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. 2 - Exploring Equity & Representation in the Arts w/ Prof. Caroline A. Streeter (part 2)
We kick off with my personal journey into the world of DIY nails, a new hobby that's teaching me the profound importance of embracing the learning process and overcoming the fear of failure.
Our discussion then navigates the labyrinth of casting in the entertainment industry as Professor Streeter and I dissect the gritty realities faced by actors of mixed heritage, addressing the tangled issues of representation, colorism, and the label of being "ethnically ambiguous." From the frustrations of fitting into specific ethnic roles to the broader implications for labor and equity, we delve into how these dynamics play out in a capitalist society.
We confront the fragmented sense of self that so many experience, advocating for the necessity of self-love and the embrace of one's entire identity. Highlighting the importance of inclusivity and the interconnectedness of humanity, we reflect on the historical and contemporary significance of mixed-race individuals. This episode is a heartfelt voyage through complex themes, aiming to inspire and challenge our listeners to rethink societal norms and embrace the beauty of diverse identities.
Professor Caroline Streeter - https://english.ucla.edu/people-faculty/streeter-caroline/
Multifacial - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6j1yfUxB0U
Black. White. tv show - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0494185/
You Can’t Say You Can’t Play - https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674965904
Half and Half - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/123546/half-and-half-by-edited-and-with-an-introduction-by-claudine-c-ohearn/
When Half is Whole - https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=6620
The Bluest Eye - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/117662/the-bluest-eye-by-toni-morrison/
Mixed: My Life in Black and White - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/122129/mixed-by-angela-nissel/
Obama’s book Dreams from my Father - https://barackobamabooks.com/dreams-from-my-father
Follow me on Instagram & TikTok: @JiselSAyon
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Hey there, welcome back to Mixed in the Arts with yours truly Giselle Soleil-Aillon, where I have conversations with mixed-race creatives, where we are blended and brilliant. This is episode two and also part two of my conversation with Professor Caroline Streeter. So if you haven't listened to part one, what the heck are you doing here? Kindly leave the premises and listen to that episode first and then come back here. Go on now. All right, now that we've got all of you who know how to follow directions, let's get into it, shall we? First my reflection for this episode.
Speaker 1:These first handful of episodes, I feel like, are still going to be connected to that first idea that I shared in the introduction episode, where I basically am working on learning to love the learning process, to not feel embarrassment or shame around trying new things and failing, drilling into my head the idea that the only way that you can actually fail is by not trying or by giving up. And there's so many things in life that I want to do that I want to try. I'm always finding new hyper fixations, really, and my new hyper fixation right now is doing my own nails. So I always almost always have nails on. If you know me, you know, but recently I've been really trying to cut down on more frivolous expenses and I felt like nails was one of them. But it really kills me and breaks my heart not to have any nails on. So I figured well, giselle, why not try doing your own nails? So I spent a little money on a like acrylic set and the UV LED light thing for gel polish, and I've gotten my nails done for so long and so many times and watched them do it that I'm like all right, you know how to do it, you know how it's done. Now just try it. And I did.
Speaker 1:I did my first set, like last week, and I just did my second set yesterday, and I was really proud of myself, not for how they turned out, but also, I mean a little bit of how they turned out, because it really wasn't half bad. But I was really proud of myself that I didn't stare at the imperfections, I didn't berate myself for the fact that they weren't salon quality and why would they be right? Why would my brain want to go to oh, giselle, they're not perfect, they're not like as if a professional did it. Well, I'm not a freaking professional and I just. It was a beautiful moment for me to realize within myself and look at them and be proud of the fact that I tried, proud of the fact that they really didn't turn out that badly, and proud that I wasn't discouraged from continuing to try and get better. That's what typically happens for me I see how I didn't get it perfect on the first try and it discourages me from even attempting to keep going, which is just ridiculous and the opposite of productive. And what's even funnier is one of my cast members literally told me that they doubt I would make it past three months of continuing to do this because it takes a while and you know I'll be on to my next hyper fixation or whatever. But I'm determined to prove her wrong.
Speaker 1:I am determined to never get my nails done ever again and never pay for them. I'm going to only do them myself and not only save up but also be creative and artsy and also have it be a form of self-care where I just sit with myself for two to five hours, depending on how ambitious of a design I'm working on, and have this be an activity where I really get to watch myself get better and watch myself improve. So I'm going to be taking pictures of all the nails, maybe posting them on my like art Instagram page, and have this journey for myself of witnessing the beauty of just continuing to work on something and watching yourself improve and get better, which I don't often get to see myself do because I don't even let myself have the chance. So I want to share a short poem by a poet that I've been a fan of for a while. I've been following him on Instagram for a while. His name is Rudy Francisco and I will link him in the show notes.
Speaker 1:I'm teaching myself about the opposite of excellence the subtle art of stumbling the radical act of failure and forgiveness. I'm learning that embarrassment only shows its face. If I allow it, I just feel like he shares such a beautiful articulation of such a variety of human emotions and the human experience in general. He's just a really great artist and poet. Please go check him out. But that is exactly the journey that I have been trying to embrace recently and hopefully will continue to embrace for the next few years until it feels like second nature to me.
Speaker 1:But anywho, let's dive right back into the rest of my conversation with Professor Caroline Streeter, where we left off talking about the complexities of casting in the entertainment industry. And then when we talk about casting in terms of this, this industry I've had conversations with friends in the industry where we're like it's's so complicated, how do we get it right? Quote, unquote, because I've talked about, like, I am black and Mexican, but there are certain roles that I don't feel I'm black enough for that that casting wouldn't think I'm black enough for and that the society wouldn't think I am black enough for.
Speaker 1:There's a show called Once on this Island. Do you know that show at all? Oh, you should absolutely. Once on this Island. Do you know that show at all? Oh, you should absolutely. Once on this Island. It's a musical, oh, it's a music. It's a musical. Yes, oh, I see. So if you ever see it in in. This is to everyone listening. If you've not been witness to that show and you see it playing in near you run. It's one of my dream shows and there's a.
Speaker 1:The main character is a girl named timun and I would love to play that role, but I don't think that it will ever happen, because the show is about a village that just it gets a terrible storm. There's a little girl in the village who's afraid and they to calm her post storm. They tell this story about a girl named timun so a little bit story within a story a little bit.
Speaker 1:So then they go in and most of the musical is them telling the story about a girl named Timun. So a little bit of a story within a story a little bit. So then they go in and most of the musical is them telling this story about Timun. All of the players in the show are telling this story.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:Timun comes from an island that is kind of split. It is the lighter skinned mulatto, rich, wealthy, and then the other side of the island that's darker, poorer, and Timun is from the poor side. She falls in love with a boy from the rich side and I just don't. I know, because that's what the story is supposed to be doing, that it's supposed to be the lighter skin and the darker skin that I will probably never, ever play timun and that makes me so sad because it's like oh, I'm not black enough for that.
Speaker 1:And then there are other things where like, okay, how, how deep do we get into the accurate representation? Right, quote, unquote accurate representation. Because if I were to do west side story where the hispanics are puerto rican, I'm not puerto rican, I'm mexican. So even though I'm hispanic, does it mean, if we're trying to do accurate, accurate casting, does it mean that Hispanic has to be the right, hispanic or Latinx, right? Or in the Heights, where one character is Dominican Republic and one character is Cuban and one character is a mix of Cuban and Dominican, but this character over here is Mexican. So do I have to only be relegated to the character that is specifically Mexican because I'm Mexican? So it's like getting into how accurate.
