Swapping Lenses for Seeing Skin
My older brother and I discussed recently the frequency and fascination with which we are often asked about our high school experiences, and we both ran through the usual list of questions and concerns our peers would voice, laughing about how it was always the same old things everyone wanted to know. However, when we started giving our individual accounts of the answers we would provide, we realized these had not been the same conversations at all. We were both shocked at the major differences between our responses to the same questions about the same high school in the same decade.
We grew up in the south, and we attended an inner-city public high school that was probably around 70% black and 29% white with very few other racial/ethnic identities represented. Although shootings, fights, and gang activity were not uncommon, it is most often the pure race relations that capture everyone’s curiosity, and that is the issue of which my brother and I were giving very different accounts. As we battled it out, throwing around accusations of who was trying to look tough and who had the memory of Pollyanna, my brother finally hit the nail on the head and urged me to look not only in the rear view mirror but in the wall mirror as well. “It is because everyone thought you were mixed.”
Reading Joane Nagel’s Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers gave clear theoretical support to my brother’s hypothesis. My brother looks like my mom’s side of the family, having light skin, freckles, and light eyes; I look like my dad with darker skin, black eyes, and dark kinky hair. While my dad’s ethnicity is unknown to us because of our inability to trace his family history, it is also to a large degree irrelevant to the racial/ethnic identity I possessed growing up where I did.
The earlier chapters of Nagel’s book focus largely on a micro-level discussion of individual interactions and relationships that support, challenge, illustrate and/or explain the functioning of ethnosexual boundaries. Her inclusion of such elements as “hypodescent,” “racial mapping,” subject positions, and constructionist views of ethnicity formation gave me a lot of food for thought in revisiting my personal beliefs about the intersections of race, ethnicity, and sexuality, beliefs which were largely formed by my early experiences in negotiating these crossroads.
The most salient of Nagel’s points, for my personal reassessments, was her explanation of an individual’s ethnicity being “a matter of structure and power: which ethnic categories are available in a society to be sorted into, and who gets to do the sorting.” (42) While the ancestral details of my ethnicity are often still asked of me and leave me without clear answers, I doubt many of my current classmates assume, as my high school peers did, that (specifically) my “daddy is black” and my “mama is white,” which of course echoes the statistics Nagel provides of the most common black/white interracial couplings taking this gendered form. As I mentioned above, black and white were the two available racial/ethnic categories in that environment, and since I appeared neither, I was understood as both. Furthermore, because of what Nagel refers to as “hypodescent” classification or the “one drop rule,” my appearance as “mixed” equated in a meaningful way to being identified as black and therefore a part of the racial majority of my school. That this identity seems doubtful to my peers at Tulane reinforces Nagel’s emphasis on the constructionist model of ethnicity as socially negotiated within one’s particular (sub-)culture.
While I was aware at the time of being labeled “that mixed girl,” I was unaware of how strongly it shaped my experiences, my relationships, and my understanding of the larger white/black race relations of that setting. My brother would argue (convincingly) that because I occupied a liminal racial/ethnic identity, I was not forced to negotiate the ethnosexual boundaries as carefully as he. Self-identifying as white but knowing I was referred to often as biracial, I was still amazingly unaware of how much this affected my relationships, intimate and otherwise, within this high school setting.
In Nagel’s description of ethnic boundaries as political, institutional, etc., she includes the categories of social, “reflected in patterns of association and friendship,” and sexual, “manifesting… in patterns of dating,… marriage, and sexual relations.” (46) In this context, the latter two are extremely closely related. My close friendships, for example, with black guys from my school were surely less dangerous and delicate than those between a white-identified girl and a black-identified boy. Because of the potential (realized or not) of such social associations to lead to sexual relationships, I am aware now that my ethnic position was allowed considerably more freedom of socializing than was my brother’s. Because he held the subject position of a white male, what he interpreted as interracial socializing, friendships, and dating would have been understood by his peers in the same way. However, because I held the subject position of white female but was identified by my peers as biracial and therefore black, what I considered smooth and unproblematic interracial associations, friendships, and dating was in actuality the effect of the larger social group interpreting these relationships as intraracial socialization. The considerable differences between my brother’s and my accounts of inter-race-relations where we grew up can be explained to a large degree by our positioning in two different ethnic categories and the force and enforcement of ethnosexual boundaries.
Tags: ethnosexual boundaries, high school, Joane Nagel, race
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September 20, 2009 at 1:55 am
This is a very good post. I linked to it because I may want to come back to it for teaching about race. Thanks.