The Colored Lens

In a recent post entitled "The Invisible Race" in his series on The White Lens, Nezua writes:

When I was a boy, I lived on another planet. This planet looked a lot like the United States of America, but in this land I lived in, Mexicans were invisible. You didn't see them in gardens, you didn't see them in stores, in catalogs, on the corner, in the schools, or at the laundromat. And to me, they did not exist. Except when you saw them in movies, or perhaps a magazine illustration. And I don't know about you, but when I saw those presentations, I more often than not just looked away. [...]

When (and it's always "White") people talk to me now about the non-existence of Race, I do understand their point. I do understand the history of their paradigm. We learn that Race was invented by Europeans in order to draw a political, ethical, moral line between themselves and those they feared and did not respect and would overrun and conquer and kill and enslave—whether it be African or Indian from the North part of "America" or Indian from the warmer parts of the "American" continent, or any of the other indigenous humans of the earth. Yet, when I speak of race as I have experienced it, of course do mean just that: how I have experienced it. Because my early education on these matters did not include much actual learning. It did not include these eye-opening ideas, these college ideas that people drop so casually now as if I can go back in time and shake off the ideas and feelings and values I absorbed through the culture. So for me, it is O!!! Now you want to discount race. Now!!! Now that I've learned why I should be proud of those things the mainstream culture has tried to used to beat me down? Now that I am finally proud of the differences between the dominant culture and myself? Now you want to take that away?

Too late. You should have told me young, when I was a boy. You should have said "you're a little browner because humans all over the world are different shades and your heritage reaches back to Mexico and all her ancient cinnamon chocolate blood." I did not get that from the media or my peers. You should have soaked the movies with the idea that we are all one, bound by our needs, our hopes, our vulnerabilities, our smallness in the face of Everything, our struggle against the entropic part of ourselves, the weakness we become when we wall ourselves away from others. I did not get any lesson like that from the movies. I got the very same thing some give me now. Oh? Mexico? Land of drugs and violence and woman-hating men? Nothing down there to see! Nothing down there to be proud of. Just like you and your blood. Build a wall! Yes, fine, you want to build a wall to keep all the Mexicans out. Perhaps that will work for you.

Intrepidly prolific as always, Nezua follows this up with another post entitled "Journeys of Hope", as part of his Road to the Fifth Sun series, in which he writes:

The journey that we undertake with hope in our sails can lead us anywhere. Today, we sail under the Fifth Sun toward the distant and shimmering golden horizon.

In 1848, when the news broke that California—a land still technically belonging to Mexico but under American military occupation—was a land of gold, tens of thousands of people from all over the world clamored to get some. The Dream of California became inextricably tangled with the "Dream of America," and the newly "ceded" land made many people rich, many people crazy, and many people dead. Meanwhile, America took on the ironic reputation that if you worked hard, you could achieve your dreams! The part about a war of aggression and the murder and displacement of countless indigenous people being an essential ingredient of that "hard work" seems to have been left out. Perhaps one could say that today in 2007, the world is still paying the price for not being aware of the full recipe for the cakey life America holds so dear.

I've been turning over Nez's words in my head with some interest, because I'm struck by the degree to which the inner thoughts and sentiments of a Mexican American can so closely parallel my own inner journey as an Asian American. I find it striking because the histories of our respective peoples in America are so very different, and yet our encounter with white imperialism has clearly produced overlapping bodies of human experience. And this further convinces me that one of my priorities as an anti-racist activist must be to continue forging connections between diverse communities of color, listening to one another's stories, identifying similarities and differences, and aligning our various struggles against white male supremacy.

The story of the Chilean man's journey to California is a familiar one to anyone who has read the history of the Chinese in America, who began to arrive in large numbers in the mid-1800s (oftentimes driven by the decline of a weak Ching dynasty under the assault of European colonialism), and who are oftentimes still perceived as foreigners (spies for communist China, for example). [ Pictured: Chinese immigrants with abacus, tea cups, and writing materials.] In his now-classic Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, Ronald Takaki writes:

Detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, Chinese immigrants carved over a hundred poems on the walls of the barracks. One of them wrote:

I used to admire the land of the Flowery Flag as a country of abundance
I immediately raised money and started my journey
For over a month, I have experienced enough wind and waves...
I look up and see Oakland so close by...
Discontent fills my belly and it is difficult for me to sleep.
I write these few lines to express what is on my mind.