Speaker 1:And then there's there's conversations that I've had with with my colleagues as well about like, how much of it is the job of the casting director and how much of it is the job of partially our job as well. Should we not be going in to those auditions that we know we're not actual representation for? Should it all be up to the casting director to be like you are not this, but also, to some extent, they cannot actually ask you what it is that you are Right. So how, how well can they do that when they're going on colorism? So then it starts to go into colorism.
Speaker 1:But if what? If someone is really light-skinned and they are Black, can they not play a Black character? If they are really light-skinned, even though're african-american, or someone who is more of a darker skinned asian-american, playing maria in west side story because they, color-wise, can look like they are a puerto rican, how accurate do we get it? And and there's, there's no, it's hard to answer that. There's no right answer, really, and and I feel like it's. You know, the job of casting directors and directors is is tough in this world, world where there is an increasing number of mixed population and that colorism isn't necessarily accurate to what someone actually is. Identifies as.
Speaker 1:Their heritage and their heritage, and how do we navigate that? It's becoming increasingly hard for casting directors to navigate that and I don't have the answer for sure and I can be really understanding of them trying, as long as I can see that they're trying. You know what I mean. But but when it comes down to, oh, this person looked the color that we needed, right, or we we moved away from ethnically ambiguous we we're not gone from that. But I have seen, had seen ethically ambiguous way far more often before than I've seen it now as a description as a description for characters of.
Speaker 1:We just want ethnically ambiguous, because I know I I never really liked the phrase ethnically ambiguous and it felt like you didn't care what I was specifically you didn't care that that is feels to me like an important part of me and it doesn't matter, as long as you look like something, it doesn't matter what you actually are, sort of thing well, definitely ambiguous reifies, the binary of white, non-white, because what they're really talking about is whiteness and not whiteness.
Speaker 2:You know, it's true? Yeah, it seems to me that there just needs to be more right, like more opportunities more stories, more stories, right.
Speaker 2:More shows, absolutely. Shows that where it's important for it to be precise, and other shows where maybe you want to disturb people's perception, like have you, are you aware of Vin Diesel's film Multifacial? No, okay, so this is an old film, it's from 1992. It's a short film that he made that screened at Sundance, and the plot is an actor in New York who is going on auditions and I think you would really like it. It's okay.
Speaker 2:I teach it every year in my mixed race literature class. I mean, he's a really good example of one of those stars who's really benefited from that ethnically ambiguous idea and also he's ascended to that level of stardom where he's just Vin Diesel, right, yeah, right, like nobody's asking Denzel Washington what he is. Right, if your race is intelligible to the people around you, then you're not ambiguous, right, and even though there's some play there, we do know that there's a well, like I said, you know, there is this binary, there's this white, non-white binary, right, but I definitely think you should watch that. I think you would get a lot out of it. Okay, I had this other idea and maybe, as another mixed race person, I wonder what you think of this. So remember when Zoe Saldana played Nina Simone and she, her skin was darkened and she wore a prosthetic and she got a lot of well, the production I won't say her as an individual, but the production got a lot of flack for casting and she is a mixed race actress, I think. Right, okay.
Speaker 2:So the question was you know, why not cast her with somebody who's more authentically like Nina Simone? But Nina Simone also has a daughter who is she's half of her genetics? Right, she is her mother, she's her birth mother, and her daughter is light skinned, with light eyes and lighter hair, because her dad is white. Right, so for me as a person, you know, when you're a person who's biologically related to somebody that does not look like you, I think it really puts into question this idea of representation. Right Like, so you're telling me that Nina Simone's own daughter is somehow inauthentic. You know what I mean? Like like, I get, I feel, like I understand that Nina Simone is a dark-skinned woman who had these kinds of features and that, and and I and you know I just gave the example of Angelina Jolie right Like, I definitely get that. But I also think that there's got to be some kind of place where we recognize that genetics are really complicated and what we perceive as people's relationship based on their physical features is really skewed, because it doesn't.
Speaker 1:Physical likeness, doesn't tell us everything about the connection between people right and there's also, like you know, the talent and is your ability to tell the story better than other people who came in and auditioned and and and finding, you know, casting based on on talent and how right you are, performance wise versus purely.
Speaker 1:You know, we don't want someone who looks exactly like her but can't act their way through a paper bag, right. So I agree, and I think what can be some people's like well, but it's because of this is opportunities for other people who do look more like that person, maybe, and less about like whether or not they. You know, despite the fact that Zoe has African-American in her genealogy, that darker skinned Black people have struggled with the opportunities to have roles that aren't, you know, someone in prison or a gangster or whatever it is, and, and I think that and I understand both sides, I understand that like well, what about you know, giving an opportunity, because light, the lighter skin that you are, the more opportunities yeah, that are available generally speaking, generally speaking in the performance industry, and so taking somebody whose skin is darker, who has not had maybe as many opportunities in the performance industry, that it's like taking away from them.
Speaker 1:So it's like, as I get both sides, that I feel like for people who might, who have a bigger problem with it, I think it is more about the opportunities than how someone identifies or whether they are a part of that group or not. Either way, there's opportunities being taken from somebody and that's, and they're just like we were saying, should just be more. We should be telling more stories, there should be more opportunities, so that we don't have that that like well, but you took that from from somebody else who could have had that opportunity.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly. I mean, you know, as a person who's a tenured professor at UCLA, you know, I know that I benefit from speaking standard English, I benefit from being comfortable around white people and knowing how to know. You know, I have assimilated, but I'm also this assimilable body, I think, in a lot of ways, because people may not even realize that I'm Black if I don't tell them. So I recognize that privilege, right, I know it's there, I understand that. So there is a politics of displacement, I agree, right, there's a politics of displacement. But then there's also this scarcity model, and that's the thing I think we should. Yes, that's what we reject the scarcity model that there's just not enough, you know, and is like the oldest thing that human beings do with each other you know, like a rest of fire or whatever it is.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, so many of us, most of us in our profession, are fighting for the top. You know the top percentage of we all want to be a-list celebrities, right, and, and that's what's place value. And also you know, frankly, monetarily, that that's when you are are comfortable, and if you're not in that top percentage of a-listers, you're not, you cannot be comfortable and you will always still be hustling to do a second job and so I have to fight to be that. So if zoe, if zoe salana just you know, no hating on her, but as an example, if Zoe Saldana is the only person that can get the opportunity and she gets the other opportunities as well, I can never breach that percentage of people who gets to live comfortably in this specific profession that can be so hard to live comfortably in.
Speaker 2:So it's hard.
Speaker 1:It's your right. We have to fight the scarcity. But in this profession, this industry, there is a scarcity when it comes to being able to live comfortably in this profession. And how do we fix that? How can we trickle down the the money when, when the creatives on the others not the creatives, necessarily, but the producers on the other side are the ones that hold all of that? They hold that money and so they hold that power. And we're all just fighting to do the thing that we love, fighting to do the thing that all humans have done forever, but also live comfortably. And so it's, it seems, hopeless to fight the scarcity problem.
Speaker 2:So interesting, right, because that's why all of these labor battles are so important. Yes, the fact that people see themselves as workers and the fact that they're recognizing that there's such an enormous asymmetry because of capitalism. Yeah, yep, and I was just listening to. You know, the United Auto Workers on strike and they have that awesome, the head of their union. He says you know, the CEO of one of these big three car companies made made twenty five million dollars last year. The companies are claiming they can't. You know they can't, they can't, they can't, they'll never be able to afford X, y and Z. Right, is the money going to go to the workers or is it going to go to the shareholders and these models, the model of the big, big corporation and the shareholders? I feel like so much of the reckoning that has to come for our country especially, is about this model of the economy and how we're going to move forward, accepting that somebody can earn $25 million. I mean, for me, I just feel like it's immoral, I don't understand.
