Episode 102 - Mixed-Race Identity
Transcript
Ellie: 0:04
Hello and welcome to Overthink.
David: 0:15
The podcast where two philosophers help you think through your own complicated experience in relation to big ideas.
Ellie: 0:22
I'm Ellie Anderson.
David: 0:24
And I'm David Peña Guzman. Ellie, as you know, I love playing tennis. And I wanted to begin today's episode by mentioning Naomi Osaka, who is a black Japanese tennis player who has become a very well known figure in the world of tennis, of course.
Ellie: 0:42
But also outside of it, she had her own sweetgreen bowl a couple of years ago, I remember.
David: 0:46
Well, and she's been also in the news for political reasons because she's also been politically engaged, which is not typical for athletes. But the reason that I wanted to mention her today is because Naomi Osaka is a black and Japanese player. So she is biracial. She identifies as a biracial. racial person, and she has faced a lot of discrimination and obstacles in the world of athletics precisely for that reason. She talks about, for example, how many reporters after a tennis match will insist on asking her whether she deep down feels more black or Japanese, which is not A related to sports and B is not a question that any biracial person can answer one way or the other.
Ellie: 1:29
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I also think it's telling, as you're describing this, that her identities as Black and Japanese are what get focused on, because that's a sort of odd mismatch. They're not asking her dad is Haitian American, I'm seeing. They're not asking her if she feels Haitian American or Japanese. Those three are nationalities. And she's not being asked if she feels more black or more Asian. Those are races. She's being asked about a race on the one hand and about a nationality on the other, which serves as a symbol for race, in this case, being Asian. And I want to come back a little bit later in the episode about how there's a tricky relationship sometimes between race, ethnicity, culture in these discussions. But I think what you're pointing to is this sense of being caught between two facets of her identity or rather being forced to be caught between them because who knows exactly what her view is of her own multiracial identity, but she's certainly being asked about it by people all the time.
David: 2:33
Yeah. Well, and not only being asked, but again, there's a sense that she's being pressured to give an impossible answer because in some context she has reported feeling as if she is expected to only affirm her blackness as a way of showing solidarity with the black struggle and the black cause, but also in some cases being pressured to identify exclusively or primarily as Japanese. Because for example, even though she registers in the public eye as black, even though she is black and Japanese, she also represented Japan in the Olympics for tennis. And so in Japan, she faced a lot of pressure to only avow her Japanese ness, which also speaks to the kind of racism that happens in other countries that is specific to those countries, like racial dynamics
Ellie: 3:23
so she was born in Japan, she moved to the U. S. as a young child and has lived in the U. S. primarily ever since. And I think when we're talking about being Japanese in particular, of course, there's a really long legacy of racism and colorism within Japan, or let's say in general xenophobia. In some cases, the classification of racism wouldn't be like a totally fair characterization. There's a lot more complexity in there in terms of Japanese colonialism or oppression of other peoples, but then also in turn, otherization by the West. Also, when you hear about Osaka and other mixed race Japanese people, especially those who are part Black, talk about their Japanese identity, it's not just about being Black and Asian. And going back to what we said before, there's also something really specific about the Japanese national identity and the way that colorism plays into that, that I think is liable to create further issues too, even though again, this is complicating the categories of race because Japanese is not a race. Japanese is a nationality and related to ethnicity and culture.
David: 4:29
Yeah, no, no, that's right. And she gave an interview with the Wall Street Journal not too long ago, where she talks about how when she was playing tennis in Japan, especially against Japanese opponents, even though she's this high profile athlete, many Japanese tennis players wouldn't really know why she was there and why she was representing Japan, like they didn't really understand that she was Japanese just because of the anti black prejudice that is so common in Japan, as well as in other Asian countries, but also assuming that she doesn't speak or understand Japanese. And so she would be in the situations where people are talking about her on the side of the court without understanding that she understands Japanese.