We need to know what was on the "minds" of the people. As scholars of a new social history have noted recently, so much of history has been the story of kings and elites, rendering invisible and silent the "little people". [...] "What is it you want to know?" an old Filipino immigrant asked a researcher. "Talk about history. What's that ... ah, the story of my life ... and how people lived with each other in my time."

Ay, manong
your old brown hands
hold life, many lives
within each crack
a story.

I'd guess that not many Americans are aware that by the late 1800s, Chinese immigrants constituted some 20% of California's population (not only building the railroads but also constructing the irrigation systems which turned a desert into a fertile farmland). And I'd guess that even fewer are aware that a powerful form of social control on the West coast in those days was lynching, which was not confined to Blacks in the deep South as is often imagined. According to research by Ken Gonzales-Day in his book Lynching in the West, there were more than 350 documented lynchings in California between 1850 and 1935, as well as over 100 documented military or judicial hangings. In one incident on Oct. 24, 1871, 15 Chinese immigrants were lynched on a single day in Los Angeles. Mexicans, Indians, Chileans, and many others were also frequent targets. [ Pictured: Massacre of the Chinese at Rock Springs, Wyoming.]

Coming back to my original reaction to Nezua's writings, I find myself asking: What does it mean to be a person of color in the USA? Of course there can be no singular answer to this absurdly broad question; each of our individual stories is uniquely noteworthy. Nevertheless, there are important patterns worth discerning. I sometimes say that talking about race is like talking about the weather: there's too much micro-variation to capture the full complexity of every particle of water in a weather system, yet analyzing and responding to the overall movement of storms and relevant macro-patterns, at an appropriate level of granularity and abstraction, is a pragmatic necessity. [ Pictured: Chinese shrimpers in Monterey.]

So again, what does it mean to be a person of color in the USA? I suppose it means that our experiences are in some way united by our encounter with the dominant culture of whiteness. Without question, many of these experiences are alienating, painful, sometimes violent or even deadly. And yet personally, I've discovered that the struggle to find my way as a member of a racial diaspora has also been illuminating and empowering. Just working on these issues with people who genuinely seek to understand and collaborate is often gratifying. Maybe that's the bottom line: as communities of color, we're working on it; we need to keep working on it; as always, we're on the move.

Comments

[Dead Inside]

Thank you, Kai.

Can I share something? I feel very much the same way about sex/gender. I don't mean to bring up the fight, but we're having some good conversations and working together on understanding, so that's the spirit I'm writing this in. It's like, for me, all the Feminist movement, sex/gender was there and nobody really questioned it. It was, as far as I know, seen as the primary and only dividing line. Women were denied the same rights as men. No middle-ground, no controversy. Then trans people started to show up in big numbers and all of a sudden it seemed to me, like women (and men) wanted to take their ball and go home. Sex/gender being their ball, cause they always had their sex/gender and took it for granted and until we showed up never questioned it, it didn't seem. Now it's all our fault that there's a sex/gender dichotomy and we're not working hard enough to eliminate sex/gender.

I see a lot of similarities with what Nezua and you have written here. I guess it's sort of a duh, cause BFP has said many times that our situations are very similar. You have highlighted another way. And a particularly insidious way of making ourselves feel like we're nuts.

I'm sure that the full story is much more complex. But that's how it felt to me going through it.

Even weirder is that I learned that there was no such thing as race from radical women of color, so I thought that's where the idea originated. So, thank you for enlightening me as to the history of this no-such-thing-as-race idea.

I hope this comment isn't disruptive. I hope it reads as seeing similarities and re-inforcing your point and finding more common ground for us all. That's how I intend it, but intentions can go awry and if this one does, I will try harder next time or just shut up and keep listening until I can find a way to make my intentions more clear.