Speaker 1:No one needs that much it doesn't make any sense to me. And with the strikes currently happening when we're recording, they're still currently happening. They're going to the table again today, or they are at the table again today, on the day that we're recording this, that people have done the calculations in terms of if the networks actually gave up a small percentage, like two or three or some small percentage. I don't remember the number off the top of my head, but that would be enough.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that the networks pretend like it's they're taking it. We're trying to take away so much from them. But that it's actually a minuscule percentage of their entire profits. That would alleviate what we're, what we're fighting for and how the companies, how the networks, the big corporations can fight so hard for what to them is a drop in the bucket amount. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, but because there's always going to be more workers. There's always going to be way more workers than there are shareholders right. The thing is, it's if you, they are afraid because we are in a system where we rely on hundreds of thousands of people being underpaid Right, school teachers, you know you name it right.
Speaker 2:We rely on the free labor of women every single day. You know we need a universal income. Why should women be having children for free? So it's like there's all these assumptions about, you know, free labor and you know, just take it, just go into debt and all this stuff. So if people, actually people, have so much power, it's like that Patti Smith song the people have the power. It's true, like people come together, my gosh, you know we could bring Amazon down in a week if we quit shopping. Yeah, it's like there's a lot, there's a lot of power in numbers.
Speaker 2:So that's what makes these, these labor movements, which are really these middle class labor movements, right, like it happened at UCLA. There was the big strike last year the postdoctoral fellows and the teaching assistants and you know the UC relies a lot on teaching assistants. I'm I'm in this elite group of tenured professors of tenured professors, there are not very many of us and the teaching model relies on lecturers and teaching assistants and they went on strike and they negotiated a different deal with the university and that's what has to happen, right, especially here in California. We're just living in this crazy place, this crazy place of magical thinking, where, you know, my one bedroom condo is worth $700,000. That doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1:And me wanting to live in New York. And as I'm on tour, my hope is to, when I'm done, whenever I'm done with tour, that I'm buying an apartment and that's in New York. And so for the last year, every month or so got hop back on and I look at what's available on the market and boy oh boy, is New York the most expensive city in the world. And actually I'm watching um Only Murders in the Building on Hulu and.
Speaker 1:I'm a little behind on watching it, but I'm on season three now and there was a joke, maybe the end of season two or maybe the beginning of season three. There was a joke where the selena gomez's character is trying to buy an apartment in new york and it's a studio that's like you know, nine by nine feet or something like that, and the woman's like it's four thousand, it's forty one hundred dollars, but honestly, oh, and you have to pay, um, you know, and you have to pay utilities, and sometimes you have to pay the guy at the homeless man on the on the front stoop $5 just to keep the piece. But other than that it's, it's a steal.
Speaker 1:And it's just this whole joke about this super small space being super expensive and you know the woman being like it's, it's a steal.
Speaker 2:I know, you know this financial model where it just seems like food and shelter, right. How is that the object of speculation? That just doesn't. I don't know. You know, I just feel like this is when I think about indigenous cultures, right, I think about different values, I think about how what we live in is also something that we it's constructed, right, this whole idea that the land is worth money and that you should have to pay for it, or that, you know, people can speculate on food. So I kind of feel like that's the bigger meta. Where are we going? Question? But it really is, it really is urgent, because I think it also speaks to that scarcity model, right, that idea that there's just not enough, you know, and it's like, but that's not true.
Speaker 1:That's actually not true. If you act from a place of scarcity, you will feel scarcity, but if you act from a place of abundance, you feel the abundance sort of thing. And I and obviously it's harder in practice than it is talking about it.
Speaker 2:But Abundance and solidarity, right, because I also think that the individual, this emphasis on the individual is also a problem, because you know, like, can I get enough for myself? Am I fine? Yeah, you know I'm fine, but I should be affected by what's happening with other people, right?
Speaker 1:And America is an individualist. It's a very individualist place.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a very individualist culture. That's why they call unions communist. Like anything that has to do with the collective becomes communism in this country. And it's like you know, like when they call MSNBC leftists, it's like I am sorry. Rachel Maddow makes something like $36 million a year from that network. She is not a leftist. Anderson Cooper is not a leftist. We do not have a single leftist right. None of those people, nobody in the entertainment industry, nobody on the so-called celebrity left is a leftist right. It's such a successful discourse right To make us feel that we're. You know, universal healthcare is communistic and universal income is going to lead us to communism.
Speaker 1:None of that is true, yeah, yeah. Well, can we shift a little bit? Yes, let's shift In your research and your teaching. Have you observed shifts in how society views? And understands and embraces mixed identities.
Speaker 2:The mixed community? Absolutely. I think that's such a good question because I also think there's two, as usual, right, there's two things happening at one time. I'm such an academic when I started doing my research in the 1990s, which was that period of time when people born after Loving versus Virginia were coming of age and we started seeing mixed race in the academy as an issue for census 2000 on television.
Speaker 2:Back when we watched television, right, all of the daytime talk shows, mixed race people were on the daytime talk shows and there were you know this is like for a conversation when I've done a little more research, but there are examples of some really interesting television shows that there was a multi-part series about a mixed race family, an interracial family, a Black-white family that focused on the daughter. There was another series that I really liked called Black and White. Ice-t was the producer and he took a white family and a black family and he race-changed both of them. He made the black family white and the white family black with makeup and prosthetics and stuff like that, and then they lived as white and black here in LA. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm telling you, man, when it comes to popular culture and television, there's a lot. You know there's a lot of content now, but there are lots of examples of really interesting shows. You know that took place. So on the one hand, I think that that absolutely mixed race has become more normalized in that. Certainly for me again, in the 90s, going to graduate school, I had this cohort of colleagues that were a little younger than me because I'm a little, you know, I'm a little older than that cohort of people coming of age. But I had a cohort of colleagues, you know, black, asian, latinx, you know different kinds of combinations of things, and here in California, right, I had all kinds of students who were all kinds of interesting mixtures, right, that had nothing to do with the United States but that were because their parents had met abroad and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:And I went to.
Speaker 2:France over the summer. And I told you, my mom is from a really small town and when I was growing up in the 70s, there were hardly any Black people in that town and we got stared at all the time and when we went, I went with my family, with my mom and my dad and my sister, to this town. We were there for three weeks and it's really changed because of you know, the economy. People don't, like they don't have a cobbler and five butchers and six acres and you know, like people don't, they don't live like that in that town anymore. It's mostly tourism oriented. But what was really cool is that I saw groups of French children, since it was summer. I saw groups of French children that were doing their summer camp thing, visiting a church or whatever it was, and there were black kids. You know, they were little girls with braids and they were just there with the other kids, right. So I saw not just black kids, I also saw Asian kids. I'm always more, you know, it's always more notable to me when I see Black kids. But I saw diversity, you know, and I saw multiracial families and mixed race couples and just Black people, right, and nobody stared at us. Now that could be, you know, for any kind of variety of reasons, right, but it definitely feels like more people, I think, have accepted the idea that just because people are different from you doesn't mean that you have to be afraid of them. I think there's more of an appreciation for people's difference and also less of a tendency to demand that different people assimilate and change. I think there's more of an appreciation for uniqueness, you know, and just difference.
Speaker 2:I was born in 1962, so I'm 61. And it's so fascinating to me that I hear such similar stories from people about how they grew up. They can identify with a lot of the same things that I experienced, you know, like some relatives who are really racist, some relatives who never really accept you, some relatives who think you're kind of actually inferior, you know. Or like you're fine but they wouldn't want their daughter, yeah Right, like that whole thing. Like not, not in my family.
