor, he couldn't have married her. If he wanted to, he would have to move out of the state, but what that meant was white men didn't have an imperative to marry the women they wanted to have sex with and to have legal heirs, and those relationships continued.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:One of the famous ones is Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina Senator, who lived to be like 103. He died in 2002. It had been an open secret for decades that he had a Black daughter, right, a daughter with a Black woman who was like out there somewhere, and she wrote this book, called Dear Senator, that I teach in my classes. That came out in 2003. Her name was Essie Mae Washington Williams and she has passed away since then, but her experience was like the slave era experience, right.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Her father, strom Thurmond, was from this little town in South Carolina. His family was an affluent family. They had had a relationship with the, with the ancestors of the people they enslaved, right like people they enslaved became the people who worked for them. And one summer, when he was 22 years old, home from college, he had an affair with this woman and she was a domestic in his household and she was 15 years old and he didn't marry her, right, obviously, didn't claim SE May. She was so interesting because she was very respectful, right? She didn't publish her memoir until after he had passed away. But he passed away and she's like this is my father. He always acknowledged me. I don't have his name, but this was my father and her Strom Thurmond's legal heirs were like okay, you know, she took a genetic test and they acknowledged her as his daughter and eventually they added her name to the monument for him. In South Carolina there's a monument to him with all the names of his children and they added her name.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:So those stories that's ubiquitous in the American South. There's all these families with a white side and a black side, right? So a lot of my research started with that African-American experience, that historical experience, right Alongside my own experience, my genealogy, which is post-1967, right, dad, in the military. You know, american militarism and imperialism has resulted in all kinds of interracial marriages and mixed race populations, right. So I'm kind of more part of this diaspora of mixed race people that comes about because of things like militarism and globalization and stuff like that.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Yeah, wow, which totally answered my next question, so I don't even have to talk about it which was just like how has your background and experience shaped your research?
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Oh yeah, but you were asking how we got to ethnic studies. So I was saying that was the mixed race part, but the ethnic studies part, and I think this is really interesting and important, right. So first to say, you know, I am French by birth and I speak French, but I've always felt more like an American than a French person, and I think that that's partly because of my difference always being pointed out to me in France, right, which is that I was American and that I was Black, right. And even though France never had Jim Crow and never made laws against interracial marriage, there's a lot of anti-Black racism in France, all throughout Europe. And that's not to say right, like, because I'm sure you know this too communities of color are not necessarily welcoming to mixed race people. You like, I've had plans. Communities of color treat me, you know, not nicely, right. So it's not that, but it is that, but it's more that I think for me, my comfort zone, um, kind of as a thinker and as a person, was that I was just more comfortable in the United States, which is a much more diverse place, right, and then most places in Europe outside of the big cities.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Ethnic studies is so important in so many ways. One of the most important is that it revises the whole story of the United States and how it was founded, because it's imagined to be a nation of immigrants with an ethnic melting pot that somehow, magically, you know, these white natives were born from this ethnic melting pot. Right, and that's the version of US history that people were taught for a long time before we started talking about things like settler colonialism and white supremacy, right? I think one of the most important contributions of ethnic studies was to look at the way that racial difference arrests assimilation. Everybody else can assimilate, you know the European groups. They leave their language behind, they leave their culture behind, and there's a Harvard sociologist named Mary Waters who created a term called symbolic ethnicity to talk about what happens to white ethnics.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:She added in terms of identity.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Because they know they have their heritage right, that they're Swedish and Italian and German or whatever it is. But their experience as Americans is that that ethnic heritage is somewhat distant and it might be acknowledged in special foods or in celebrations or in holidays, but it's not an ethnic identity that influences them a lot, because the way in which ethnic identity for Europeans worked in the United States, the process of assimilation, was assimilation to an Anglo-American norm. You speak English, you stop doing those weird things that you're called a fess, right, whatever it is right and you start intermarrying with people of a different ethnic background, right, which is how well, how we get Americans who say, oh, I'm Portuguese and I'm Swedish and I'm Dutch or whatever it is. But that process of assimilation does not happen for racially defined people. Others, right, they don't get to be American because they can't be white, so they end up being the perpetual foreigners that Asian Americans experience, right, like where are you from? You know, and the perpetual being on the bottom of the racial hierarchy that African Americans experience.