Just Not An Identity Politics Kinda Girl
My reluctant, life-long tango with race essentialism
In this inaugural post for my memoir-inflected blog, about culture, politics and film, maybe even beauty and dating when they tickle my fancy, I detail my innate aversion to identity politics, yet inability to escape them.
I can very easily characterize the bulk of my life — professional, social and private — as a reluctant tango with the expectations and assumptions made about me based on my skin color, about the tastes foisted on me, the ideological allegiances expected of me, the feelings projected on me by family, peers, teachers, bosses, retail clerks, and prospective lovers, due to the above categorizations. This extensive grouping of familiars and strangers, allies and foes alike, have all made it a point of telling me, instructing me, even bullying me into embracing what they feel I should think about myself, namely, that what I am is who I am, and punishing me when I don’t nod accordingly and follow suit.
It’s a position most of my brethren on this platform don’t mind. The majority of Medium contributors accept and even welcome these external designations of race (and gender) as their raison-d’etre, boasting of the rigid degree to which they cling to their randomly assigned identities. It’s like snagging a number at an old-fashioned butcher counter. For those who don’t remember, upon entering the tight space, packed with hungry carnivores, you’d take the pink, tongue-shaped slip, study it with resignation, then line up and wait accordingly. By the time it’s your turn, you’d not only memorized your number, but also learned to take pride in your place in the queue, and, by extension, in the universe, willing to defend it if threatened. You’d order the cuts of meat and mayonnaise-based salads you came for, without time to indulge a whim for something different. Then you’d leave with the chops and thinly-sliced turkey breast snugly under your arm, onto the next task which would most likely involve more assigned behavior and a queue, assured that the world is as it should be, as is your place in it.
Invariably, the few times I’ve entered butcher shops, I’ve lost the assigned slip, forgotten my true place, cut the line, or worse, let others take my rightful place and last hunks of charcuterie. I’ve tried to live my life as I see it, but others take umbrage at the placement I’ve chosen for myself. Early on I learned the hard way, that not falling in line, upsetting the order of custom meat purchases, is a punishable offense, especially in Chicago where I grew up.
Back to my tango… Perhaps tango conjures up the wrong image — a sultry and exotic pas de deux of fit, hypersexual equals. A tango, a true one, is a push and pull, a power struggle enacted as seduction, one in which the lesser party gives in.
My push and pull with identity politics is still a tango, though not streamlined and elegant. It’s a desperate, unchoreographed jig to an extended remix of the Macarena, with that archetypal aging playboy who haunts every party. Be it a wedding reception, office X-mas celebration, a kid’s birthday, he’s always there, trying to get my attention, misreading my effort to be polite and humor him as a form of smoldering flirtation.
This aging playboy, like the critical mass of identity politics proselytizers, operates under the assumption that with the right amount of persistence and exhibitionism, I’ll eventually warm up. So that’s his strategy. When the chairs are cleared away, the lighting dimmed, when the first pan-Latin beats — this is an extended remix so anything goes — beckon from the speakers, he’s the first to claim the dance floor. Willfully ignorant of the differences between flamenco and tango rhythms, he’s confident he’s dancing a tango and nailing it, unaware that his impromptu choreography is really just another version of the funky chicken.
After a few more bars of music, the crowd gathers to cheer him on, allowing me to recede as far away from his line of sight as possible, but he spots me, as I knew he would, and yanks me onto the dance floor, ruining the perfect moment of a freshly refilled cocktail and solitude.
Once out on the dance floor, drink spilled down my dress, I have to play along, and stop violently pulling away for fear of breaking a heel and looking even more besieged. I go along, simple enough movements, so as not to encourage his wilder interpretations of the funky chicken, or look like the wet blanket, the bitch guest no one remembers inviting. I wait for him to exhaust himself, for the crowd to tire of his antics, but this old dude has stamina and the crowd has nothing else better to do. So there I am, stuck complicit in the shamble of flirtation and joy for what feels like an eternity. This is what my dealings with identity politics have felt like for most of my life.
