IN-BETWEENNESS
Shannon Joyce Prince Seeking to Be Whole
A particular memory from my teenage years stands out as one experience that shaped how I thought about race, racism, and responsibility. Ironically, it’s a memory of the extremes a white woman took to make my family feel welcome in a predominantly white space. We were at the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, a centuries-old resort staffed by many black employees, where my family and our friends are usually the only nonwhite patrons. A docent was explaining some of the resort’s history to us, and she pointed to a lithograph of the resort from back in the 1700s.
“You see,” she said, beaming at my little sister Ashley and me, “if we were back in the colonial era, the two of you young ladies would be sitting on the porch drinking tea.” My sister and I both tried desperately not to laugh. We knew that we definitely would not have been drinking tea on the porch of the Greenbrier in the 1700s. But the docent was so unwilling to face the human rights abuses of the past—and the inequity of the present that still kept most nonwhites out of the Greenbrier, except as staff—that she, wittingly or unwittingly, engaged in historical revisionism. She completely lied.
That revisionism couldn’t help but throw some light on the truths I hadn’t been able to see before. The experience was compounded on that same trip when an African American bellman smiled at Ashley and me and asked, “Is everyone treating you well?”
“Oh, yes,” we told him. “Everyone has treated us beautifully.”
“I know they have,” he said, and then his smile became more conspiratorial, “because we take care of our own.” Even though I’m a mix of cultures, three of which the bellman probably wouldn’t consider “his own,” the way I experience race means that all of me feels a sense of solidarity with someone offering good-natured kinship. I realized the bellman was articulating the attitude of many nonwhite service workers I had encountered, especially those at my predominantly white, private college preparatory school. They encouraged and supported us, their pride always evident. They did take care of their own, but what about us? I realized that minority individuals privileged enough to benefit from institutions like private schools or historic resorts had responsibilities to those men and women not given the same opportunities. The fact that in both contexts white people got to be the students and guests while nonwhite people were stuck with the brooms and frying pans wasn’t an accident. It was an inequity. It was the direct result of the situation the docent had been too uncomfortable to acknowledge. My experience at the Greenbrier occurred when I was a teenager, but if I’m going to describe my journey with race, I’ll need to go back much further.
Whenever I’ve been called on to define my heritage, I’ve never been perplexed about how to answer. My response has not changed since I was first able to speak, just as my ethnic identity has never shifted. When asked what I am, I smile and say, “I am African American, Cherokee (Aniyunwiya) Native American, Chinese (Cantonese) American, and English American.” I excise nothing of myself. I claim the slave who was a mathematical genius; the storyteller, the quilt maker, and the wise healer; the bilingual railroad laborer and the farmer—regardless of the amount of melanin in any of their skins. I pay no attention to the pseudoscientific idea of blood quantum (the idea that race is a biological, measurable reality) and am uninterested in dividing myself into fractions. I am completely, concurrently, and proudly all of my heritages.
From the time I was able to think about such things, I have considered myself both quadricultural and ana-racial (my personal neologism for “without race.”) I am zero (raceless) and hoop (part of peoples from all over the world). I think my parents might have been a little more comfortable with my homogenous white world had I been a little less comfortable in it, but I felt that four peoples had found space in my blood; thus, people of all bloods belonged in every space in general. I was comfortable at school not because I didn’t know who I was but because I did. And I knew who I was because I came from a strong family.
When I was little, I didn’t recognize my relationships with my relatives as being racialized. I adored and was close friends with my black/white/Cherokee great-grandfather, Papa, but it was my African American great-grandmother, Mamo Seal, whom I idolized. I was able to bond with Papa. With his gold skin, straight hair, and pale blue eyes that other nonwhites had been trained to worship, Papa was my playmate. We drove tractors together, walked through the woods, and played with the cows on his farm. I recognized that his startling azure eyes made him unique, and I admired his uniqueness, but I didn’t value his irises over any others. In contrast, Mamo Seal inspired genuflection. To me, my African American great-grandmother was and remains an unparalleled beauty. Her most celebrated quality was her dark skin—hence her name. She was a feisty woman not entirely opposed to profanity. I usually sat across the room from her, not in her lap, and listened to her rather than chatting with her.