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:You know, the perpetual outsider status of the Native Americans. And then you know I think it is interesting and this is part of your background, so this is interesting. I'm curious to see what you think of this, because the Latinx people right, let's call them that for now. Yeah, and also I know you want to talk about names and language, and I also think that that's fascinating. Yeah, my parents live in New Mexico now and in New Mexico people still call themselves Hispanic and that's also the term that's still used in the US census, but that's considered quite offensive to some people.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Yes, I'm aware of, like the culture right now. You know, latinx became a way of saying it. That's also to do with, you know, gender, filling in the X because of the gender language, which is so interesting to me. Yes, yes, me. And I've used my Hispanic to describe myself, and I didn't know about it being an offensive term to some groups of people, and I would still, to this day, use that as a descriptor if I'm not deciding to say Latinx, or if I don't want to say Mexican because it's also.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:I've had people be like mexican isn't a race right, like okay thank you, but also that's just how I use you know, that's just how I use language to describe myself. It's just easy to say mexican, versus figuring out whether I say latina or latinx, or afro-latina or hispanic I can just say mexican, I you know, but I don't actually know though the history or the context of why somealupe, hidalgo and California, new Mexico, arizona and Texas, which had all been Mexico. Right, this is the, this is the Mexican-American War, the Alamo, you know yeah, I was in San.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Antonio for tour, not like June of this year, and I went to the Alamo. I had no context, historical context for this war and I was, like I always think of texas as being predominantly white, and I was I.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:This was like one of my first times visiting texas.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Really, we had done san antonio and then we were going to el paso right after that um and I had spent time in dallas a little bit for like a week for my tour before that, but this was my first time being like oh, oh, no, there is a huge Hispanic or Latinx community here. I did not know, and I had visited the Alamo and learned all about this Mexican-American war and realizing that, oh no, this was, this was all land that was completely actually Mexico.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:So many children left behind in the US educational system right.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:And history was my least favorite subject, and that's so sad because history is so fascinating, right, like there's so much cool stuff, so exactly, so you know the amount of territory, just the sheer like, because the United States expanded, like that's how it became the United States, and so that expansion was so interesting because at that point, in 1848, all Mexicans became American citizens. But that doesn't mean that they became white Right, especially if they had obvious indigenous heritage, and we know that. So in Mexico they use the term mestizaje to describe themselves. They are this European indigenous mix, right, and they have their own really conflicted relationship with indigenous heritage, like, on the one hand, it's this honorable thing that they are proud of. On the other hand, most of the people who are poor are indigenous and to call somebody an Indian is an insult. So that hierarchy is there and the you know, they also have this myth of the people, which is also really sexist. Hernando Cortez had this Native American mistress and she's called La Malinche, the fucked one.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Yeah, yeah.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:There's that she had the children with Cortez right. So she's the, she's the traitor and mother of the Mexican race. And then, but then they also do this really interesting syncretic stuff, because the virgin, the virgin of Guadalupe, is brown right, Brown Madonna. So the US still has the Hispanic is an ethnic group, but they also want to know on the census, are you a white Hispanic or are you a black Hispanic? And they want to know it for health reasons too, because race and genealogy right.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Yeah, okay, wait, help me with this because honestly, and I've never admitted that, I've never quite understood this, but when I'm filling out my race and ethnicity, and that's it, honestly, kind of segues perfect to what we'll end up going into the breaking. What is the actual difference in terms of the definitions for race, ethnicity and nationality? Because I think I still get confused all the time.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:I think it's very confusing and complex.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Yeah, so when they want me to mark, they have all of these, you know, white, pacific Islander, black, african-american, and then they have a separate question that says Hispanic or non-Hispanic.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:And.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:I've always been like because I am black and I am. Mexican. I've always been like. Why is it two separate questions to ask Hispanic or non-Hispanic, and then you're also marking these other things in a separate question. Why is that?