You could say my first encounter with this was as early as childhood, I remember being called “oreo” often from preschool through most of high school by white and black kids, even Asian and Latino ones. By 5 years old, I was over the slur, as well as the accompanying “you think you’re a white girl” — it just stopped registering. The more in-depth and most punishing leg of this tango was with my family, their disappointments and punishments for not having the friends or interests they deemed appropriate for me. There’s enough here to justify a memoir — but for the sake of a passing anecdote…
My sophomore year at Reed College, I was accepted into an art history fellowship sponsored by a small liberal arts school to study stupas, Buddhist shrines dating back to 5th century A.D., in Nepal and India. “Black girls don’t go to India to study Buddhist architecture,” was the mantra leveled at me by my mother and the men in our family she designated enforcers of the rules I always seemed to transgress. It was lost on her that this phrase was lastly, and most definitely, uttered by her 3rd husband, then of only a few years, a man who unironically ordered Kente cloth checks from the bank, who couldn’t locate Nepal on a map then, and probably still can’t. It didn’t matter what I wanted, what I felt. My skin color and the values others assigned to it had already been constructed to pre-determine the contours of my life. And that was that. It would take me another half-decade to break out of this framework and Chicago, and head abroad.
Compared to the histrionics and punishing sectarianism of current group-think, the level of blind fury unleashed over traitors and apostates like Rachel Dolezal, these earlier incidents are pretty tepid, even innocuous, the kind I’d learned to take on the chin. I recall my first encounter with the antecedents of today’s feverish tribalism in graduate school.
I had just moved to New York and matriculated to NYU’s Masters Program in Cinema Studies. It wasn’t the Graduate Film program — I wasn’t ready for it, nor could I afford it. At least it was on the NYU campus, in the Tisch building and afforded me a grad school apartment in the Village. I guess there were few other black students in the program — I didn’t make a point of keeping count. Though we had very little in common and lacked genuine simpatico, instant friends were made — I was sucked into a ready-made social orbit. There were invitations to Baptist prayer brunches — I’m an atheist. I joined other social outings and was met with disbelief and criticism when I failed to appreciate a spoken-word performance, or worse laughed. There were talks of party mix-tapes with TLC in heavy rotation. I was very much into the techno and drum and bass, and Björk, and still am. (Not to disparage one of the least pathological Housewives on the Bravo franchise, I still find it physically impossible to listen to the group she produced as if it’s real music.) I made my musical tastes known. My new friends said that was cool, yet insisted I list my favorite hip-hop artists. Sometimes modern race essentialism is Machiavellian and adapts — it appears just lenient enough not to trigger a full rebuke. Its proponents — unlike my family — wouldn’t forbid me from listening to Björk by throwing out all my music. They would instead insist that deep down I really prefer TLC. It’s a simple paradigm, externally fluid enough to allow other things, but the essence, at its foundation, assumes a cement core of blackness that is as indisputable as it is unmalleable.
I realize now most of these insta-friends were just trying to settle in a new city, begin a new chapter in life. They were nice and inoffensive enough to be forgettable, except for one young man. I’ll call him Kevante.
We were in the same film theory class. I’d wanted to sign up for a class about alienation and post-war despair in European new wave film. When I went to obtain the instructor’s approval and signature, an older white woman, rapidly aging and wrinkling before my very eyes in real-time, the stench of half-metabolized booze oozing out of her pores, cracked open the office door with the most baffled stare. She had no idea what I was doing in her office a few days before the beginning of her storied cinema studies seminar. I was told it was full, closed to new students, though I’d heard otherwise, and quickly dispatched. It’s easy to characterize this incident as an example of racism. Maybe if I were in a charitable mood, I’d blame it on the booze, but I blame it on this tango.
For my dance partner is always uncomfortably close to me gyrating away. Just when the lighting and rhythm change enough to hint that the set is ending and that I’ll be free of him, just when I think he’s spent and fading, he catches another wind, adapts to the pulsating beat, keeping me hostage, though the party is well over and all and the guests have long gone.
My only other choice was a graduate gender theory in film, basically endless reading of Judith Butler and her brethren about the male gaze. I’ll do almost anything to avoid ever reading Judith Butler and gender film theory again, so I chose alternative narratives in Classical Hollywood Film. I believe we started with an early Bette Davis film. After class, en route to the library, Kevante launched into a diatribe about his reading of THE SHINING, that it was a film steeped in post-colonial guilt and repressed slave narratives. I guess Scatman Crothers was an uncredited metaphysical bridge between these worlds. I’d always seen THE SHINING as an all too familiar tale of imploding male ego, alcoholism and familial abuse, and said so. He didn’t hide his displeasure at my reading. He pushed harder, insinuating that I, of all people, should get it. I pushed back even harder. In his assumptions and expectations, he’d never postulated that I’d be a headstrong bitch, and possibly more analytical than he. He huffed off, his backpack tightly clutched in his hands, against baggy, acid-washed jeans which I surmised had been ironed, given the crease down the middle. I’ve always suspected that men who iron their jeans with a crease down the middle are villains, and should be avoided at all costs. I wasn’t wrong.