One of my fondest memories is of helping her to dress. I remember guiding a bright scarlet dress over her head, ringing her neck with crayon-bright glass beads, pulling stockings over her ebony calves, wondering if the baby-soft texture of her skin was somehow connected to its pure blackness. The world tried to teach me to see beauty as Papa, but Papa saw beauty as Mamo Seal, and so did I. When I was young, Mamo Seal (and Papa, too) were simply beautiful. As I grew older, their beauty was politicized. And in a world where Queen Elizabeth was on the curriculum but not Yaa Asantewaa, where girls dreamed of being Britney Spears but not India Arie, seeing Mamo Seal revered and having her to revere was one of many affirming examples set by my family.
For that reason, my constant proximity to whiteness didn’t cause me to romanticize, normalize, or idealize it. It did cause me to expiate it, however. I was always around white people and white people were always nice to me. It didn’t occur to me that maybe I was palatable to white people because I was a pig-tailed, upper-middle-class little kid. I considered myself an empiricist, mainly because I was reluctant to condemn unjustly, and my experience had taught me that racism among whites was rare. If white people didn’t discriminate against me as an individual, then they must not discriminate against nonwhites as a group.
I understand that there’s a trope in horror movies where the protagonist will see someone she knows and begin happily interacting with him or her, only to discover that her acquaintance’s body has been taken over by aliens or monsters. The protagonist feels shock, revulsion, panic, and horror. She doesn’t know those she thought she did. She realizes the world isn’t what she thought it was and discovers that her perspective was flawed—and that scares her. It scared me. But I didn’t feel fear when a classmate told me he was moving to a public school that “was a good one without lots of minorities,” or when a girl I knew described being afraid because “a big black guy” had asked her to dance at a party, I felt horror. The mask had been ripped off to reveal the ugliness underneath.
Something I also understand about horror movies is that their viewers often warn protagonists not to walk into dangerous environments. “Don’t go up those stairs!” they cry. “Don’t open that door!” “Are you crazy? Don’t go in there!” But what do you do when your whole world is “in there”?
What do you do if the stable where you take riding lessons, the golf course where you practice your swing, the incredible museums you regularly visit are all “in there”? What do you do if your people have spent the past few centuries literally dying for your right to go “in there”? What happens when the actions and passivity of your peers “in there” reveal that the majority of them have been “body snatched”? Sometimes I’d argue with myself that my glimpses of the beings behind the masks were only tricks of the light. I had to figure out what to do with my increasing awareness that my world wasn’t what it had seemed.
In my predominantly white world, addressing racism meant you were oversensitive. It meant you waited eagerly to play the “race card” and enjoyed being a victim. It meant you “made everything about race.” Nonwhite people were seen as inherently biased, as unable to determine objectively what was and was not racism. I noticed that the person who criticized racism was the problem. The person who perpetrated the racism was the victim.
When I entered upper school and began to acknowledge racism, I tried to address it, always voicing my concerns and suggestions with the utmost care. I would point out to the headmaster that if I didn’t love our school, I wouldn’t want the student body to be more diverse; it was only because I thought the school was wonderful that I wanted more nonwhite students to attend. When I approached the upper school librarian about library books, some of them published in the past few years, that contained statements such as “abolitionists exaggerated the negative aspects of slavery,” I would explain that my objection to the books’ being in our collection was a manifestation of my caring for the library. I was (and remain) quiet and soft-spoken, and I rarely brought up the subject of racism. When I did, my concerns sometimes were met with the greatest respect, compassion, and, most important, positive action. I did not feel, however, as though I was always heard—such as when the principal continued to allow my teacher to wear Confederate flag ties to school.
I was coming to realize that the same people who thought I was a cute five-foot-five teenage girl clutched their purses tighter when my six-foot-one father passed them on the street. The same students and teachers who enjoyed having one or two of me in a class didn’t want to be in a neighborhood full of me after dark. It occurred to me that whereas any negative action a nonwhite person took was seen as confirming stereotypes, positive actions a nonwhite person took didn’t erode them. The positive actions of nonwhite individuals only allowed them to be seen as exceptions to the rule. And it hurt so badly to realize that someone I loved, someone who loved me, was racist.
