what about the ones who hold the doors

Where is my kindness?
I put it in my closet
I shut it in my drawer
I locked it in my chest.

Because what is nice?
It is a doormat
It is a weakling
It is a coward.

It won't win me any medals and
It won't gain me any fans but
I'll keep on trying to get by, so

 I've put away the glue
I've hidden all the staples
I've put down my tape and
started looking for some scissors.

They always watch the breakers
The ones who rip and rend
The ones who tear asunder
while ignoring those who mend

I've had enough of speaking up
I've had enough of speaking out
Why is it that the voice that matters
Has to be raised in a shout?

Negotiating Racial Spaces, Part One

For those of you who do not know, I've grown up as a biracial man in predominantly white spaces. This is not recent news to me and this is hardly the first time I've thought about it. However, what I am realizing now is how profoundly that has shaped my self identity and my existence as a man of color. My childhood, my adolescence, and most of my young adulthood have taken place in predominantly white environments. I was unaware of my own internalized racism as a result of this upbringing until a few years ago. Until my recent experience working with City Year DC in an environment that was not predominantly white, I had no clue that my definition of myself only existed in white spaces.

In City Year, I was assigned to work at a school in Southeast DC with 99% black students. My team was the picture-perfect example of diversity (there were nine of us: four of us were black, four of us were white, and one of us was me), so for the first time in my life I was outside of Whiteville. I had no way of anticipating or even understanding how this would throw my carefully crafted identity into chaos. What I failed to realize until now is that my self image (of which my racial identity plays a large part) cannot remain constant to all environments.

Now, I am fully aware that I am far from the first to understand this fact. Code-switching exists for a reason. People of color have long been aware of the necessity of adapting their mannerisms and ways of being to different (read: white) spaces. Many are aware of the white-supremacist devaluing of their nonwhite ways of being and they learn to work around it. These people change their behavior to allow for white validation of not only their actions, but also their beings. This is not to suggest that all POC who code-switch do so because they want white validation. Many do so out of necessity. This is one area where code-switching POC and I differ.

I have long sought the validation of white people, since they comprised the majority of my peer circle growing up. For many many years, I sought to be white and act white and be read as essentially white. To me, only the tone of my skin separated me from all of my white friends. These are the years where my internalized racism came through strongest as I sought to distance myself from other POC. Of course, this was a plan doomed to failure. No matter how I struggled, my mostly white friends saw me differently than I saw myself. This disconnect shaped social interactions akin to swimming upstream, as my sense of self-worth always has relied on how others viewed me. Finally, in college, I found some peace of mind in finally coming to understand myself and the nature of white supremacy. While this was hardly a pleasant revelation, locating some explanation for my frequent difficulties with myself and my race was a breath of fresh air after many years holding it in underwater. I was able to have a reckoning with myself and my (white) surroundings, and I developed a solid sense of self-definition as a biracial man for the first time in my life.

Thus I came to City Year with a perfectly solid sense of self that could only ever be maintained in a white context; my racial naivete was the perfect setup for more of that good old upstream swimming.

Hello Again! A Re-Introduction (You can call it a comeback if you want)

Hello hypothetical readers,
It's me again! I took a long hiatus from this blog (part of which was due to a failed attempt at vlogging and most of which was due to City Year) and I really miss writing. I want to write more and I feel a powerful need to express myself in ways that I cannot or do not in person, so I am going to start posting again. My first post will be a trilogy about race and my experiences in different racial environments. The first shall address mostly my life up until City Year, the second shall cover my experiences with City Year, and the third shall deal with my return to one of the most formative spaces of my childhood in my summer drama camp.

Enjoy reading!

It's a Waste of My Time

It is, though, isn't it? I mean, why keep trying to be someone I'm not? You know, people told me that there was a difference, but it really doesn't hit you until you see it, until you feel it, for yourself.

You could call me an African American.
You could call me Black.
You could call me mixed, multiracial, biracial, mulatto, mongrel or a motherfucking nigger but you wouldn't be right. You wouldn't.

I wouldn't.

The funny part is, I've been trying to. I read books, I took classes, I talked to people, I thought about it, but it still didn't hit me. I thought, mixed, yeah, mixed would work. Ooo, multiracial, that's cool. Biracial, yeah that works. African American? Well, technically. I guess. Black? Sure, why not.

But it doesn't fit.

I am trying, I am learning, I am pretending, but every time I make a misstep I invalidate myself, my very identity. And every time, I remember:

It doesn't fit.

"Of African descent?" What does that even mean? Who in the hell came up with that? What were they thinking? .... And yet.

Sure, it could be applied to anyone with skin darker than whoever, with hair that did whatever. This is literally the vaguest term any PC freak could ever think of, but the thing is. It's the only one that's true.

But what really gets my goat here is that that's all I have, and I don't even have that. I'm not African American, I'm not a part of their culture, and I won't ever be. All I have is my African heritage. But I don't know a single fucking thing about Africa. I've never been there, I don't know about half of my family, I don't speak the language, and I'm already an adult.