Speaker 2:So I kind of feel like when we were, when we were working on this model of interracial marriage has become legal, so we have this cohort of people coming of age, right, and then we move forward in time, and so then we start to think about, obviously every mixed race person isn't going to have one parent of one race and one parent of another race like this original model of biracial identity.
Speaker 2:You're going to have all different kinds of people, but people do intermarry, monoracially, generally speaking, and that's fascinating to me. Like somebody, I'm not married and I don't have kids, but when we start talking about sexuality and reproduction, people often start thinking along these lines of they want somebody like them, right, like they want to have children that look like them. So I think that and I can't speak far beyond the US, right but I do think there's a tendency, and I kind of saw this when I was at Berkeley in graduate school. Maybe this is because I've spent so much time at colleges now, right, like as a student myself and now as a professor because this is the age of young adulthood, when people are away from home for the first time, they start to explore their sexuality, they start to have different partners, and it's a time when people might be more open to different kinds of partners, because they're not looking to get married and they're not trying to have kids, right?
Speaker 1:They're young.
Speaker 2:But then, when people start making their decisions and bringing people home and deciding who to have children with, they often gravitate right towards people of the same race, and so that aspect of sexuality that just makes me think of, like I said, right, how does white supremacy perpetuate itself?
Speaker 2:In the United States? It's perpetuated itself by exclusivity, like you know you, white property stays in white hands because your children are white, right, so like. So I loved seeing Bill de Blasio right With his wife and his kids with their afros, right, you know, I love that there are people at every level kind of willing to kind of break this mold in a way that for me, just feels normal, right, because I've never been able like I'm sure you feel the same way Like I've never been able to choose someone just like me to have sex with or to decide to have kids with, because I, that's not my model, right, but I do think that there's something really powerful about this idea of and maybe it's something more ancient about human beings and about reproduction and about, you know, like, making generations like I, because I understand that too, especially from people, people who are from cultures that are in danger.
Speaker 1:You know yes.
Speaker 2:I really understand wanting to make generations, wanting to perpetuate your bloodline, like, sometimes I think, oh, you know, it's the end of the genetic line for me and my, you know, my sister and I don't have kids and it's like, oh, that's kind of a shame because you know, I'm pretty great, right, maybe I should have had a kid. That's why I, that's why I like being an educator. I get all this influence, you know, on people, people's minds. You, you know, instead of like, give birth.
Speaker 2:So I think that I, I, I, always me, personally, as a woman and as a person of color, this whole idea that there were some good old days at some point is bullshit, right, I don't even want to go back a month, like I. I want to. You know as much as, as as challenging as it is to get older, right, there's only one alternative, which is to die. So I'd rather get older and I want to keep moving forward. You know, I'm all about just keep moving forward. We do not need to look back Any anybody who's from a group of people like African-Americans, or even just women. Women were still dying in childbirth a hundred years ago, like in big numbers, you know. So I'm all for modernity and the future and moving ahead the same time. Racism is so persistent and race has this way of being able to remake itself, like to remake itself, to adapt to shifting historical conditions because we don't need race anymore.
Speaker 1:But there still has to be something that that separates the elite and the upper class from everyone else.
Speaker 2:Well, just think about it, right, why our nation was founded? They wanted to get away from the king the whole idea of royal blood, right, that was the ultimate everybody was inferior if they didn't have royal blood. So that was a response to a kind of racism. You know this whole idea that some people are just biologically superior. So yeah, and so maybe that's much older too, right?
Speaker 1:There has to be that. I don't think humans will ever get away from that idea that, like, there will always have to be a group that is better and whatever that looks like, whether it's royal blood, or whether it's the color of your skin or we can't quite separate that anymore. So now it has to it's, it's shifting. That's that's why I think it shifts, that, that that quote-unquote racism is going to shift, because they're always humans, will always have to have some reason to separate the top group from everybody else.
Speaker 1:Or the majority from the minority, or the, you know, the oppressed versus the oppressors. It will shift throughout the future and it will look different, but it has to be something that separates.
Speaker 2:You know what it's really interesting, especially, you know, given the show. You're in Hamilton, right, because the thing about our laws and our republic is that it doesn't guarantee that everybody is equal, but everybody has to be treated equally right.
Speaker 1:Or seem like they have the chance to get there.
Speaker 2:Well, even well, yeah, I mean, as long as you're, if you're, if you have the good fortune to be a citizen of the United States, right, you are equal under the common law that we've adapted Right From England. So that's not that you're not considered just as good as a rich, as a person who's rich, or as a person who's more beautiful than you are, or whatever it is, but you're equal under the law. So, like we were talking about earlier, right, I think that the idea of a structure that forces us to treat each other well is actually kind of necessary, you know, because the founding fathers did not intend this to be a multiracial democracy like what's depicted in Hamilton, but it is one, right, it's a multiracial democracy and that, hopefully, that's the model, and I mean, you know, with all its flaws, because it has so many flaws, but I still think it's a viable model for moving forward. And something else you said was making me think about exclusivity and the pecking order. There's this really amazing book I read.
Speaker 2:The title is you Can't Say you Can't Play, and it's this childhood educator who did childhood education for many, many, many, many years and she noticed the tendency among very young children, like kindergartners and first graders to establish a pecking order to isolate certain individuals and leave them out and be mean to them. So she started studying it as a phenomenon and she created a rule in her own kindergarten classroom which was that you cannot exclude people, you have to include everyone. It's what we call inclusivity today, right, but basically the rule was you can't say you can't play right, because that's children's model is playing together, right. And her rule was that you can't exclude people, it's not allowed. And I love that book so much because she talks about how, in her research, she had, like the popular five-year-olds, right, who were like, well, I, you know, I don't like the rule, I don't, you know, but I don't want to play with so-and-so, I and you try to ask a five-year-old to explain it.
Speaker 2:They can't explain it, but they know, you know, like the popular kids have an instinct that they can exclude and want to use that power, right, and and so this whole I again, you know, it's like this aspect of human nature that's really troubling that I think we do have to consciously force ourselves, right, not to exclude people, not to leave people out, so that you don't create a situation where people are afraid to speak up because of a bully, right? Or because you want to be liked, or whatever. It is Like we all know how hard it is to confront somebody who's mistreating other people, right? Because your first thought is, oh, I don't want to be treated like that person. So you sort of slink away, you know, leaving the outcast behind you.
Speaker 1:Glad you're not the outcast right, or worried that the people who are doing the outcasting will not only outcast you as well, but turn others against, because they're the ones that have the power over other people's perception and things.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. This whole model that this educator used was this model based on, as an adult, being able to understand that this is not a good way to learn how to treat people, even if it feels natural, right, even if somehow, somewhere in our brains, we establish a pecking order, for whatever reason it is Maybe it's because we're primates, you know, who knows but this idea of establishing a pecking order, this idea of creating outcasts, right, we don't have to do it. So I feel so much hope and inspiration by this idea that you don't have to recreate these structures that feel natural. They don't have to be that way, you know. So I'm really inspired by that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you feel like historically, the mixed community has been othered and that we're being not so othered now?
Speaker 2:You know it's so interesting, right? Because one of the things that makes mixed race an enduring source of interest and fascination is that it's on the boundary, right, when you are in a binary a Manichean world that's defined by the idea of binary and opposition. What's on the boundary, what mixes things, what transgresses the boundary, that's a source of both fascination and, I think, some dread. And there's, I think there's still with us this idea that mixed race people have either the best of both worlds or the worst of both worlds, right, I think that that's still with us, right, like it hasn't happened to me in a long time because I'm older now, but I've had experiences in LA, so this is maybe when I was in my 40s or 50s of, you know having conversations with people who insist that mixed race people are more beautiful than anybody else, you know, and I'm a good example of that and I'm like, I've seen some homely mixed race babies. They are not, I am sorry, they are not the cutest babies, right? So I do think that there are still these ongoing myths about race mixture, that that kind of reproduce, a binary to best versus worst, right.