I started becoming aware of the way my white environment had shaped me. Before kindergarten, when I pictured falling in love with somebody, the image was always of a guy with brown skin. Somewhere along the way, completely unconsciously, it changed to that of a white guy. As a little girl, even before I began creative writing, I would make up stories in my imagination as I waited to fall asleep. It occurred to me one day that whenever I crafted stories, all but one or two characters would be white. Again, the practice was unconscious. I wasn’t choosing to dream up predominantly white characters; it was just that the environments I imagined naturally reflected the one I inhabited. Such realizations surprised, fascinated, and disturbed me. I didn’t mind white people playing a part in my imagination, but it bothered me that they dominated it. Even my dreamscapes had been colonized.
My parents couldn’t have been happier when I became aware of white privilege. Although almost all of our family and individual activities took place in predominantly white contexts, it was the school they had selected for my sister Ashley and me, where we spent most of our waking hours, that concerned them the most. They had picked our school because it offered a world-class education, but they wondered if the extreme lack of diversity we experienced there was too high a cost to pay. They particularly worried about me, as Ashley never struck them as assimilated. While I had always taken pride in my heritage, it wasn’t until I acknowledged the presence and prevalence of racism that they were able to exhale. My radicalization meant they could relax.
On paper my parents don’t seem like the kind of people who would send their children to a predominantly white school in the first place. As a little child, my black, Cherokee, English mother had adored Malcolm X the way other girls fell in love with rock stars. She admired Martin Luther King Jr., but his patience and nonviolence wearied her. In college she became fluent in Swahili, eventually teaching courses in the language. She challenged her professors on everything from the maps they used that showed Africa as disproportionately small to their neglect and distortions of African history. Her activism (and kindness and beauty) eventually won her a proposal from the king of an African country—which she politely declined.
Instead she married one of her college classmates, my father, a black Chinese man so disgusted with America’s racism that he was well into his twenties before he could bring himself to say the Pledge of Allegiance. He cited prejudice in the arena of employment as a primary incentive for owning his own business. My father was baffled at how he could be given the key to the city and still get pulled over for driving while black. He occasionally entertained my little sister and me with the true story of how racist policemen once nearly arrested him for “robbing” his own parents’ house.
My parents searched for schools for me when I was still a baby. In fact, my mother may have still been pregnant when they started. They visited one school where nonwhite children only a few years old spoke a variety of languages with great fluency, but, as my mother explained, “There was no joy in their eyes.” At the school they ultimately settled on (when I was still under a year old), the one my sister and I would attend from kindergarten through twelfth grade, they saw a scholarly and warm faculty teaching enthusiastic students in state-of-the-art classrooms and theaters. Little kids were playing with sheep and chickens in the campus petting zoo. Older students relaxed in beautiful, colorful gardens. Everyone looked engaged, inspired, and happy. But almost everyone was white. The black and brown people around the school were cafeteria ladies and maintenance men, as well as nannies and housekeepers picking up their charges in the carpool lane. That fact concerned my parents.
So they tried to compensate, and I believe succeeded. Their efforts remind me of the “culture camps” to which white American parents send their transracially adopted children from Korea and China. During the summers, my mother taught my sister and me the nonwhite history that our school’s curriculum only gave a nod to. She brewed us Cherokee pine needle tea to build up our immune systems when the moderate Houston winter began. My father taught us how gentrification was affecting the city, and our grandmother introduced us to the work of her college professor John Biggers, one of the greatest African American painters of the twentieth century.
Looking back, I find some of their tactics amusing. I remember the book of hand games my parents gave my sister and me. Most African American girls learn the clapping and rhyming games from their black friends; my sister and I had to read about them. We had books praising the beauty of skin tones described as peanut butter, warm mocha, and sweet licorice, although we were far more likely to see those shades on the people on our book pages than on those around us. Ashley could perform West African dance. I could weave on a loom. But neither of us could claim to have black or Native American friends for the better part of our childhoods. As I said, my parents weren’t really worried about Ashley’s racial self-esteem. They were concerned, however, that despite my love for my cultures, I denied the prevalence of racial injustice.
I think my parents were confused. How could I be secure in my racial identity if I didn’t understand the important role racism played in the world? It seems that my immediate and extended families and I debated the point endlessly when I was little. It wasn’t that the discussion began with my relatives trying to convince me of the reality of white supremacy. The conversations usually started with a very real, very painful humiliation suffered by one of us the previous week, a tale retold cathartically. But what my relatives saw as prejudice, I was more likely to excuse as simple rudeness.