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Yes, yes, yes. Well, because Mexican citizens became American citizens at a time when citizenship was very limited, at a time when citizenship was very limited and it was difficult, for you know, 1848,. Black Americans are still slaves, so they can't be citizens. Native Americans aren't citizens, right, they're outsiders within, on their tribal lands, and the Asian migrations had begun. But they brought a stop to that pretty quickly. There was a naturalization act passed in 1790 that limited citizenship to white persons.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:So the incorporation of Mexico, like when you actually, when you look at the debates that happened at the time, there were political leaders who warned that that would lead to mongrelization. If the United States incorporated Mexico, we would become this mongrel nation. Because they're not white, because they're not white, they're not European. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that you kind of see the slippage of ethnicity. Because they are a mixed ethnic group, they speak a European language, hispanic. That's what the term Hispanic comes from. Hispaniola, that's the settlement right, but so that it's a colonial, it's a term that comes from the history of colonization and that is their language and that's a European language. But they are also mixed with indigenous people and in the United States, where they've tried to limit the number of Native American people as much as possible. Because they owe Native American people so much, they actually use the incorporation of Mexico to try to limit Native Americans.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Right Like people were, people were strongly discouraged, like the whole thing you're talking about. Well, I'm both right, I'm Afro, latinx, I am Hispanic and I am Black. The systems do not want to know that. Right Like they don't want to know that there are Mexicans who become American citizens, who are actually also indigenous. Like that makes things too complicated because the federal government, because of the fact that they took the land from the Native Americans right Like, if you read about the treaties that people were writing about, they were like the Americans never had any intention of honoring those treaties ever. Right Like they were done completely in bad faith.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:The federal government only recognizes some tribes, not all tribes. If you're from a federally recognized tribe, you're not considered part of that tribe, according to the federal government, unless you're 25% that tribe, so they, the federal government imposes a blood quantum that Native American tribes don't even impose. They don't define themselves that way. So the American system really works to classify people in ways that benefit expansion and capitalism and that kind of thing, and I think people use the terms, terms that are racial and terms that are about ethnicity. They use them interchangeably all the time because race is genealogy it is what you inherit from your parents, your grandparents, your ancestors, right Biologically. But race is also a fiction, because there are not separate races in humanity right.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:We are human race.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:We are a human race. Now, did we migrate to different parts of the world? Do our physiologies reflect biological adaptation to different circumstances? Right, it makes sense that people in the Southern Hemisphere are darker because of the sun. People in the Northern Hemisphere don't have as much melanin because they needed the sun. So there are these differences that have to do with us being life forms on earth. But those differences which have been interpreted as racial differences, those differences which have been interpreted as racial differences, there's no such thing as race. It doesn't exist. Race is a social construct.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:However, if you speak to epidemiologists and medical researchers, it is the case that there are genetic differences that we inherit that result in certain types of conditions. So, for example, sickle cell anemia for African Americans, tay-sachs disease for Jewish Americans. So there are traits, especially when it comes to genetic mutations. So there's and I'm not a scientist, right, but it's basically looking at kind of aggregate numbers Like you can't make really concrete distinctions between the races, because we are all one human race, but you can look in the aggregate and say, yes, you know, in this specific group these kinds of health conditions are prevalent. And of course, there's also, you know, there's tissue matching for organ donation. There's blood type and it's true that certain blood types may very well be more prominent in some groups.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:So it was when I started talking to epidemiologists you know people who research diseases who said, well, yeah, you know, we do need to know people's background, but they're not for just just classifying blindly. They're like we need to know all the background, all the details, yeah, all the details, because your need or my need for an organ donor might be very different from someone who's from a mono racial background. I mean, this is kind of part of the work I do when I look at the mulatto and the mulatta in African American studies. Is that it crosses these boundaries right? Because, especially for African Americans, for other ethnic groups too, there's so much diversity within the group because of ancestral race mixture that there isn't necessarily a big difference between a biracial person or a person with grandparents of different races and a person who's African-American with ancestral race mixture. So you can't necessarily make the distinction between mixed race people and people from monoracial groups based on genetics.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Because visually it might look one way like you're the mixed person and you're the African-American person, but there's so much in your heritage that's going to be a mixture anyway that biologically you wouldn't be able to tell.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Yes, that's exactly right and in like, in course, be linked, because racially defined groups may very well share culture, and I think that there's some examples where that's more obvious than others. Right Like, so Jewish people. Jewish people are an interesting example, I think, because they're not a race, but they have a blood rule. Right, you're Jewish. If your mother was Jewish, now your mother can convert to Judaism, like, for example, ivanka Trump, who's married to Jared Kushner, who's Jewish. She converted to Judaism so that his kids would be Jewish according to Jewish law. So there is a blood rule in the Jewish definition of Jewishness.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Right, that's still a practice, like that's their decision to practice that culturally. So that is an ethnicity.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Well, what's ethnic is Judaic cultural practices, because it's possible, right for a Jewish person to have a Jewish mom and be Jewish according to Jewish law, but not practice anything ethnically Jewish Like. So, for example, there's secular Jews, so there's people who are Jewish who don't go to temple and don't, I mean who are even atheist sometimes, right, but they still participate in aspects of their Jewish identity and Jewish heritage and, of course, they're affected by anti-Semitism. So the more you research this stuff, I think, and if you just think about it as well, every group is incredibly diverse, with a huge, you know different relationships to like blood, heritage, ethnic practices, secular life. You know all of that, but it's basically ethnicity, cultural practices, race, the body.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:And the nationality would just be like where you're literally from right it's the nation, what is your country of citizenship?