Speaker 2:And I think, too, that there's something about any identity that crosses the boundary, that maybe makes people feel a little bit I don't know like they can't quite trust you. I mean, I'm bisexual also, and so my experience has been really interesting in terms of partners. I've had men say to me, and women say, that bisexuality kind of makes them feel uncomfortable because they a man says, well, I can't compete with a woman, and a woman says I can't compete with a man. It's like, well, but I didn't choose you just because you're just this one thing, right, you're this whole person. So, oh, I know that was the other, that was the other thing that I this is something that I think has changed. So I was thinking of talking with you about the idea that mixed race people are fragmented and are not whole.
Speaker 1:Which kind of, to me, goes into the question of language and how you feel important languages in terms of identity, Because in that realm I used to say I'm half this and half that. Yeah, and it helps solidify the feeling that I felt not whole in anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I've stopped saying that. I've stopped saying I'm just say I'm Black and Mexican, that I don't say the half part anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you asked me about book recommendations and there is one that I teach a lot called Half and Half Writers on Growing Up, biracial and bicultural. So this whole idea of being more than one thing, and it's really interesting that they take it into the direction of biracial and bicultural, because they mean bi-ethnic right, they mean coming from two different cultures and or two different races, and it's coming from other communities too, people who are from immigrant communities, people for whom they don't have a home right, the idea of displacement, because there's these things that we valorize. We valorize being whole, we valorize having a home, being rooted, being from one place, but that's not everybody's experience. Sometimes displacement is your experience, Diaspora is your experience.
Speaker 2:So I do think that there's definitely a pushback against this idea that because you have mixed heritage, multiple heritage, like you said, that somehow you are this collection of fragments rather than a whole. That's something that's, I think, really being resisted. There's another collection about Asian American ethnic identity that's called when Half is Whole and he, stephen Murphy Shigematsu really great writer, also a professor writes a lot about rejecting that idea that being composed of multiple heritage makes you half of this and half of that going through the world feeling consistently like you are never a whole of a thing when it comes to like when I was trying to explore some of my different cultures when one.
Speaker 1:I don't know what that culture would be on my mom's side, because we are, you know, because she didn't have a culture passed down to her and she just recently did ancestrycom and found out I think most of the ancestry comes from Ghana in Africa.
Speaker 1:But Africa is huge and there's so many cultures, there's so many languages. It's like where, if I were to start to explore culture on my African-American side, what would that even be or look like? And then starting, I know exactly what it looks like on my Mexican side, but feeling like because I don't feel like a whole of something, and that fallacy of thinking of like all or nothing that I can appropriate my own heritage, yeah, that's deep.
Speaker 1:And struggling with. Okay, so my birthday is the last day of Dia de los Muertos which is coming up. Oh, yeah. Yes, and I started after, honestly, after Coco came out.
Speaker 2:Have you seen Coco?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have. Yeah, beautiful, gorgeous movie.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it made me so emotional because I was like this is a part of my culture. My family, my dad's family, doesn't necessarily celebrate it, but it is something that I could explore, research, learn about, start to embrace and celebrate myself. And so I have made my birthday a time to celebrate the Adros Muertos and that whenever I do a birthday gathering, I am having my friends celebrate it with me. It's like a.
Speaker 1:it's like a just an excuse to throw a party and decorate and do all those things, and then it's also like me learning more by teaching my friends. But at at first it was a struggle because or I wanted to learn baile folclórico, the big big skirts, the big colorful skirts, but I was like I don't know if I'm.
Speaker 1:Mexican enough to do this, and will it seem like I'm just appropriating this culture? Or if I try and pick something? So even if I, if okay, say I focus on Ghana because that's what my mom's ancestry came back as, Am I appropriating? If I start to learn more and try and embrace cultures or garb or whatever it is of, that am I appropriating? So if I am stuck thinking I am only parts of, fragments of and not a whole of, I'm going to feel like I am not enough of the thing to embrace the culture and the heritage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, I think going to feel like I am not enough of the thing to embrace the culture and heritage, mm?
Speaker 2:hmm, yeah, absolutely, you know, I think what you're saying is so it really resonates with me this whole idea of authenticity and the fear of inauthenticity and also the question of how do you approach something that is yours by birthright, let's say, but is not familiar and is not known. Part of this has been my own kind of work with my colleagues. At one point I really thought that there were certain aspects of mixed race heritage that were truly unique, like this idea of being on the binary, you know, and being part of two worlds. And then I started talking to gay friends of mine, especially gay Black friends, who felt very much like they could identify with this idea of feeling split, you know, feeling like there's the world of one's origin and then there's the chosen family, for example, you know, for a, for gay folk, let's say queer folk and I. And I think that what's so interesting too is when you start meeting people who are fully authentic, you know, like, let's say, you met somebody who's fully aware of what their heritage is. Right, they might not feel authentic, though Just because someone has the inherited wholeness, perhaps it doesn't mean that they're necessarily more comfortable just by virtue of that. I don't think there's a recipe for people to feel completely comfortable. So humans are really self-conscious.
Speaker 2:People have been talking about hybridity and mixture in different contexts right, for a long time.
Speaker 2:It hasn't just suddenly come up in the 1990s in the US, but I think that there's ways of articulating something specific with mixed race that other people can identify with along different lines.
Speaker 2:Right, it's not necessarily a completely unique experience. It's an experience that can be translated because, like I said, right, like there's all kinds of reasons why somebody can feel like an outsider in their own family. Right, everybody's a doctor except me and I want to be an artist, or everybody went to the military, or every you know what I mean quite fit in. So I kind of feel like this model that we have of not quite fitting and having these dual heritages. There's also something that is global about it. Right, it's also a sign of the way human development has worked. Right, like the human race started in Africa and we know that people started migrating and that's how they populated the globe, but they also remained isolated for long periods of time. And now we're in this different mode where there's so much access and you can access people who are very different without even displacing yourself because of the internet.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah.
Speaker 2:That's amazing too. So I feel like there's this opportunity to kind of also understand how human beings negotiate their relationships. Right, like your parents and my parents, my parents they came from very different places and you know how did they even like figure out what they knew in common and stuff like that? And that was part of the attraction, I think, like especially for my mom, you know. I think she was like, oh my God, I got to get out of this town, right, and, and that was part of the foreign boy, right, you know. So again, right, difference is is also attractive and exciting. But there's also things that they found so similar. You know, their parents never met. I don't think any of my family members have ever met each other and their parents certainly never met.
Speaker 1:But can I ask, is your, is your mom's side, still predominantly living in France?
Speaker 2:Wow, they live in France. Yeah, they do. They all live in France. Yeah, I have one cousin who lives in Poland and very few of them have been to the United States.
Speaker 1:At all.
Speaker 2:At all.
Speaker 2:Wow yeah very few, very few. My dad's family is a little more well traveled, but not that much. He came from a big family. He had eight brothers and sisters and I think every single one of them except for him he's almost 90. And he's one of the older ones. So there, there's only three. For him he's almost 90 and he's one of the older ones. So there, there's only three, I think, of them left now out of eight. But everyone except for him went back to the South eventually. Oh wow, whereas my father was like absolutely not.
Speaker 1:Literally, he was the only one who didn't go back he's the only one. Wow, is he also the most well-traveled, because of the Air Force.
Speaker 2:Well, not because of the military traveled because of the air force. Well, not because of the military, but because of marrying my mom. He had brothers in the military who also traveled because of the military, but he's the only one who married a person who's not American, and he's the only one who married a person who's not black as well.