I managed to alienate Kevante enough that he steered clear of me for the rest of the semester. We were reunited at a social gathering, the birthday of a mutual friend from the Cinema Studies program, a Spanish girl who always had a stream of friends visiting from Sevilla and San Sebastian. One guy in particular, I’ll call him Sancho for obvious reasons, and I hung out a lot. We both liked techno and drum-and-bass, an annoying, alienating preference to most people, so we clicked.
Kevante too had brought a friend, a Pre-Raphaelite Blonde with a sweet girlish energy. She resembled a mannequin for those horned Norse helmets come to life, so I’ll call her Sophie. We too clicked instantly. She told me she worked as a dominatrix. I confessed that I had, too, years back, but only for a week. She told funny stories about her clients and their kinks — she was a gem. She seemed smitten with Kevante for reasons I’ll never understand, except that she was between apartments and he’d let her stay with him. When I told him how much I liked his girlfriend, he scoffed at the idea, denied the mere plausibility of such a thing, even uttered gibberish including “as a strong black man.” I felt bad for Sophie, that he’d so easily negated their bond to lean into his race essentialism soapboxing. Then the topic of conversation turned to me and Sancho. I politely excused myself.
I returned from the bathroom of the dingy East Village pool hall to find Kevante whispering sweet nothings in Sancho’s ear. For the sake of this excavation about race, it’s appropriate to mention that Sancho was the fairest Spaniard I’d ever met, especially one from Sevilla — pale blue eyes, blond, a fact noted by Kevante for sure. Sancho’s eyes bulged with shock at my simultaneous re-appearance against the backdrop of Kevante’s narration. His eyes, always kinda damp, were limpid. The night ended.
Kevante left with Sophie and I with Sancho. He was very quiet, as was I. Finally, he struggled to get to the heart of the matter. In his Castilian-inflected English, Sancho botched the pronunciation of Kevante but the next sentences were clear. Kevante had told him in vivid detail that I’d been sleeping with him and a slew of other guys during our courtship. Disgusted and humiliated, Sancho ended things.
Was it because of my perceived bad taste? I’d have dumped anyone who would have designated Kevante a lover in the absence of practical necessity. Maybe Sancho was the racist, maybe his Euro imagination had run amok with the suggestion that I belonged to and de facto preferred Kevante because of our shared ancestry, because of whatever not-so-subtle Mandingo references Kevante, a reigning king of race essentialism, would have embellished.
For the rest of the semester, whenever I’d pass Kevante on campus or in the library, he always had a smirk on his face, a look of triumph that he’d trumped, defeated, and humiliated me, using the only weapon he had — racial identity and its contours, both his and mine.
Over the years, I’ve met a lot of Kevantes. I can’t help but find myself rubbing shoulders with the kind of people who at parties preface their introductions and every subsequent comment with a mention of their ethnicity. Even their comments about the communal food and beverage with statements fit this pattern: “As a Dominican-American, I cut avocados a different way,” “I’m Hungarian-American, so I add paprika to everything.” These people lurk everywhere and are rarely corrected or challenged. They are too busy blathering away, aglow at the sound of their own banter to notice that everyone likes paprika’s promise of smokiness and spice, and no two people cut avocados in the same manner because it is impossible.
I never saw Kevante again. For a few months, the tango slowed to a pace that I could ignore. I enjoyed life, bought killer pairs of shoes, and saw Björk in concert for the first time. Later that spring, I ran into Sophie and asked if she was still with Kevante. She told me it ended soon after that party. I asked why. She was simple and direct, “He’s an asshole.”
Is it really that simple? In my experience, yes. The type of people who come out of the gate swinging with identity-laden statements and try to lure me into their rabbit holes are, like Kevante, just assholes. Of course, there are all sorts of assholes — outwardly hostile, aggressive assholes to covert, passive-aggressive assholes. If I meet someone like Kevante, they are somewhere on that spectrum, which is really to say a narcissist, looking for cover, a simultaneous pretext and outlet for their worst selves, an excuse to blab on and on without actually saying anything substantive, to mete out punishment without real authority. I wish I could ignore them, turn away but I’m stuck, we’re all stuck, in that tango waiting for the aging playboy to realize he has no rhythm or grace, and finally bow out.