[Kai]

Dead Inside, thanks for your comments, there's nothing disruptive about them, indeed I appreciate it. I hesitate to comment on The Fight(s), as it feels like enough fuel's already been thrown on that fire to burn for several lifetimes; but I'll just say that what you've said here makes sense to me, that the entrance of trans folks into feminist discussions complicated matters and has caused consternation among those who had already devoted themselves to any given set of orthodoxies. As you point out, current thinking is that race doesn't exist biologically but it most certainly exists as a social construct and must be addressed as such. When those social constructs fall away, race will fall away, but arguing that the social constructs don't exist based on biological non-essentialism is a slight of hand that actual defends the current social constructs. Along similar lines, in my opinion there has yet to be a really substantive reckoning with multi-racialism and its impact on racial thought in America. I mean, people like Carmen at Racialicious are doing their best to tackle it but she seems to be among the few. Anyway, thank you for tying together yet more of our experiences in our struggles to "become whole" (as BFP recently commented here), as far as I'm concerned that's just about always a good thing. :-D

[MB Williams]

My gr-gr-grandmother's older brother, a decorated Civil War veteran guide (of the famous Maine 20th) was lynched in Norridgewock (Larone), Maine in 1880. His crime? Being a land-owning Indian in a time when scalp-bounties for Indians were still on the books. It caused such fear in my family that my gr-gr-grandmother and her father up and moved from the centuries-old traditional village of the Kennebec Abenaki to Portland, where they felt they'd actually be safe. Of course, Granny Nellie was still alive when in 1925, over 20,000 KKK supporters met in the Portland's Baxter Park for a "picnic". One of the things they were protesting was the US granting some Indians the right to vote in federal elections (we still couldn't vote in Maine elections until 1954; 1969 if you lived on tribal land.)

I've probably told this story before, but I think it needs to be told a million more times. The US legacy of racism extends well beyond African-Americans and the South, both in demographics and geography, and is still alive and well for many of us today.

Great post, Kai (and Nezua).

[g]

Great post.

I've often thought the same thing - with so many parallels between America's ethnic communities (such as the history of Mexican Americans and Chinese Americans in your post), you'd think it be so easy to build bonds between us... but unity even today seems so elusive. Of course it doesn't mean we should stop trying, but I find it to be another sad reminder of the enduring legacy of racism in America that Asians are pitted against Latinos who pitted against Blacks who pitted against Indians, etc...

-g.

[Kevin]

Hey, Kai! In honor of National Delurking Week I'm officially delurking. Your posts, your blog, blows me away.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect that this post is at least partly in response to Jeff Goldstein's post via Feministe. I had the same response to Jeff's ideas and I've had the same response every time someone starts talking along those lines. I love the way you phrase it, "theoretical slight of hand." Sums it up perfectly. What's forgotten is that it's easy to deny the existence of race from a theoretical perspective when you have never really experienced race from a real life perspective. I'm not saying that white folks don't ever experience race, not at all; but I am saying that when I walk out the door I almost immediately am confronted with the fact that I'm a black man--even those little things, like the short look of surprise or shock people express when first meeting me that the dude with the anglo sounding name is in fact black. When one of your earliest memories is of being 4 or 5 and pulling into the donut shop with your moms and watching a dude on a motorcycle jump off, lunge at you and scream "fucking niggers" while (thankfully) being held back by his friend, well, it's tough to all of the sudden jump on the "race is a fiction" bandwagon. Yeah, I understand that on a theoretical and scientific basis, but my real life experiences tell me that race is very real. And frankly, I resent those that want to try and take my experiences away from me. And that's what I think people really mean when they say things like "we need to get past our differences." In other words, "you should just forget all the past hurt and injustice, you should stop all that needless celebration of your unique culture and lived experience, and just stfu and be like me." No thanks.

And yeah, Dead Inside, I think you're spot on. In many ways the introduction of trans issues into feminist thought is painfully too similar to the introduction of PoC issues into feminist thought. But like you said, BFP has already spelled that out.