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Or you know, maybe you're a stateless person like the Palestinians. Yeah, you know, maybe you're a stateless person like the Palestinians yeah. You know, you can be a stateless person, but my nationality? I actually was naturalized when I was nine years old because I was born in France. So I didn't have US citizenship, but I had the right to be naturalized because of my dad's being in the Air Force and being an American. So I became a naturalized citizen when I was nine. I have my certificate with my little nine-year-old signature on it, you know.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:How cute. So if I were to then pursue getting actual paperwork for my dual citizenship, I would be naturalized as a national Mexican.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:I think in your case it's interesting. I think different countries might go about it differently because not everybody has the rule of birthplace citizenship either. So we have birthplace citizenship in the United States, which a lot of people are trying to change. But I know that in some countries Japan is a country actually it they really limit who can be Japanese. So, for example, if you're Korean, it's very hard to become a Japanese citizen because they have a long standing racial animosity. You know like a sense of racial superiority, like the Japanese have a background in that sense that a lot like white supremacy. You know there's a sense of and when I say the Japanese I'm talking about the history of people's. You know expressions about that identity, not Japanese people today and the government.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Yeah, that was right. The state Absolutely not Japanese people today. And the government? Yeah, that was right, the state Absolutely. So it's not easy, for, like, I think that a Japanese woman who gives birth to a mixed race kid, I think that that kid has Japanese citizenship, but I think that a foreign woman who gives birth to a Japanese man's child, they may not be a citizen. Now, you know, you can't, you can't quote me because, but it does, but it does shift right yeah, country to country.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:People's rules about nationality are differently and it and it really is that nation right and and that is also complicated because of the ways that conflicts, as well as colonialism and expansion and militarism, have shifted borders.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:So, yeah, so I, which goes to show us a little bit how much it is a construct that we define and create and not actually a physical thing, a physical difference, you know, biologically, and yeah, that's so interesting. Well, so, in a follow up to talking about the technical definitions of these words, do you think is essential to use those words to distinguish?