My sister and I would sit in our maternal grandmother, Dear’s, lap, while my parents sat on either side of her wooden desk. My Creole step-grandfather would sit at the end of the sofa. My aunt Linda and my adopted African American aunt Gwen would frequently stand, animated by passion.
“Wednesday,” I remember Gwen saying once, “we were asking for directions. We were in this white neighborhood, driving around looking for this restaurant, and we just could not find it. So we pulled over and asked these two white people if they knew where the restaurant was. The woman said, ‘I don’t, but Greg does.’ And meanwhile the man was just looking around, looking at the ground. And the woman kept saying, ‘Greg, you know where it is. You know you know where it is. Why won’t you tell them?’ And the man just wouldn’t tell us because he didn’t want us in that neighborhood.”
“That’s how they are sometimes,” said Dear mildly.
“They do the same thing to me,” added my dad. “I got a phony speeding ticket for just driving through a white neighborhood, trying to pick the girls up from school. Sometimes they just don’t want us around.”
“Why are your people like that?” Aunt Linda teased Grandfather.
“I’m not one of them!” he said emphatically.
“It’s not fair to judge all of a race by one person,” I reasoned. “Maybe Greg was just mean.” What I saw as isolated incidents—though, in retrospect, continuous isolated incidents—the adults in my family saw as part of a larger pattern.
“I’m around white people all the time,” I said. “My classmates and their parents and my teachers aren’t like that.” This was true.
But sometimes I wonder if my belief that racism was rare might have been reinforced by my environment. If white people were so bad, then why would my parents choose to be surrounded by them: in the neighborhoods where we lived, the schools they sent us to, and so on? What was I supposed to do—believe that my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles were right in thinking that it was rare for white people to be truly free of prejudice, and still comfortably spend all my time learning and playing with them? Did they want me to live the life they designed for me without fully believing in it? Would that calm them down?
Don’t get me wrong. As a little girl I sincerely believed that racism just didn’t happen all that often and that bigots were as rare as hens’ teeth. My belief that most people were full of sunshine and rainbows was genuine—it wasn’t a coping mechanism. But I wonder what my life would have been like had I not believed those things.
I remember the arguments my dad and I would have about racism. I found it hard to believe him when he talked about the prevalence of white ignorance. But, as I said, I was an empiricist, and my dad declined to offer me proof until I was old enough not to need it. I was in my late teens before he would tell me how, after a few too many glasses of wine at parents’ night, white fathers would tell him jovially, “You know, I really like black people!” Or how white mothers would flirt with him, their overtures oddly racialized. One woman told my dad, “You’re so cute, like that man in How Stella Got Her Groove Back.” Seriously. He didn’t want to hurt me by challenging my view of the world, so he didn’t offer any examples to bolster his assertions. And in the absence of those assertions, I simply didn’t believe him. I don’t always find my dad correct on racial issues, but now that I’m older, I see him as more credible—not because he has changed, but because I have.
As a little girl, when I heard my parents discussing white people, I immediately thought about the white people I knew. Did my best friend who used to put my hair in Dutch braids when I put hers in French braids think I was anti-intellectual? Did the teacher who sent me a calligraphic thank-you note for letting her exhibit my seashell collection in our homeroom secretly believe most of my peoples preferred welfare to work? As I grew up, I did indeed find that a friend’s parent who had hugged and kissed me and treated me with warmth for years requested that I ask a black guy friend or cousin to the girls’ choice cotillion so I wouldn’t “make anyone uncomfortable,” and that the friend I could talk about everything with into the wee hours of the morning believed that blacks and Hispanics had a predilection for gang violence. But looking back, I wonder if it ever occurred to my parents that if I couldn’t have friendships with my classmates at an early age uncomplicated by politics, I would have nobody else to give my friendship to. I don’t believe that ignorance is blissful or even beneficial; it’s just that there are no easy answers. There’s no simple way to be four races in a homogenously white space.