[Kai]

MB, I remember you mentioning your ancestor's lynching once before in a thread about racism (unfortunately I also remember the response of various white men, which was "who cares? ancient history!" *sigh*). If you ever have the time or inclination at Wampum, I'd be interested in hearing or seeing any additional textural details that have come down your family, like portraits or anecdotes or anything really. I think these stories are important. And as your family's response illustrates, lynching has always been intended to terrorize the imagination as much as it's meant to murder an individual. In fact I've just been reading an interesting book on this topic by Jacqueline Goldsby called "A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature".

g, thanks for your comment. Yes, white supremacy has done a pretty good job of driving wedges between communities of color. Actually this post began with my attempt to find historical interactions between early Chinese immigrants and the Mexicans, Chileans, and American Indians who inhabited California at that time. Not surprisingly I've had a hard time finding anything so far, but I just started looking. I'm sure that language and culture, and the guns of white colonialists, all played a role in keeping our communities apart; but I'd be willing to bet that there were Chinese who learned Spanish and banded with Mexicans or Chileans. Unfortunately such stories tend to get buried. I'll keep looking into it, but in any case one thing I can do today is build alliances in NY and CT and indeed right here in the blogosphere. In my view we're making slow but real progress on this front.

Kevin, thanks for delurking! Actually I wrote this post before I read Jill's post at Feministe, which led me to the Goldstein piece, which I honestly found very convoluted. And my reaction is the same as yours: it annoys me that my experiential reality is seen as having less validity than the pseudo-lofty meanderings of white theorists. I mean, obviously race isn't biologically real, most people of color understand this (for example, I'm a mix of Han and Manchu blood, so the race "Chinese" doesn't really mean anything, yeah yeah yeah I get it, thank you for enlightening me). But as you say, race is very real every time I walk out the door. And it's real in that it's been hammered into the bedrock of my psyche. So I see all this race-does-not-exist talk as an attempt to erase one of the most fundamental struggles in my life story, and I don't appreciate it. Anyway, I read every single sparkling word at SlantTruth, so now I guess it's my turn to delurk over at your pad. ;-)

[Nanette]

I was watching some show on MLK with my mom the other night, on PBS, and at one point he said something that I've probably read or heard many times before, although I don't recall it, but which this time just had resonance.

Justice is indivisible.

Such a simple, short phrase that preceded a much more widely known (or, at least, quoted) phrase "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere".

Both are powerful, both resonate... but it's the first one that, to me, is just inescapable. I mean, there is no equivocating there - not that there is in the next sentence either, but "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere" somehow, in my mind, also allows the onus to be on... someone. Maybe this government there, or that person here, or whatever. "Justice is indivisible.", full stop, puts the onus on each person.

Also, there are so few first person narratives of non white people from the early California times. I'm sure there are some oral and family histories and stories tho, if one can find the right person. No clue where that person would be, though. Might be able to find something from a later period in the um... you know, that government writing project? I don't recall where to access that, but I do know that there are hidden gems there.

I think, most likely, that there was interaction between the various groups... there always has been, to an extent, so I don't see why it would have been any different then. And, of course, if one was in any sort of service business, you'd have to know at least some of the language of your customers - or co-workers, employers, etc.

It's possible that as various peoples here continue along the line of putting together the ignored history of their ancestors that more stuff like that will come out, actually. Right now, and for the past couple of decades, just finding, recording and highlighting the primary history has been a big, ongoing project.

[atlasien]

There are plenty of modern day Chinese-Mexicans in the border town of Mexicali. They have a very interesting and complicated history.

"The first Chinese to arrive in the area at the turn of the century signed on as labourers for the Colorado River Land Company, an American enterprise which designed and built an extensive irrigation system in the fertile Valle de Mexicali. Some immigrants came overland from America, often fleeing officially sanctioned anti-Chinese policies in the U.S., while others sailed directly from China via the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortez. As in California, thousands of Chinese coolies were lured to the area by the promise of high wages that never materialised.

A 200-meter desert peak near Baja California's Crucero La Trinidad is named El Chinero in memory of a group of 160 Chinese labourers who perished while crossing the San Felipe Desert in search of work in the valley. The desert itself was known for a time as El Desierto de los Chinos, 'Desert of the Chinese.' An unscrupulous boatman landed the group at a fork in the Rio Colorado, telling them Mexicali was only a short distance away; sixty-five kilometres of burning desert lay between them and the goal they never reached."

http://www.mexconnect.com/mex_/travel/jcummings/jcchina.html

[Yolanda Carrington]

"So again, what does it mean to be a person of color in the USA?"