So where do I fit? Hell if I know.

I am Working on Something!

So, as I've been falling down on updating this blog at all ever, I decided to try vlogging! As of now, I have exactly 3 VIDEOS!!!!!! with a pretty sad production quality, but whatever. If any of you are interested, here is the link.

Cheers!

The Reason Rally

I just got back to my college from the Reason Rally in DC. It... was... amazing!! As you should all already know by now, I am an atheist. The Reason Rally was billed as the largest gathering of nonbelievers ever. So, you know, that's a pretty good reason to be happy I went. But what I want to talk about is another reason I felt extremely elated to be at the Reason Rally. In this event, the skeptic community and all of its speakers went out of their way to emphasize one thing: diversity. Many of the speakers made sure that we all knew that for the skeptic community, diversity was a priority. The speaker's panel was diverse (three examples of diverse speakers that come to mind are rationalwarrior, Hermant Mehta, and Greta Christina. Now, I've seen some pretty questionable and offensive shit from skeptics (Rebecca Watson's detractors, for example) and I've felt pretty disillusioned with the mainstream movement and minority issues. But today's rally was just so... welcoming. Despite the relative majority of white people, I didn't feel out of place there. I felt like America's skeptic community wanted me to be there. So in case anyone was wondering...secularists do it right.

On Moderation: Some Observations from a Disgruntled Radical

"Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice."
-Thomas Paine

I'm writing today to describe a pattern I've been seeing in a lot of peoples' thinking lately. I also want to talk about why it's harmful to our society. I am talking, of course, about moderation. I often find myself in conversations with other people about a number of issues that I have strong opinions on. I have put in a lot of effort into developing these opinions, and I've learned a massive amount in the past year that has fundamentally altered the way I view the world. I think it's safe to say that my experiences at my undergraduate institution have undoubtedly made me into someone that most Americans would consider a radical. To put it bluntly, I have a lot of ideas that a lot of people think are horseshit. I'm coming to terms with that, and I accept that it comes with the territory. However, there is one idea I have that I don't feel is actually that radical: disagreements are both useful and necessary.


To situate this within some context, the social climate of my college is currently undergoing what I consider to be growing pains. There is a lot of tension between different groups of people on campus, specifically the mainstream culture and a relatively small [but vocal!] number of dissidents. I think the particular way that we engage with this issue is largely determined by the minuscule size of our student body (between 2500 and 3000 students). Whenever something goes down, everybody knows about it and everybody has a different opinion on the matter. So when there's division among the student body, you can be sure it will be on the tip of everyone's tongue. Due to a number of highly visible events on our campus within the past year, we have finally begun to have a dialogue to address our differences. So my question is: why are people so unhappy about that?

When I talk to some people, I get the feeling that they avoid certain topics around me because they are simply terrified that I might disagree with what they think. I understand that not everyone feels as strongly as I do about certain topics, but this is something I frankly have no patience for. It is absolutely unavoidable that when we have people with completely unique life experiences that cause them to interpret and perceive things differently, they will sometimes disagree. What's wrong with challenging one another? If I hear someone say something that I find to be completely ignorant, why shouldn't I tell them so? How are we as a people going to progress if we spend all of our time agreeing on everything? We need division and argument if we are to hash out what ideas are useful to us and what ideas are not.

Regardless of how I feel about it, it seems that most people don't think that way. Most people seem to want to go through their intellectual development with kiddie-gloves on, coddling each other and hugging and babbling about how much they agree with each other. Our society's fetish for compromise has become a widespread and effective roadblock to progress. On my college campus specifically, it seems like anyone who challenges the ideas of someone else is labeled a "radical". At first, I was really confused as to why any would think that this is a  practical way to proceed, but then I thought about what moderation accomplishes.

I think it's important to always consider what effect certain ideas and practices have on other people before espousing and enacting them. For example: racist prejudices and the discrimination that comes with them have a negative effect upon people of color while advantaging whites. For me, that puts them off of the table. So I return to this question of what moderation accomplishes. If space is not given for [strikingly] different opinions to be expressed in an open or direct way, we as a people will never change the way we think about anything. If we do not allow for people to argue the various benefits of, say, a radically different sexual misconduct college policy versus the old way of doing things, we will never make any change. Thus, moderation of this variety will inevitably perpetuate the status quo.

So now I have my answer for why people insist on moderation and compromise in every disagreement: they are resistant to change. People on my campus aren't used to being challenged, and try to force us onto the middle road that will leave them comfortably safe from dissent. If that sounds implausible to you, remember this: that is what these people accomplish when they claim that agreeing is always the better way. Whether you buy that this is their intention or not, that is the effect that their actions have.

So I hope that anyone reading this thinks twice the next time they dismiss someone else because they are "too opinionated" or "like arguing too much". I would ask that we stop and take a moment to reconsider when we pass judgment on someone because they have strong views. Such thinking can never do anything but lock us into mediocrity.




P.S. Someone has stolen all of my gruntles. I think it was the moderates, but I'm not sure.