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:You know it's funny, because I actually think the model of intersectionality could be a good way to think about race, ethnicity and nationality, at least in terms of how they would be articulated by an individual. I think that when you're talking about individuals and groups, there are different stakes, like what we say about race and racism, for example, race is a social construct, but racism is a very real phenomenon, and so you can't dismiss with magical thinking the effects of racism. And I think that you could say the same thing about nationalism. There are expressions of nationalism that aren't harmful, but there are expressions of nationalism that have been very harmful.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:So I think that I'm going to sound like every academic out there when I say that it's contextual, right. It's really really important to establish context that these are not. But, like you're saying, these are human creations, right. These are ways of making sense of the world and the creation of the nation state. I don't know a lot about the history of the creation of the nation state, but it seems to me at least right that it doesn't simply arise from the expression of culture. It arises from disputes over borders, disputes over land, disputes over resources, right. And this model of competition.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Right, us versus them and having to find groups to survive. And then you come across a different group and it becomes a threat to your own survival.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:And I think that, at least in my thinking, I think it's easy to default to the idea that, well, human beings are tribal right. This is tribalism. But I kind of think, well, I think we really need to update our thinking about this right.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:A little bit. Yeah, you know, like we're not living in tribes anymore and you know, we, I think, can understand that there are those of us that have enormous privilege, right, when it comes to can I cross the border? Do I get to live in a safe place? Right, and I think that it's incumbent on all of us to understand that here in the United States for sure, that our comforts and our resources, they come at a cost. Right, like we consume 25% of the world's resources and I can't remember what the statistic is, but it's crazy. Right, like Americans have this outsized really bad effect on the planet when it comes to resources because we consume so much. And this is what the global South is doing. That's what's really exciting. Right, like all these different countries are saying you know, we're tired of these extractive policies of taking our minerals and taking our resources and using it to enrich Western countries.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:And I think that ethnic studies has had a really strong role in creating a level of consciousness about these politics. Right, like, the tipping point of the murder of George Floyd was really remarkable to me because I didn't think I'd ever see conventional news anchors talk about white supremacy. I was like, wow, you know, I didn't think that day would come. You know where there's a the appropriation of the discourse around white supremacy and race privilege in the United States and to talk about it it's a real thing. I mean, I was in class yesterday and one of my students was saying she was feeling really hopeless because she felt like the Black Lives Matter movement had really been kind of deflated. And I guess I really take the long view with stuff like that, because change takes such a long time. And I also have to say that when it comes to police brutality, black Americans are vulnerable out of proportion to their population to police brutality. But the American police are violent and they hurt everybody.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Yeah.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Right Like you go onto YouTube, you can find white cops. You know knocking down pregnant white women, hitting old white people. You know killing white children. You know the problem of excessive force with the American police. It's a problem that affects us all. It doesn't affect us all equally, but it affects us all because state violence has become such a problem in our country.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Yeah, ok, can we shift gears? Would that be okay? I want to talk about entertainment a little bit, cause I have a question for you about race and acting. Is that okay? Absolutely? Because your questions helped me think about something that I thought was so fascinating and that I wondered I thought you know you might not even know about also. So it was your question about misconceptions and stereotypes that mixed race people face, and particularly in the performing arts industry, and I was thinking about the history of blackface and yellowface and brownface right in Hollywood film and to some extent in television as well, and there's a couple of really notorious examples. So Miss Saigon was on stage some years ago and Jonathan Price, who's this white British actor, wore eye prosthetics to look Asian because he was playing this Asian role, and it really was.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:I had no idea.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Yeah.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Here. She looked up an article that's called the Battle of Miss Saigon, Yellowface, Art and Opportunity. I'm going to link it in the show notes so that you can read it in full if you'd like.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:So it opened in 1989 and he started wearing his eye prosthetics when casting. Like that happens, it's always so notable to me that if you wanted a Eurasian actor, I'm sure that you could find a Eurasian actor A hundred percent. And to ask Jonathan Price or any white actor to wear eye prosthetics, is you not only just really racist, but also it kind of raises this question of what are you trying to do? Yeah, so that was one really famous one, and then the other one was angelina jolie's film a mighty heart I have not seen that from 2007.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Okay, so in in a mighty heart, she played the widow of daniel pearl, and daniel pearl was an american journalist, a jewish journalist, who worked at the wall street journal and he was doing research in pakistan in 2002. So this is post 9-11. And he was captured by Islamist militants in Cuban mom and a Dutch Jewish dad. And she's kind of a light brown skinned woman with curly hair and when Angelina Jolie played her, she wore this tan makeup to make herself look a little darker and a curly wig. And I remember so well at the time there was this black female journalist whose name I can't remember right now, but she wrote a piece about that film and she wrote saying it wouldn't have been so great if Angelina Jolie had called someone like Tandy Newton and said girl, I've got the most amazing role in mind and you would kill it Rightandy newton. She's white and african and she's a british citizen and she's mixed race and looks mixed race. Oh, she was in west world. She actually has a big role in west world.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:I think I know who you're talking about. Actually, I think someone has told me that they think I look like her.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Yeah, you definitely have similar features. So this piece by this Black woman was like, you know, can Angelina Jolie play this role? Sure she can, right, but she's not really authentic to the role. And could you find people authentic to the role? Well, yes, you know, really, in fact you could. And Tandy Newton is this absolutely amazing actress, and I've never forgotten that piece because you know, it gets to that question that I know we are interested in, which is representation, right, yeah, and the politics of casting.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:And you're in Hamilton, and what Hamilton is doing, which I find so interesting and so bizarre, is that the founding fathers, who were all terrible, okay, yep, have been transformed by Hamilton into these cool guys, right, yeah. And I feel like it's so interesting to me because I feel like, ok, you know, I get it, I do, but I find it really troubling that we are giving ourselves this opportunity to kind of like them, in a way, by displacing their whiteness, their racism, their status as rapists, right, I mean Thomas Jefferson played by David Diggs who doesn't want to see that? Who doesn't want to like David Diggs in anything? Exactly, right, but it's really troubling to think about the transformation of these men in this way, right, by a cast of color. And it's this really interesting take on what you probably know way more about than I do, which is the history of race blind casting. Right, it's race conscious casting. It's not race blind casting because the only white member is King George, right?