What my family wanted, of course, was for me to use the best education available in the state of Texas to create a great future not just for myself but for my peoples. That expectation was not without precedent. Dear had used the bachelor’s degree she’d earned, at a time when few women of any color went to college, to teach black, Hispanic, and white students for almost half a century in Houston’s poorest public schools. She had helped integrate the Houston Independent School District and pilot one of the city’s first Head Start programs. She had used her education to further her commitment to racial and social justice. Grandfather had only a fifth-grade education. When his father was crippled in an accident, he had to leave school to pick sugarcane. Still, he is an autodidact who became fluent in several languages. When he began his produce/Cajun foods shop, he used his Spanish skills to provide fair-paying, respectful work for immigrant laborers. My father taught young minority men and women how to be entrepreneurs, and my mother, who during the beginning of her marriage worked as a child therapist, often cared for families with diverse backgrounds who were on welfare. My family had a history of using their knowledge and talents to benefit minority (and white) people who didn’t have the same opportunities. I too loved volunteering, although my passions were focused not on ameliorating racism but on endangered animals and poverty.
My mother says that when my sister and I were babies, the first time we were rained on after we had begun talking was wondrous to us. “What’s this?” we had asked, tiny hands outstretched, long-lashed eyes looking upwards. The ability to use language to discuss rain heightened our experience of being rained on. Similarly, my awareness of the prevalence of racism during upper school came at about the same time I began creative writing. Thus my poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction were often about institutional prejudice, white imperialist feminism, indigenous sovereignty, and Orientalism. As a young girl I didn’t speak much in general, and spoke seldom about racism in particular. As a teen, however, I wrote profusely, frequently addressing prejudice.
Like many African and African American, Native American, and Chinese people, I believed that I belonged to a community made up of ancestors, living peers, and future generations not yet conceived. As a good citizen of that community, I was responsible to all three groups. Writing for me wasn’t so much about the Western end of self-expression as it was a commitment to those who had gone before and those yet to come. It was my way of speaking for those living, dead, and yet to be who could not speak for themselves. Many Chinese people believe in hungry ghosts; thus the idea that the ancestors must be fed and revered by the living. Writing allowed me to execute this responsibility. When I heard about prejudice against either my own peoples, or Amazonian Indians who were being evicted from their lands, or women in poor countries being forcibly sterilized, I sometimes felt that I couldn’t get a moment’s peace until I addressed the issue in my writing. It was as though my ancestors were tugging at me. I knew my aim as a writer was to be an oracle, not an entertainer.
So, strangely, it was at my predominantly white school where I forged my revolutionary ethos. Since I was a multicultural girl in a white space, I used my situation to try to bring to my peers’ and teachers’ attention things that they wouldn’t ordinarily notice. My quest to speak truth to power was facilitated by being in one of power’s centers. And I was humbled when, over time, I became a resource for my teachers on nonwhite issues.
After I graduated from upper school, I went to Dartmouth, a mainly white college in New Hampshire, the second-whitest state in the country. At my old school, melanin in an adult person’s skin most likely meant he or she was a menial laborer, whereas in Hanover, the town where Dartmouth is located, melanin was a status symbol, as it automatically meant you were an Ivy League student or professor. Nonwhite people had no other roles in the town. Many nonwhite students felt uncomfortable in such a white space, even to the point of leaving the college. I was stunned by their reactions.
“I’ve never seen so much diversity in my life,” I would say, shocked. Although Houston is an extremely diverse city, the parts of it in which I lived and moved were far whiter than Hanover and Dartmouth. With an Igbo professor and friends from Nepal and Albania, I felt as though I was on Disney’s “It’s a Small World” ride.
My boyfriend during freshman year was from Ghana. In contrast to the ever-present white guy of my little kid cotillion dreams, my boyfriend was a proud Asante who paired the three European tongues he was fluent in with three West African languages. We were friends whose hours spent talking, watching indie films, and listening to Ghanaian music segued into romance.
My relationship with my boyfriend seems, in ways spoken and unspoken, to have affected my relationship with my parents, especially my father. I remember, as a little girl, pointing to an ad in Town and Country magazine with a picture of a JFK Jr. lookalike and saying I wanted to marry a man who looked like him. My father wondered aloud why I would want to marry a guy of a race different from his. While the model’s debonair smile and old-fashioned taste in clothing reminded me of my father, all my dad could see was the model’s lack of melanin. But just as my parents couldn’t fully believe I was secure in my heritage until I could acknowledge the reality of racism, my love for a young Asante man affirmed to them my love for my background, and perhaps my esteem for our family.