Speaker 1:Oh, I wanted to ask you do you ever feel like you sort of you mentioned, like how your grandma would be like, oh yeah, you know, my daughter's married to a man. He's very nice but he's black. Did your family on either side ever make you and your sister feel like you were not enough of either thing, like you weren't French enough or you weren't black enough?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, not really. I have to say that that is something our parents were really good about letting us just develop relationships as children with our relatives. And you know how it is. This is part of it too. Children change things. Children like melt hearts.
Speaker 2:So there were particularly, you know, there were some real crusty old racists on my mom's in-laws side, her sister's parents, who were not nice when she got married to my father, you know who, like talked about her and stuff like that. But they always treated my sister and I really well. They were never mean to us, ever, you know. And same thing on my dad's side. There was one uncle who kind of got out of hand with my mom and dad one time in this way sort of this he doesn't like white people way, but they never told us, watch out for this one, watch out for that one, you know. They just let us have our own relationships and I think that children are very disarming, you know, and people, it's much harder to be prejudicial for, thank goodness, right, it's harder. It's harder to be hateful toward a little kid, you know. And I have to say, right, like I always feel very lucky that I didn't grow up with a white American family, because I think that it's worse in the United States.
Speaker 2:Right, I think that I'm really glad my mom's not a white American, you know, even like as an African Americanist, right, I'm like, oh my God, why are we not doing research on these people? Right, like because racism is always focused on the victim, right, so there's all this research on the pathology that's happened, you know, among black people because of slavery. It's like, what about the pathology because of slave ownership? Right, I mean, that is not okay, it's really bad, bad. So, anyway, yeah, so, yeah, to answer your question, no, my, my parents have really wanted not to influence us with their experience. Yeah, and they were also very, just, very strong willed, like absolutely so devoted to one another. You know, kind of that us against the world kind of thing. You know, like, everybody expects us to get a divorce, so we're never getting a divorce.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for me it definitely was never any of my my elders like my aunts and uncles and stuff like that, and I have more aunts and uncles on my dad's side than I do my mom, so my dad's one of six. And what state is your dad from? He is sinaloa, oh, sinaloa that's right.
Speaker 2:And where's your mother from? My mother is well well, she grew up all over yeah, so they moved every two years.
Speaker 1:Where's her?
Speaker 2:family of origin from I actually don't even know.
Speaker 1:If I have that answer, which I should honestly find more out about her family. It's it's easier to pinpoint my dad's because it's just Mexico and that's it like they still have the ranch that my dad was raised on, and and he was raised mostly by his aunt and uncle, because my grandmother, his, his, his biological father passed, so my grandmother came to the United States, left him and his two siblings behind to try and build a life here, and then, one at a time, they ended up coming over.
Speaker 1:So she had spent many years without them until she could get them here, and so it's easier to just know. On my dad's side, I really don't know my grandmother was not treated well by her. I can't even remember. Your mother's mother, my mother's mother, yes.
Speaker 2:Okay, so maybe that family is a bit fragmented.
Speaker 1:I think it's a little bit fragmented and I don't know if my, my grandmother, knows everything, because of the ways that she wasn't really quite with her parents necessarily, um, and we still have her, thank heavens, but she's 96 now.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's amazing. Where does she?
Speaker 1:live. She lives at home now. She was in Sacramento, which is where the last place that before my grandfather retired. So the Sacramento was the last place they were stationed and that's where they ended up staying. And then my grandmother has had a couple accidents recently and it was there was one last one that was just like okay, final straw, You're not living by yourself anymore, You're 96 and you've had some accidents and you cannot be up there about yourself.
Speaker 2:So she's now with my parents in long beach I see, yes, your grandma is the one who was moving with her yes, so my, my mom was born in anchorage, because that's where they were stationed when she was born.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she was only there for six months, then they moved but she was all over. They lived in turkey for two years. They lived in the philippines for two years. They lived in um another place overseas for two. For two years she finally she was in the united states for like most of middle school and high school. So she did, I think like colorado was a lot of middle school, I think, um, there was like rome, new york for part of high school then. Then there was Sacramento for the last part of high school. Then she left home and went to college in Long Beach and never left Long Beach. Oh, I see, but yeah, she grew up everywhere.
Speaker 2:And is that where she met your dad in Long Beach?
Speaker 1:Yeah, at college in Long Beach they met in a Spanish class because my dad thought it would be an easy A. And then his joke is that like oh, your mom asked me to tutor her and then she took advantage of me.
Speaker 2:Like, that's what a sweet story.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I have cousins, multiple cousins, on my dad's side. I only have one cousin on my mom's side and she's, funny enough, also mixed. Her mother is from England, and so just the two of us mixed girls on that side. And then I have one, two, three, four, five, six, six cousins on my dad's side, and they're all predominantly Mexican as well.
Speaker 2:Okay, and so? And where was your mom's mother born and your mom's father? I don't know. Okay, you don't know. I should know that. I know I'm going to have to ask.
Speaker 1:I don't know, but those cousins were always the ones Not always I shouldn't say that who knows if they're going to listen to the podcast, hi primos but they were the ones who would sometimes make me feel like I wasn't enough. Because, they grew up around predominantly Hispanics. I don't speak Spanish.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:And so whenever I was with that side of the family, everyone was speaking Spanish. Me and my brother are, and even my mom can hold her own pretty much but me and my brother didn't speak Spanish, and so we would always kind of get like, oh ha ha, like these two and they don't, you know they don't know and they'll never know, and and all that stuff.
Speaker 1:So they were the ones in my family that made me feel that way but I didn't ever get that on my mom's side, because I had the one cousin and we were we're both mixed and neither of us ever talked about it or anything like that. It was really in college where I started to feel from my community that like, oh, I wasn't Black enough for like the Black people at my college or I wasn't Hispanic enough for the Hispanic people at my college.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and you did feel that they made you feel like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was called like Oreo in middle school, and that was not from the black community, that was from the white community just being like, oh my god, but you're so, you're so like white, though, you're so like whitewashed, and I didn't quite understand that, but I, you know, I spoke standard english and I'm, you know, well educated and did really well, excelled in school, and so I just the white community was always like, wow, how, how, how different, like that's so crazy, you're so much whiter than you know other black people or whatever, which, which tossed in the confusion of feeling like I would.
Speaker 1:people always assumed I was half black, half white yeah, and then also feeling like I always wanted to, because that was the popular thing to be was white. I was wanting to be white. I wanted to look white so then I was messing with this triangle of like, of feeling not enough of all three things, and I'm not even white at all.
Speaker 2:Right, but tossing that in to the struggle of identity.
Speaker 1:And so then in college it was just feeling like like I couldn't go to Black grad. I could absolutely go to Black grad.
Speaker 2:I was absolutely allowed to, but I didn't feel like I could.
Speaker 1:I didn't feel comfortable and I had some of my closer friends be like you can absolutely go to Black grad, but I didn't feel like I would have been accepted there. And there was one girl that I befriended in freshman year and we never really stayed connected past freshman year. We kind of got close but all of her friends were darker skinned black people and they did not make me feel accepted. If I were hanging out with her and they were around as well, they were always like side eyeing me.
Speaker 2:That's so interesting. You know, I, I definitely get that. I think that's one of the really pernicious things about white culture, like sort of socioeconomically mobile white culture because I know what you mean by feeling like you're more accepted by white people was always diverse. But, like I said right, my, my Blackness was always really evident to me, but it was kind of held in my dad because we weren't. There were other Black kids Like I had Black friends, I had mixed friends, but I didn't have a Black community. We didn't, you know my, my mom's, my, rather my father's family, that well, we didn't live in black communities. I think it's really interesting. Yeah, that's what.