Jisel Soleil Ayon:And then you have the ensemble.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Exactly, in the ensemble. The ensemble is a multiracial ensemble, absolutely, absolutely. But they, but you know, it's very selective who, the, who, the white characters are.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:I took a moment to explain to her that there were changes made to the what did I miss number after COVID and I don't know the specific details of that. But there is an article, if you're curious to learn more, that was by the New York Times, titled as Broadway Returns Shows Rethink and Restage Depictions of Race. I'm also going to link that in the show notes for you to read if you'd like to. It's a very interesting article and if you are a big theater fan, I do encourage you to read it. It does mention a couple other shows, including Lion King and the Book of Mormon, and how those also made certain changes post COVID, post shutdown, because of the BLM movement and all of the thinking that we were doing, and I think that's really beautiful. So I encourage you to check out that article for sure.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Yeah, you know. Ok, so what did I miss? He was in France as the ambassador and he started having sex with the girl who was sent to be the young. She was sent to France to accompany his younger daughter, maria, to France. Right, sally was sent with her and she was 14 years old and he's 33 years older than her. And when she came back to the United States, I want to say they were there for four years. Maybe I have to look, but when she came back to the United States she was there pregnant. That that I feel like. I feel like that's how you know. There weren't a lot of women in that room for that whole what did I miss thing. He's just the most egregious example, right, but basically this is what I'm talking about, right, I can't articulate it very well yet, but I'm just not comfortable with the way that the founding fathers have been rehabilitated by this soundtrack and this multiracial cast.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:I hear you in terms of that and I think it's really tough One, because if you say anything remotely not positive about Hamilton, you've got a bunch of people on your back being like what are you?
Jisel Soleil Ayon:talking about. This is the best musical in the world and yes, there's really great stuff about Hamilton artistically, the way the music's written, you know the lyrics, all of that stuff. There are great parts about Hamilton. But I agree that if we avoid talking about any of the ways that that it might be a negative impact. I don't think that's healthy either. Right If we, if we're avoiding talking about it in that way because we're just like it's so great we can't, we can only talk about it, about how great it is. I agree that when I first saw Hamilton and it was like four years after it had come out I avoided listening to soundtracks before.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:I see the show and I hadn't been able to see it on Broadway, so I only saw it when it came through LA, and so it was four years I think three or four years into the production running that I'd seen it or listened to really any of it, except for like things I couldn't avoid because I was in, you know, high school theater or whatever. And I remember kind of thinking when I first saw it, like the. I think the initial question that most people ask themselves is like who is the villain, which I think is a great talking point that the show is trying to make. Know, we go into the show thinking hamilton is the hero and burr is the villain, and then we start to go oh, I'm not actually so sure who is the hero and who is the villain, and we we leave the show knowing that, like that people can be both, that that it's not black and white, that you know that we can see why burr did the things that he did and it's not because he's just a villain sort of thing. So it's like, okay, those are really great questions as humans to be asking ourselves, but that people like George Washington, who in American history in general, those founding fathers, are idolized.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Look at all the great things they did. They built this country from scratch. You know how amazing that they did that. They fought for the freedom and then they built this country from scratch. These are the men that made that but did that, they fought for the freedom and then they build this country from scratch. These are the men that made that.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:But also, yeah, what about all the bad parts and the fact that that the, that american schools, typically, you know the, the histories in american schools want us to think all of the only good things about these men and honestly, frankly, to be honest with you, I haven't quite thought about it in the way that you have just stated, and you're right that, like you know, it's amazing that young people are loving theater because of this show, but there's, there are young people that now are like, yeah, all of these founding fathers are so great and we don't have all of the other parts. And I will say that, like it's a musical and the musical is already so long it's three hours and you can't possibly fit, like, all of the aspects of history, all of the context of history, in them. But still, in order to do one thing, we're also doing another thing which is, you know, sort of only showing these positive aspects of these people, these historical figures.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Interesting. I mean, I agree with you. I would never diminish the talent of Lin-Manuel Miranda, that is for sure. I've seen the show live, I've seen it on TV. My parents live in New Mexico and they have these little neighbors that are 10 and 12, these girls who love theater. And I was hanging out with them one time and we put on the Hamilton soundtrack.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:They know every word it is amazing how many children and how young I have a dear dear friend.