Older brother, your question is bottomless. If I begin to tackle answering it, I would start by saying that "person of color" means that I am always the other, seen as a object/projection and never as a full human being. Regardless of my gender, age, or physical ability, I am the beast (literally and figuratively) that every white person is afraid of.

I am a woman, but because I'm Black, I'm as dangerous and as violently scary as any man. I can't tell you how many supposedly progressive/feminist white women have reacted to me with intense fear if I dare express disdain or raise my voice. You would think I was trying to strangle them. Yet they feel perfectly safe around the clean-cut handsome white man who is more likely to violate and harm them than any man of color would. Women of color---have you all not had this same experience with white women, or white men for that matter? Ain't we a woman? White folks don't think so.

Being POC also means I can see my own experience reflected in the lives of all POC. I can read Kai's or Nezua's words---Asian man and Chicano man---and hear my own Black girl humiliations and sorrows reflected back at me. Different time, different place, different body---same damn story.

If there is a race binary, it is white/other. It is the White Man against everyone else. White Man against the State of Nature. To him still, we POC represent the barbarian, the savage. Women and children do too. That's what "civilization" and "progress" and "science" is all about---from the Crusades to technology to this current war against the Middle East to shopping malls to homeland security. Since the imperialist Global North works hard everyday to keep the Global South in bondage, the White Man's dualisms of Man/Nature-progress/barbarianism remain self-fulfilling prophecy.

White Mankind's domination of the colonized, the feminized, the Other. That's what being a person of color in our world is all about.

[nezua limón xolografik-jonez]

Kai

I love both this post (and not simply because it bounces of my post, because we all do that back and forth and that's what i've really come to love about these blog communities, the raising of consciousness and unity we are able to take part in) and the thread, the comments.

1. i think white male supremacy is slowly, but surely, ending. however, if we can survive the thrashing, tantrummy, angry, violent, reaction i don't know.

1. And this further convinces me that one of my priorities as an anti-racist activist must be to continue forging connections between diverse communities of color, listening to one another's stories, identifying similarities and differences, and aligning our various struggles against white male supremacy.

absolutely. in fact, that post about "throwing like a girl" that i did is the beginnings of me getting out from under narratives and thought and speech patterns i have never confronted regarding women. and this is because i realized—on a gut level, and not so much articulated yet—that i cannot care about myself and my own struggle and feelings related to race/white male supremacy and not care just as much about their struggle. when i let the awareness of the mexican struggle, the chinese, the women, the blacks, the indian—all people who at one time have been (and still are) under the grip and gaze of the White Male—fill my mind and heart, it ruins my peace completely. it makes me furious, and sad, and then, determined.

10. ;) Nanette, there are many first person stories coming from California from Chican@s. Because it is a very important part of our history. the california experience is tied inextricably to our past, and the history of Mexico, of Indians, of Mexican Americans today. (I want to see the Austrian out of office, and someone more representative sitting there.) As the Chinese have such a huge history there, I imagine there are stories told by them, as well.

7. As scholars of a new social history have noted recently, so much of history has been the story of kings and elites, rendering invisible and silent the "little people". this is very interesting, and so true. thus, it's no wonder that the absorbed "history" as it stands leads to only more woe and pain for those of us not in those upper echelons. it's no wonder that "learning" only leads to more of the same. we need REAL history, real people's stories, the effects of what we've lived, the lessons. without that, we are dooooomed. and there's no need for us to be so stupid and backward except that a certain faction of people have the need and desire to see us that way. it keeps the red carpets crumb-less.

