Racial Identity in Balance

I consider myself multiracial. Technically, I am half Japanese, a quarter Czech, and a quarter English-Dutch. By definition, then, I am an “other” in American society. Or at least I am according to conventional definitions of race and ethnicity, which require people to check the box marked “other” when they don’t fit into one of the pre-established categories.

And yet, every day those of us who are multiracial live “outside the box,” as tired as that phrase may be. We are not “other” to ourselves. And we need not allow ourselves to be defined in contrast to, or in opposition to, an assumed standard of racial singularity. But we do need to educate those around us about the reality of feeling boxed in by definitions of racial identity that confront not only multiracial individuals, but every individual who checks a box whose category is not an adequate definition of his or her identity.

Speaking as a multiracial faculty member, I know that many of the regular invitations that I receive to serve on committees or coalitions originate from an awareness of my “other” status, when it comes to gender or ethnicity. I have trained myself to turn a blind eye to the underlying offensiveness of the academic tendency to ghettoize faculty of color by placing us on “diversity committees” without fully recognizing the value of our potential contributions to majority committees as well. Yet to speak honestly, sometimes I tire of being expected to accommodate the majority of my colleagues by giving them credit for good intentions.

Sure, good intentions are important. But I believe that before we can achieve balance, we must recognize imbalance.

On the one hand, committees formed for the purpose of enhancing diversity on campus tend to be composed mainly of representatives from already marginalized groups, without sufficient participation from the majority populations that already dominate the campus climate. In some sense, the existence of diversity committees can serve primarily to elevate the categorization of “otherness” from individual to committee status.

On the other hand, committees formed for everything else often include at least one woman and/or faculty member of color, “for the sake of diversity.” It is almost impossible to decline the obligation to do our part by accepting either type of committee service. After all, we may ask, if not me, then who? And yet all too frequently, we find that our contributions as “diverse” and yet isolated committee members aren’t truly heard or sufficiently valued.

Of course it can be argued that the motive here is a genuine respect for the value of diversity. As a longtime committee organizer myself, I firmly believe in the necessity of bringing a diverse group of voices and perspectives to the table in any discussion, and I appreciate the impulse to achieve that end.

Nonetheless, the assumptions underlying some of the invitations to participate can smack of an elite and intellectualized form of racial profiling, however unintended.

I believe it is important to recognize the visible cost of such good intentions. Extra committee service places an undue burden on female and minority faculty members in particular, making it more difficult for us to attain a reasonable balance in our work life.

And then there is the hidden cost, when we issue our recommendations and find that the response is merely business as usual, with the university remarkably resistant to change. We may wonder, “What’s the point?”

In the end, it’s not enough to populate the university with a smattering of “others.” As long as we’re regarded that way, then the very impact of our contributions is limited by the confines of that box, which is not where we live. I’ll confess right now that my words come not solely or even primarily from my professional work, where I have learned to modulate my speech in committee meetings in the interests of diplomacy.

I’m writing from where I live, as a multiracial parent in a “mixed-race marriage,” that has produced mega-multi-racial children. To me, these issues are not abstractions for a campus diversity report: they are, fundamentally, my responsibility and my life.

My husband is half black, half German-Jewish, and so my four children are a veritable rainbow coalition among themselves. Interestingly enough, partly because we live in Arizona, some of the racial/ethnic identities that are not included in their background (such as Hispanic and Native American) are ones that are associated with their multiracial appearance.

My children have long resisted identifying themselves in the typical ethnic categories, to such an extent that my older daughter, filling out the box on the statewide aptitude test in middle school, chose to check a different ethnic identity for each day of the exam, depending on what group she felt like identifying with that day. When she told me this after the fact, I made an attempt to explain the importance to the state government of gathering accurate ethnic data, even as I completely understood and identified with the grounds of her resistance to such singular categorization.

Later on, my children had an interesting conversation about racial prejudice during a Fourth-of-July picnic when my eldest daughter was in high school and my eldest son was still in middle school. My daughter was explaining to her brother that it bothered her that all of her (white) friends had no concept of the reality of her multiracial identity, so that that aspect of her identity was “invisible” to them. My son asked, “But doesn’t that mean that they are color-blind, then? And so it’s a good thing that they are not racially prejudiced?”

My daughter’s response was to tell her brother that soon enough he would become aware of the relevance of his racially mixed heritage, and that although she valued the lack of racial prejudice among her friends, she was disturbed by the very “blindness” to racial identity that is so often praised as a social virtue, because it erased the reality of her own identity. In other words, ignorance is not an adequate replacement for prejudice.

Sure enough, by the time my older son was graduating from middle school, he found it almost laughable that he could never tell a white friend his ethnic makeup without encountering surprise. In his words, “People often assume I’m Hispanic, because my skin color matches their preconceptions. Some even think I’m a white person with a deep tan, because the fine details of difference are uncomfortable for them to deal with. They see only what they expect to see.” My son’s conclusion was that “people who are used to seeing in black and white will never be able to appreciate a rainbow.”

So how do we foster the conditions for a rainbow? One initiative that is being investigated at my own institution, by none other than a “diversity committee” with a diverse membership, is the possibility of cluster hires: recruiting not just one or even two diverse faculty members as isolated “targets of opportunity,” but rather a critical mass of diverse professors who have shared intellectual interests.

In the context of such an increasingly multifaceted intellectual community, contributions from diverse faculty members can be valued not simply because they are “other,” but because they are central. Only once we change the notion of what is marginal can we change the core.

There is something else, the missing piece in what I have said so far: Racial identity in balance must include the perspectives of majority as well as minority groups, even as those definitions change daily. All those individuals whom society fits into the box of being “white” are no more all alike than all the “others.” And when diversity is recognized to include multiple articulations of sexual, political, or religious identity, as well as the racial identity that is the topic of this column, then the question of balance becomes truly three-dimensional.

Unless we find a way to communicate with each other outside the old categories, we will never come to appreciate the space and freedom that only we can provide one another, person to person, eye to eye. For my children, I look forward to a future where they need be nothing “other” than themselves. With my colleagues and students, I work toward that same end.