My relationship with my boyfriend was neither about race generally nor about our particular cultures specifically. We would have loved each other had we been Maori, Mayan, or Scottish. Nevertheless, much of our journey toward each other was inspired by an interest in each other’s heritages. He was intrigued by my existence in the diaspora; I was enchanted by his homeland. Both before and after becoming my significant other, my boyfriend was one of my first black friends, and we looked upon each other as long-lost cousins catching up after a centuries-long separation, exploring the bounds of nature and nurture. He and I both saw our love, and our friendship, as a sort of homecoming.
Despite the fact that qualities such as integrity, compassion, and piety rather than ethnicity are what attract me to guys, my two other college boyfriends, one American and one Jamaican, were both black. Race was not a conscious factor for me in choosing to be with them, but the happy coincidence vindicated me in a “See, I haven’t been maimed by my environment” way.
My friendships, like my romantic relationships, reflected the diversity in my environment. Furthermore, once I wasn’t restricted to the option of having white (or occasionally Asian) friends or none at all, I could be choosier about my relationships. As a child I used to grade white people’s antiracist literacy on a curve. I still have friends I love from lower, middle, and upper school who will try to excuse the Confederacy or rant about the wrongs of affirmative action, but at Dartmouth I stopped befriending people like that. The white people I made friends with at college, whether they were savvy about racial issues or were largely unaware about the extent of discrimination against nonwhites, were uniformly people I felt I could be safe with. They didn’t inadvertently say racist things. They didn’t deny nonwhite perceptions of reality or history.
Fortunately, despite all the diversity at Dartmouth, I wasn’t as naïve as I once was. I recognized that just because Dartmouth was more diverse than what I was used to didn’t mean that various racial and ethnic groups were equitably represented. The fact that elderly white women at church gave me directions to their homes and urged me not to hesitate if I needed anything didn’t cause me to discount the fact that several nonwhite guys on campus described being harassed by the police.
Still, I felt comfortable at Dartmouth, not primarily because it was more diverse than what I was used to, but because, outside of my political concern with fair representation, I still didn’t notice the color of the people around me. Today I care about the inequity that leads to homogenously white spaces, but for better or worse, on a daily basis I still don’t notice race in my environment. Because this is such a fundamental part of my nature, I think I would have felt the same at Dartmouth even if I had been raised in primarily nonwhite spaces. By contrast, many of my peers were uncomfortable at Dartmouth. Whiteness wasn’t invisible to them. These students had known something I never had: the experience of growing up in places where they were the rule rather than the exception.
So at Dartmouth I saw both how much I had and how much I had missed. As a Cherokee girl whose prep school education meant I spoke three European languages, I looked wistfully at a Diné girl whose upbringing on a reservation meant she was fluent in her people’s tongue. Who was the privileged one? Who was underprivileged? Her school hadn’t taught advanced math. No one in my family spoke Tsalagi. Both of us had mastered one world and sought to succeed in a second. Like many, maybe even all the nonwhite students at Dartmouth, we were seeking to be whole.
And for me, being a whole African American, Cherokee, Chinese, English woman meant that there were two things I needed to do. First, I had to seek to rectify the inequity I had witnessed in my past. Second, I wanted to take advantage of being in a diverse community for the first time in my life in order to learn more about and protect my peoples’ spiritual and cultural ways of life. For me, Dartmouth represented more than the opportunity to get an extraordinary education. It was a chance to participate in communities I wasn’t able to be part of previously. No more learning hand games from how-to books.
I immediately thought about these goals when I heard of Dartmouth’s First Year Summer Research project. Why not use my education to address the inequity I had seen in my past by researching the experiences of poor minority workers at my privileged white school? Why not ask them what it meant to be a modern-day Atlas, not the archaic Greek mythological figure who literally bore the skies upon his shoulders, but one of the many impoverished people of color whose labors hold up a world run by the white and elite? I felt that as a creative writer, the best thing I could do to show my appreciation to the minority service workers who supported me during my time at school was to interview as many of them as possible about race and class issues, and from their interviews write creative nonfiction oral histories. Thus my project “Atlas Speaks,” a portfolio of oral histories crafted from the words of minority service workers, was born. The project was based on my interest in race and space. Who was allowed where, and did they come through the front or back door? Along with race and space, I was interested in voice.