Speaker 2:That's one of the things that I think is it's pernicious, right, assimilation, the ability to assimilate and to get along well on this socio economic ladder, I feel like it's very, you know, it's a privilege, there's no doubt about it. But it's also, like you say right, you can be subject to being treated in a way that makes you deeply uncomfortable, like for me, it always manifested as you don't seem Black to me, as you don't seem black to me. Yeah, that was a compliment and I, I would just yeah, I just never even, I just I never engaged it, right, but it was always like I understand that they mean it as a compliment and they don't understand that it's not a compliment. It's really uncomfortable, right, because? But what they're saying is you don't seem different to me, you seem like me, I'm comfortable with you, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I also. I know that I had the experience when I was at college, in Stanford. All of the black groups invited me but I didn't feel that I belonged. You know, I was really uncomfortable. It took me it. It was a process, right. It took me a while to understand that there were other Black people who felt, also for various reasons, that they didn't fit right, like I used to look at the Black community as this group where everybody just knew they belonged and they they knew they fit and there was some kind of magical recipe that I didn't know. And that's just not true, right? It appears like that when you're an outsider, in a way. I became so comfortable as a Black faculty member at UCLA that it took me a long time to realize that I was walking into classrooms, into African-American studies classrooms, with Black undergrads who didn't think I was Black.
Speaker 1:Oh, who were like why is this woman teaching this class? What authority does she have?
Speaker 2:Oh, why is she here? Matter of fact, this is one of my favorite stories. This was now. This was a few years back, maybe 10 years ago, maybe. I kind of feel like it has to do with getting older and having gray hair, and I've been staying out of the sun for ages, you know, because I'm trying to preserve it's true, I'm lighter than I used to be because I stay out of the sun and I have you know I have gray hair.
Speaker 1:We have such a capability for being a wide spectrum of colors.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's exactly right. So I walked into this. I was teaching over the summer a group of students from historically Black colleges and universities who had come to UCLA for the summer, and one of my students told me, after I had done this summer program, one of the students became one of my students and she told me that the first day I walked in there, people thought and I had an afro. At the time I used to think, okay, my hair is the marker, I'm wearing my afro, surely that will do the speaking for me, right? I assumed right. But she told me they thought her name was Brittany. She told me they they thought, oh well, I guess she's a down white lady. They were like they sent us a down white lady.
Speaker 2:And it wasn't until I said something about my identity or we, or something like that, that they realized oh, you know that I think of myself as black and that. And then at some point, you know I'm sure I said something about being mixed race, but I swear, I think that there's something. So it's so great to not even realize it's going on, right, because I mean, like I said, I just don't think of myself as looking white. It's hard for me to think like that because of always having had this identity and my family and being so close, being related, to people who are Black, so I don't see myself as that different. And also I think too and I'm sure this is the case for you too I know how many different ways people of mixed race can look right, many, many different ways. So it never occurs to me that somebody thinks I'm white.
Speaker 2:I used to realize when I was working in the 10 years between undergrad and grad school. I worked at different businesses and for a while I thought I was going to be a hotel manager and I worked in a hotel, a couple of hotel chains, and I started realizing that when I talked to people on the phone and then they met me, I would see that they were surprised. They didn't expect me to look the way I looked. So then I thought, oh, they assumed I was white, right, because of the way I talk. But, like I said, it is this phenomenon of how I look. Now that I'm older, I just it's just astonishing, right, it's just astonishing. I'm always like, oh, I guess there's all kinds of things that I could do if I wanted to, because people think I'm white but I'm not really sure what that would be.
Speaker 1:And it's interesting for me now I love I stay out in the sun longer to try and get tanner to try and see how dark my skin gets, and my skin mostly gets olive. It doesn't ever get like browner, it just gets a darker shade of olive. But now I try to look quote unquote blacker, to explore how black I can look and love it because, I've spent so many years not hating it, you know, so very interesting in terms of like, looks and how you're perceived.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that you know. I teach Toni Morrison's novel the Bluest Eye. Are you familiar with that novel?
Speaker 2:No no, it's a really great novel. It's a hard novel to read. She's one of my favorite writers, but that book is her first book, her first novel, and in it it's a hard novel to read. She's one of my favorite writers, but that book is her first book, her first novel, and in it there's a there's character, a very dark skinned girl who longs for blue eyes, and one of the things Morrison says about that novel is that she wanted to think about racial self-loathing. How does that happen and what is its effect, especially on a child? And there's another character in the book. You know there are also like healthy black girls in the book who don't hate themselves. So it's not all this abjection, but but I think that racial self loathing is a real thing, you know it's.
Speaker 2:I think that it is absolutely necessary to love yourself as a political statement. You know like love yourself, love your difference, especially when, for whatever reasons in our personal past, that it's easy to assimilate, that it's even more incumbent. You know to like really cultivate love. You know like self-love for your difference, whatever it is, and active love for difference. You know, I think that's been part of my own development as a person. It's been very obvious to me when I actively started to say I don't want to have self-loathing and I also don't want to be afraid of loving the Blackness of my own Blackness and the Blackness of other people.
Speaker 2:Right, yes, and I don't want to love other people just because they're Black, right, but I think that loving something that's been devalued and that's been hated, but that's also fetishized and you know, has been a profit model in all these different ways, it's really really important. It's really important and also, again, right, like not thinking of that as a personal failure on your part. I think that's a really important thing too, because don't forget that the culture teaches everybody to hate themselves, right, like you can be white and beautiful and hate yourself, because in capitalism, that's how they create consumers, right? The whole point is that you're shown something that if you just buy this, you will be complete. So the whole, you know the whole, like the deferment of self-love, it's this model for making money and that's why it's so. You know, body dysmorphia and eating disorders and all the, all the hell women put themselves through, right, it's kind of.
Speaker 2:I think that that's the thing, too, when you start to talk to other women, and you talk to women who look beautiful and who don't seem to have any flaws, right, and they don't love themselves at all, right, they don't. There's this, what was it? It's in another oh yeah, it's in another Toni Morrison novel that I'm teaching, where this young woman who's like maybe 19 years old, she's a Black woman and she's talking about Hollywood movies, and this novel is set in the 1920s. So she's talking about Hollywood movies and how she loves Hollywood movies and romances, but when she's imagining scenarios, romantic scenarios, the scenarios don't work. If she is herself in the scenario, she has to imagine the actors in the scenario in order for it to be romantic. Right, that whole displacement thing we're taught that right the culture teaches us to. You know, like what do they call it in advertising? They have a word for it Aspirational.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes, yes. Well, it's so interesting that you brought up that, that novel and her thinking that, because I had a realization, not but maybe two weeks ago for the first time. I love reading romance and I've been reading this one specific romance author that I really enjoy and at some point in the middle of the book she describes, I think, the skin color of this character, the lead girl's character, and it was like Tanner or something like that, and I just I had the realization that every time I read a romance I only imagine the main woman as white.
Speaker 1:Yeah in my head she is always pictured as white and I'm like why wouldn't it be like me? Why wouldn't the go to color be my color? Right, it's always imagining a love story or romantic situation as the white woman being the main character.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a really good novel. She has this line, the character has this line it doesn't feel right If she thinks about herself. It doesn't feel right.
Speaker 1:I only had two more questions for Professor Streeter, the first being how does mixed race studies and ethnic studies in general benefit society and promote and contribute to inclusivity?