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:it's called hagiography, but it's basically powerful people get represented for the good things they've done, the important things right, the things that have made them these historical figures. And then, when people bring up aspects of powerful people that are not admirable, they're often accused of trying to, you know, impugn the greatness of this powerful person. So I think part of it is to understand that that people aren't perfect, right. I think that there's this idea that a powerful person who's you know, the people who wrote the Constitution that somehow they have to be admirable in every way.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:In every way yeah, right.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:And not only are they not admirable in every way, they made decisions right. Like not all of them were slaveholders Not all of you know what I mean. Like there's this really interesting book called Never Caught about a slave that escaped from George Washington's family. Somebody needs to do a play about this woman, this woman, ona Judge. She escaped in when was it? It was at the very beginning of the nation. It was when Philadelphia was still the capital, so it was like the 1780s or the 1790s. It's such a good book, this Black female academic who found out about Ona Judge because she found in the archive a fugitive slave notice that said the president's slave is missing. Philadelphia was a free city, they didn't have slavery, the family was staying in Philadelphia and she walked away and she was Martha's slave, not George's slave I actually feel like I've heard of this.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:I think our resident director currently. She is a historian. She is very passionate about history, so it's interesting to have her as a resident director right now, because all of her input comes with. Oh, by the way, did you know this historical context of like what? This actually what actually happened? There's also this happening around it and it's interesting to hear from her because I obviously again, like I said, history was my least favorite subject, but mostly because it was like I just had to memorize dates and times.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Dates and times, that's why I didn't like it when I think about it more in a story aspect. So I kind of I feel like I should revisit a lot of historical learning in that way, in that that light. But yeah, I think I've heard briefly about her that in Philadelphia it was Martha's top slave, main slave, and that she walked away.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Yes, so here she gets up and she goes to the bookshelf that's against the wall, that's behind her, and she actually pulls the book off of the shelf and then goes through the pages to find the actual ad that is featured in this book and seeing it is really crazy.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:I will also link this book in the show notes, don't you worry yes, yes, may 25th, 1796, ten dollars reward absconded from the household of the president of the united states on saturday afternoon only judge a light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and bushy black hair.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:She is of middle stature but slender and delicately made. About 20 years of age. She has many changes of very good clothes of all sorts, but they are not sufficiently recollected to describe, as there was no suspicion of her going off and it happened without the least provocation. It is not easy to conjecture whither she is gone or what her design is, but as she may attempt to escape by water, all matters of vessels and others are cautioned against receiving her on board, although she may and probably will endeavor to pass as a free woman and, it is said, has wherewithal to pay her passage. Ten dollars will be paid to any person, white or black, who will bring her home, if taken in the city or on board any vessel in the harbor, and a further reasonable sum if apprehended and brought home from a great distance and in proportion to the distance.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Wow, that's the actual ad for her.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:It's the ad, it's in the book. Wow. So Erica Dunbar found this ad and she's like, absconded from the household of the president of the United States and she's realizing, oh, and this is the first. Yeah, that's him 1796. Okay, so what's so fascinating about the way that owners viewed slavery is that so she escaped and she was never caught. Just like that book title says. She escaped and she was never caught. Just like that book title says.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:However, George Washington tried for years to get her to come back. He sent people after her, he wrote letters trying to persuade her. And these letters like that part about without the least provocation as if being a slave isn't enough provocation with her. When I was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Cruz, she grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and she writes about how, when she was in school, the history textbooks said and she was in school, she was born in like 19, in the forties, maybe 1945. But when she was in school in the forties and in the fifties, her textbook said that black people were happy when they were slaves and contented and everything was fine. And that's what ethnic studies has done for us Right Now. We can look at, we can look at without the least provocation and go. Oh well you know, actually Right Right.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:But what's fascinating is the letters that Erica Dunbar found, where George Washington is basically writing. I do not know what's wrong with her. You know, like, what did we do? What have we done? You know you need to come back to us. You're part of the family.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:And believing that you know where we treat you well we are. You could have a master that does not treat you so well, and we treat you well. What's wrong?