I remember one interview with a worker who had been employed at the school for decades. She told me the story of her journey from stay-at-home mom to becoming one of the school’s employees, of being called by her first name by little children, of her camaraderie with her colleagues and the paucity of black teachers, and how much she valued “her babies”—the students, white and nonwhite, that she cared for. She told me of suffering from institutional disrespect and engaging in guerrilla advocacy for minority students.
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you doing this interview,” I said, as we wound down our conversation, well past the allotted hour. She looked at me and smiled.
“You are what we fought for,” she said. Her tone suggested a subtext: So you must fight for us. The role of a storyteller in the battle for social equity was affirmed for me once more.
It was my hope that by naming the issues, planning improvements, defining realities, and articulating hopes, by acknowledging the truth of conditions at my school, I could help it become a space of diversity and appreciation. I tried to communicate to the school’s employees, “This is your space. This centuries-old school, its rose-brick buildings, its tennis courts and libraries and art exhibits and outdoor bayou classroom are your spaces.” They tended it lovingly, labored in it diligently, and cared for it loyally—and they had the right to be esteemed highly and compensated fairly.
But I also wanted to say to them, referring to the white paper on which I had written their stories, “This too is your space. You have a right to a place on paper, in essays. You have a right to a forum and to give testimony. You have the right not to remain silent. Anything you say just might set you or someone else free.” I had reached the point in my storytelling where, instead of accepting a nearly homogenously white cast of characters, I could put the spotlight on nonwhites.
My cultural goals at college weren’t like a checklist. It’s not as if I said, “Well, I’ve done some activist ethnography, now I’m finished fighting for social justice.” “Atlas Speaks” was part of my journey, not a task completed or a battle won. And it was while recognizing this fact that I began working on my second aim: joining my peoples’ communities and becoming better at serving and practicing my cultures.
There were communities available on campus for students of all the cultures in my heritage. I just had to find my space. But having lots of cultures in you can be like having lots of kids: you have to find time to devote to each one. I spoke English, French, and Spanish, but should I try to learn a language from one of my nonwhite cultures? Tsalagi? A West African language such as Yoruba? Cantonese? Which one? All three? Would such a course of action make me more culturally competent, or just crazy? Should I join a group pertaining to each ethnic heritage? When I graduated, should I join alumni associations pertaining to each one too? And if I didn’t, would that mean that I was prioritizing some of my cultures over others?
I ended up organizing my time more organically. I went to black student meetings and participated in Students for Africa. I helped hire the first professor of Asian American literature in the English Department and attended Asian cultural events. During sophomore summer, I lived in the African American affinity house. I wrote political articles, celebrated a range of holidays, and protested when I was called to. But there was one community I was hesitant to join.
“It’s your space,” said Dr. Brewer, a Dartmouth Cherokee scholar, when I discussed the matter with him in his office. “You have a good instinct for the sensitivities around issues of Native American identity,” he continued. “It’s your space.”
“It” was the affinity house for Native Americans at Dartmouth, or NADs. I was a NAD, but a secret one. While I practiced Cherokee traditions quietly and privately, I’d entered the house only once by my junior year at Dartmouth. Since I didn’t know how to dance, during the college powwows I would volunteer at the T-shirt booth, which put me metaphorically and literally on the sidelines.
“I’ve never gone to NAD meetings because I thought they were for people who had been raised in Native American communities. I didn’t want to intrude on space that wasn’t mine,” I explained. And there was something else: I never referred to myself as being “part” something or the other because I knew I was not a fractured person. When my ascendants forged their cross-cultural connections, they did not break their descendants. I’m not like a plate that lies on the floor in pieces, something less than whole, diminished, disinherited. But what if in the NAD house I was seen as a broken cookie? Being multicultural is kind of like being a messy handwritten note. You have a definite message, but people will read you as they see fit; they will possibly misinterpret you or find you ambiguous. I was concerned that by being many, I would be deemed not enough. And I felt that NADs who had been raised traditionally had the right to make that judgment. I just didn’t want to subject myself to it.
I said earlier that I don’t notice the race of the people around me. And I guess that’s true, as I spent the majority of my life in predominantly white environments. What has changed, though, is that every now and then I become keenly aware of my own heritage. I feel especially at home in the francophone African community in Paris. I feel proud walking through the streets of Chinatown. African Americans, Asians, and whites are easily accepting of my plurality on the rare occasions when it comes up. For example, no Asian has ever looked at me askance for celebrating the Chinese New Year. But because racial authenticity is such a fraught question in the Native American community, when I was considering entering the NAD community, I was particularly conscious of race(s), the community’s and my own.