Speaker 2:Yes, Well, I absolutely think that, because mixed race is part of the human experience and also because, with the ways that we have access to one another, you know, I think that one of the things that mixed race identity does is reinforce to us this basic human connection that we have that transcends culture, that transcends background, that transcends nationality, right, that people can connect across difference. It's hackneyed and a little bit of a stereotype, but it is also real. I think that there's this basic human connection that is very powerful and also that it is really stimulating and wonderful to find out about people who are different from you. You know, I really respect cultural identities, right, I really respect communities and their identities and their particularity and, at the same time, I also know that many of us are displaced and on the boundary. You know, we all don't have that experience of being really rooted and having a cohesive community and stuff like that, and there are so many opportunities for us to create new things, right, human beings are so creative and so brilliant and also we have so many problems to solve, right, so many problems to solve. So, as a person who is an educator, right, as a person who also has this background in ethnic studies and feminist studies, where I think it's really important to bring marginal things to light.
Speaker 2:Mixed race people have always been out there, people, you know, crossing boundaries, although sometimes it's done really violently, right, like histories of slavery and colonialism and expansion and militarism and imperialism, you know, these are all really troubled sites of mixture and I think that we can acknowledge that, just like we were talking about Hamilton, right, there's all kinds of things about mixture and crossing boundaries that are not to be celebrated, right, because they're non-consensual.
Speaker 2:At the same time, I also think that the reason why people explore, right, human beings have always explored, they've always wanted to go to other places, and there's also something really magical about human connection, right, whether it's sexual or not, right, whether it's intimate or not, there's something really magical about human connection and I guess also, you know, partly because of the wars that are going on right now, I do feel like life is a gift, right, this really precious gift.
Speaker 2:So the way that people come together, like I said, I'm not a mother myself, you know, but I think that the way people come together and connect and reproduce, it is a beautiful thing and life is a gift. So I think that mixed race people are this kind of illustration of the bridging of difference again, right Like it is an illustration of the bridging of difference again, right Like it is an illustration of the bridging of difference. And it's also the illustration of how we, that we share really elemental, fundamental things about being human, but that also there are differences that we can learn from. And also cultures are always changing, right? Cultures are always changing, human beings are always changing and I definitely think mixed race people can be thought of as signifiers of change and development and movement, you know.
Speaker 2:You know, when I think about political activism among African-Americans, let's say right, since I know more about that generally speaking, there's a long history in the United States because of the one drop rule of African Americans being light skinned, being virtually white, right, and not everybody's right to be treated well. You know, one of the really inspiring things about the Black Lives Matter movement for me is really that when Black Lives Matter, all lives matter. And then I'm, you know, I'm not a Christian but I was raised Catholic and I know that in the teachings of Jesus there's something about the least among us, right, like Jesus befriended prostitutes and thieves. Right, and the teaching was that everybody has dignity and everybody is worthwhile, like.
Speaker 2:I definitely see Angela Davis as somebody like this. Right, she's a really good example and she's a mentor and an amazing role model worldwide for so many people. But she's a really good example of somebody who you know she was raised in segregated Birmingham, alabama, and she became very educated in this elite way as a philosopher of continental philosophy and then she became this Black radical activist. So she's always been a member of these very different worlds, right, this very elite, privileged world, and then this world where you're advocating for people. That are, the people who are easy to forget, right, the people who are easy to take advantage of, and I think that there's something really inspiring about seeing yourself in other people you know yeah.
Speaker 2:And wanting, sort of wanting that basic human dignity for everybody. That, I think, is really inspiring. So for me, I kind of feel like when we're in a position where we know that we can use our privilege on behalf of other people, it's really incumbent upon us to do it. Yeah, you know, if we possibly can. This even happened with somebody like Frederick Douglass, right, he was mixed race, although he didn't look mixed race necessarily when we think of mixed race today, but as a highly literate slave, right, who was self-taught, he convinced.
Speaker 2:It's kind of that black excellence model, right, where you convince people through your extraordinariness that black people are worth something and you should care about them, right. So I kind of feel like there's also this way that mixed race people can be used in a way that's a little uncomfortable too, right, convincing people that you really should care about the humanity. I mean, that's the role of the tragic mulatto figure in popular culture, right. Why do we feel so sorry for her? Because she looks white, and were it not for that one drop of black blood in her veins, she could live as a white person, you know. So now you should be able to identify with somebody as a human being without them looking white, right Like ideally.
Speaker 2:You know, this is one of the things that people in the past I know especially people have been very suspicious of people who declare mixed race identity because it can be perceived as something that is ingratiating. Barack Obama said that in his first biography. In Dreams from my Father he wrote that he had stopped telling white people that he was biracial years ago because he thought, or feared thought, that it would seem like he was ingratiating himself to them. So I do feel like there's this kind of dance that we do around privilege and around knowing that you can walk in worlds that are privileged worlds because you don't threaten people or they don't even realize that you're not different, and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:And lastly, does she have any advice or a message that she would like to give to other young mixed folks?
Speaker 2:I definitely believe in community. You know, I think it is one of the things that happens when people go to college and they start to find out where community is and you start to explore aspects of yourself that maybe are harder at home in your family, you know, for whatever reason. One of the things that's really cool I would say too, about mixed race and community is that you can have similar experiences to somebody who has they don't share your background at all. What you share is that you are both in the position of being this hybrid person. So the multiracial collective is a radically multiple group, which I think is powerful and which is another really interesting way of thinking about what happens when cultures come together and what happens when people decide to reach across difference and things like that.
Speaker 2:Like I said about my parents, they are from such different backgrounds but they also felt like they had a lot in common. They felt like their fathers were so similar. When I was at Berkeley and became more involved with student groups for people of mixed race, it was always really interesting to me how people gravitated toward writing about their experience, doing art about their experience and sharing that. So there's a couple of a couple of groups at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz in particular that came out with anthologies of work by people of mixed oh, very cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's, I think. I think that that impulse to tell your story is a really cool impulse and also that impulse to express your feelings, you know, in a creative way is also really compelling. I've seen a lot in the classes that I teach when I give people the opportunity to do some kind of creative response to the material, it really frees people to have a way of engaging with the material with, you know, with books or with films or with historical things, whatever we're thinking about, in a way that isn't just purely academic but that's also personal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and honestly, part of my aim with this podcast is to, one, strengthen community and bring people together and two, to allow other mixed people to tell their story.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, yes, like you said, right, there are so many similarities, like things are better than they used to be, right. Like I said, let's not go backwards in any respect. But there's also a cyclical repetition of things you know, like relations of racism repeat. Relations of inequality repeat, you know. Also, I think, that there's something about sameness and difference that maybe is again in our reptilian brain, or something right, like needing to know what is different and what is the same. That just seems like a kind of basic distinction that's part of us. To understand that difference doesn't have to be threatening and it doesn't have to be frightening is also really that's something that I feel that mixed race people bring to the table as well. That, I think, is really valuable.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, thank you so much. You're welcome. This conversation was amazing. It's been such a pleasure. You're awesome and I enjoyed talking to you so much so thank you for spending the time and carving the time out of your day, and I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1:Yes, of course. What did I tell you? That conversation took every twist and turn imaginable. I hope you learned a thing or two. I know I sure did, and she is just an absolute delight of a human being. If you enjoyed this episode, support by rating, leaving a review and or sharing. Recommend this podcast to a friend, why not? The cover art is by Madeline Ashton and the theme music is by Austin Dedman. Thank you to both of them. Follow me on the social medias. I'm on Instagram and TikTok at Giselle S Ione. That's J-I-S-E-L-S-A-Y-O-N. They will be linked in the show notes. When you follow, you officially become a Gisele Bean. Thank you to Rachel for that name. All the books or articles we talked about are linked in the show notes, as well as the podcast Patreon page. When you become a member on Patreon, you'll get exclusive benefits and ways to interact with the podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. It really, truly means the world to me and I will catch you beautiful, blended and brilliant people next time. Bye.