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:How dare you be so ungrateful, how dare you embarrass us like this? I mean, really, you start to see that aspect. I think this more and more right that the problem with slavery, so much of it, was about if you give total control of a person to another person, that kind of power corrupts. You can't do that. You can't have anybody exercising total control over the life of another. It will never lead to anything good, because somehow the person with control convinces themselves that their control is valid. You know that, you know it's God given or they're constitutionally superior or whatever. It is Right. And it's totally fascinating because you know she did not go back. They did not get her and she did not go back. So I think that we have to mature enough to be able to hold more than one thing in our minds at once.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:Right, was he a great leader? Yes, was he a great general? Yes, do we honor him? Yes, right, was he a great leader? Yes, was he a great general? Yes, do we honor him? Yes, right. Was he a slaveholder? Yes, right, and not just because he was a creature of his time, because every person with money in 1796 wasn't a slaveholder. Some people decided that it wasn't a good thing to do, you know.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:So this other excuse that people make, which is, oh, they're just a person of their time, oh, you know, it's like no, everybody didn't do that, even people who could didn't do it, and I feel like this is just kind of like all of us have to hold ourselves responsible and accountable, you know, because we're all full of contradictions and we all do things that are wrong. You know, I kind of feel like there's an aspect of human beings we're so lazy, right, like when we lie, cheat and steal. Absolutely Right, if there were, if there were not, you know boundaries, would we you know what I mean Like we're not, we're, we're really imperfect, we're really imperfect. So, yeah, so I, I kind of feel like Hamilton is more than anything. It's an opportunity, right, to think about all this stuff and also to kind of think about the whole race, blind and acting, even though it's art and it's artistic, is still so in the dark ages. When it comes to employment, right, it's like you can exercise racial discrimination in acting legally. Yes, you can't do that in any other profession.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:Yeah. It wouldn't be allowed yeah, I think it's interesting because well one what we were saying is yes, it's, hamilton is in, is an opportunity, and I think that's how I see it that there should be conversations had after one has seen hamilton you know new people, especially children, seeing hamilton. There should be conversations in the home after that happens. There should be conversations in the home after that happens. There should be conversations in schools about it and conversations calibrated.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:It's like I'm not trying to tell every 10 year old that George Washington was a slave holder, right? It's like this is what the right does with this whole woke you know craziness.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:It's like I'm not trying to you do age appropriate education you know, yeah, I think Lynn did a great job in terms of. You know, alexander hamilton is the main person of this show, but we're not trying to paint him as a saint, we're not trying to paint him as a perfect person, and he couldn't do that with every character in the show, obviously exactly and he did a good.
Professor Caroline A. Streeter:I think he did a really good job of showing his humanity and his you know mistakes and right that, like you, you want there's.
Jisel Soleil Ayon:There's times where you want to love Hamilton and there's times where you want to hate Hamilton, and that's. That is the human experience, with a lot with with. Yeah, just how we are as humans. We're not perfect, we're very flawed. Yeah, I think it's a. It's a great opportunity, and I think that that what the show has done is is open up possibilities to talk more about, have more conversations like this that are great to be having more discourse. That's like what can it make us think about?
Jisel Soleil Ayon:And that concludes part one of my conversation with Professor Streeter. I hope you are enjoying yourself so far, so please come back for episode two with Professor Streeter, where we will continue our conversation and finish it off. I will link everything we've talked about in this episode so far in the show notes, so go check all of those things out, including Professor Streeter's information, and obviously my social media will be there as well. All support is greatly appreciated. That includes rating and or reviewing the podcast so that it can reach more people. Now scurry your little behind over to part two. See you over there.