And then there was my appearance. I don’t like to describe myself in terms of the stereotyped features attributed to each of my cultures, but I think I look African American, whatever that means. I also think I look like all of my peoples. Some people recognize Asian or Native American features in me. Others don’t. Most days I’m assumed to be African American. Often I am asked, “What are you?” If you made a spectrum of people with Samis on one end and Dinkas on the other, I would have the brown color pretty much in the middle. My bust-length hair is the last auburn on the spectrum before black. My eyes are brown. People of various races mistake me for Asian Indian or being of another Southeast Asian culture.
But despite all this, Dr. Brewer was unequivocal: “It’s your space.” And when I attended my first NAD meeting, I was welcomed. No one questioned whether I belonged in the house on that first Thursday evening, in cooking fry bread in the kitchen on Saturdays to sell at fundraisers, or in discussions about the racism behind Dartmouth’s unofficial mascot, “the Dartmouth Indian.”
I joined the Native Americans at Dartmouth group the day after I spoke to Dr. Brewer, and I welcomed the sense of communion. I learned how to peyote stitch and passed on the knowledge of Cherokee medicine I had been taught by elderly relatives. I round-danced, discussed decolonizing academia, and was introduced to the wonderful world of Pendleton blankets. But it wasn’t until my senior year, when I had gathered with some other Native American students in one of the dormitory basements with a Tuscarora professor, that I had an epiphany. As we talked about Europeans in America, Native Americans in the ivory tower, and what it meant to walk in two worlds, I realized that most of the Native Americans in the room had questioned what it means to be, to be accepted as, and to be located as a Native American.
“I heard the term ‘blood quantum’ for the first time and it confused me,” said a slender Diné boy. “I went home and asked my mom, ‘How much Indian am I?’ ” He mimicked his mother rolling her eyes and smiling. “ ‘You’re as Indian as you feel,’ she told me.”
“I didn’t know all the stuff about Indians living in harmony with nature until I went to school,” another boy added. “And I grew up on a reservation. The way we were described in books was so far from what I knew. I thought: Is that what we did historically? Really?”
I was surprised. Even students who were so-called full-blooded Indians, students who were fluent in Native American languages and had grown up on reservations, had been made to doubt their indigenousness and to wonder if they fit the definitions constructed by both non-Natives and fellow Indians. Other students discussed the issue of “ghost NADs,” Native American students who left the NAD community either because they personally were rejected for not being “Indian enough” or because they were offended by the judgments others made.
Finally, I spoke. “That’s what kept me away from the NAD community for a long time. I thought maybe I shouldn’t be there since I wasn’t traditionally raised. But fortunately no one ever rejected me.”
“Oh, Shannon!” exclaimed a sophomore student in dismay. I had never told anyone but Dr. Brewer about my concerns in joining NAD. I think the sophomore had just thought I was especially shy. The professor looked at me in sympathy as we all affirmed to one another what Dr. Brewer had told me months ago. That we were in the right space.
Since that time, I’ve heard or read about the same discussions occurring among blacks, Arabs, Asian Indians, and East Asians. I recognize their concern that the culture they identify with will find them lacking, that after a lifetime of being a minority in white spaces, they might not belong in the spaces of their own peoples either.
When people ask me, “What are you?” I’m neither offended by being queried nor perplexed about how to answer. My response, like my ethnic identity, has never shifted, but just because I don’t falter doesn’t mean I’m not wary of being doubted or challenged. I know I’ll never be the first thing that comes to mind when people picture a preparatory school student, a Greenbrier guest, or a Native American at Dartmouth, but through maturing and my experiences in college, and particularly as a NAD, I have learned that it’s not just important to know who you are; you also have to affirm where you belong. That’s why I joined the Native Women’s Dance Society in my senior year at Dartmouth and learned to dance “fancy shawl.” When powwow came that spring, I entered the circle—my space, and the space of my people—as an African American, Cherokee Native American, Chinese American, and English American. And I danced.
After graduating from Dartmouth College, Shannon was a Lombard Fellow in Mongolia and a Reynolds Scholar in Australia. She is currently a joint-degree J.D./Ph.D. student at Harvard University in African and African American Studies.