26. I was going to search online but realized that it is in issue #2 of Chican@ Art Mag that there is an article on the blending of Chinese and Mexican cultura in LA right now, even the graffiti is blending the cultures! Damn, I don't even have it here, i lent it to a friend...who happens to be lesbian/Indian. jeje! look at the culture joining there, in her, in particular, absorbing the message of that article. look at the gaps closing. we went out the other night for drinks and talked about how Mexicans were Indians, too. we laughed loudly (in this area in a bar, and her girlfriend was right there, too) and it felt good to not be acting like a "mexican ought to" in a state dripping with white supremacy, or how a "woman ought to" and we were killing so many lies in one night it was liberating. and you could tell some people around us knew it, for they didn't look like they were having half as much fun. death to the Lie.

that is what we are doing here. telling each other our stories, and that leaves no room for the false memes of this dominant white culture. as yolanda says above, being POC also means I can see my own experience reflected in the lives of all POC. I can read Kai's or Nezua's words---Asian man and Chicano man---and hear my own Black girl humiliations and sorrows reflected back at me. Different time, different place, different body---same damn story.

and that's what the White/Male/"Global North" line of thought has historically been about ("the white lens" in my own nomenclature, for even Gonzales wears it, even Condi wears it, even Malkin wears it): keeping us at each other's throats. because were we to be at each other's sides,well...

there's so many more of us, isn't there?

1. Kai, thanks for doing your part to heal those chasms between our people, and to educate us all on this history.

[nezua limón xolografik-jonez]

PS
i'm coming to a certain point of view, which will be unfolded more in one of my White Lens installments—fuck what White People think about how i should feel or act regarding the POC struggle. i'm sure in time i'll tamp that, smooth that, shape that into a prettier piece. but really. i am getting way sick of hearing or reading White Thought on RaceNotExisting, how i ought not to talk about Race, or in what way Race truly exists and should be addressed.

we've had enough of the glare coming down from that Lens. stfu and listen for once is my thinking.

(great title)

[Donna]

Dead Inside, as far as I am concerned you are supposed to see the relationships and similarities. It's what I do and I think that leads to understanding and cooperation. It's when oppressed groups only see their struggle or put their struggle above all others that we fight amongst each other.

Then trans people started to show up in big numbers and all of a sudden it seemed to me, like women (and men) wanted to take their ball and go home.

This is something I notice all the time when the privileged group suddenly says things like "race doesn't exist", or in this case "gender doesn't exist". It comes at a time when POC/transpeople organize and make gains, when socially and legally the tables slowly start turning. It was ok while social constructs and laws favored them, but once it might be favoring someone else at their expense then gosh, we are all equal, and there should be no "special" recognition or standing!

Watch the same thing happen based on class as the divide between rich and poor widens. Suddenly you'll hear the argument that America is a classless society and that anyone can become a tycoon by pulling themselves up by the bootstraps. The narrative might be starting already because isn't that what that Happyness movie is about? Notice how Oprah is always in the news now too and her rags to riches story. As the "rabble" awaken and start agitating for fair taxation and laws we will be hearing more and more about how the wealthy deserve what they got and poor people are just plain lazy.

There is no race, there is no gender, America is classless; it's all the fault of POC, transpeople, the poor for seeing these differences and wanting equality/fairness when they have had it all along.

[Nanette]

Nezua:

Nanette, there are many first person stories coming from California from Chican@s. Because it is a very important part of our history. the california experience is tied inextricably to our past, and the history of Mexico, of Indians, of Mexican Americans today.

Yep. Oddly enough, I wasn't including Mexicans/Mexican Americans because of the history - which is, to me, a good portion of California history. I actually thought of that while reading your last White Lens series (that Kai quotes above), about Mexicans being invisible where you lived. And contrasted it to where I grew up, where Mexicans (and other Latinos, no doubt, but not so much back then) were just a part of the fabric of LA life, and while there was racism of course, I don't remember there being this idea that Mexicans were somehow foreign to the state, like the view some have now.

Anyway, though, I mostly was thinking of immigrants such as the Chinese, Japanese, so on whose writings and personal histories would have been less likely to have been gathered up in those early days because, unlike Spanish, the very formation of the words would have been incomprehensible (and thus rejected by much of the wider [or whiter, lol] society). Same with non Spanish or English speaking/writing Native Americans, no doubt.

I bet there is stuff out there though, for sure, (as we can see from that link above and Kai's new post, which I haven't had time to read) I just don't know about it or where to find it.