Ellie: 5:13
Osaka is in these situations, I think there's something really telling about the sort of loneliness or solitude that she may be facing because one thing that gets pointed out by scholars who work on mixed race identity, I'm thinking in particular about another Naomi, a very well known philosopher of race named Naomi Zack, who's written a lot about mixed race identity. is that to be mixed is often an identity that you don't share with your parents. Your parents don't identify as mixed, right? Naomi Osaka's mother is read as Asian, and her father is read as Black. So, having to contend with this sort of being in between is very different from racial identities in general, which tend to pertain to one's genealogy, one's lineage, right? And so black families in the U. S. can connect and support each other over racist situations in U. S. society. Black parents are often teaching their black children about this, whereas mixed children often talk about feeling caught between the identities of their two parents. Having a white mom who can't do their hair because their dad is black, right? Or having a black side of the family that doesn't think that they're black enough.
David: 6:26
Yeah, actually this came up in the last season of Love is Blind, where there was a black man dating a white woman, and one of the other black, uh, women contestants talked to the black guy and said, Hey, look, I like you, but I just want to make sure that she knows, as a white woman entering into a potentially mixed race family, that she would have an additional burden, which is the burden of raising a mixed child.
Ellie: 6:51
Well, it actually wasn't that point. I remember this conversation very well because I love A. D., the black woman who brought this up. I also really liked the other characters, Kenneth, and I forget what the white woman's name was, but I really liked her and she seemed pretty aware of the situation. Yeah, but
David: 7:06
did.
Ellie: 7:06
so the point that A. D. was making wasn't having a mixed child, it was having a black child.
David: 7:10
Black child. Yeah. Obviously, given that he was black.
Ellie: 7:14
yeah, but I think that's something that's really important to point out, which we want to talk about a bit later, is the way that non white racial classifications stick to people's bodies in white supremacist societies in ways that whiteness does not. Today we're talking about mixed race identity.
David: 7:32
How does philosophy help us think through the lived experiences of being multiracial?
Ellie: 7:37
How do differently raced individuals experience axes of a privilege and oppression differently based on how others perceive them? Yeah,
David: 7:53
Ellie, there was a movement in the 1980s and 1990s in the U. S. to try to inject new racial categories into the U. S. census. And the goal behind this movement was to try to create demographic legibility for the many, many Americans who simply did not identify with any one of the racial categories that existed in the census before. And as part of this movement, there were a new set of political groups that were formed, there were magazines and journals that were created, as well as a ton of lobbying efforts to try to make this change happen.
Ellie: 8:31
And since that period, the actual number of Americans who are mixed race has exploded. I read that as of the 2020 census, the two or more races population is 33. 8 million people. This is a tenth of the entire U. S. population, and very fascinatingly, It's an almost threefold increase from the 2010 census. So just within 10 years, there was an increase of 276 percent of people who identify as two or more races. And in fact, around a third of those who reported being multiracial were under 18 in 2020. And I will say, I feel like my family is a perfect example of this. My grandparents' generation, all white. I mean, who knows? There's probably like some mixing here and there. But when I did my 23 and me, I was 97. 5 percent Northern European. And then my parents generation a couple of their siblings married people who aren't white. And then my generation, I have so many cousins or kids of my cousins who are multiracial. If I end up having kids, they will most likely be multiracial. My sister's kids will be multiracial. And so I feel like there is just like this encapsulation of the 2020 census that I witnessed within my own family,
David: 9:45
I know it feels like you and your family are contributing to the nightmare of the conservatives, which is the idea that the white race is disappearing slowly from the face of the earth. I like the idea that it's young people making that nightmare come true. So Ellie, do your duty and have some mixed race kids immediately.
Ellie: 10:04
There's actually something really profound in what you just said because the way that our society treats race is as though white people don't have a race, but anyone who's not white does have a race, right? So we think about people as raced and not raced on the basis of whether or not they read as white. And this would include anyone who's even kind of not white, right? And think here about in the US context, the legacy of the one drop rule with respect to Black people. When we had this misunderstanding of race as passed down by bloodlines, the idea under segregation and slavery was that if you were even a little bit Black, if you had one drop of Black blood, then you were Black. There's no such thing as quote unquote Black blood, so that has been superseded. But I think that legacy still exists to some extent today. And the philosopher, Naomi Zack, is somebody who has talked about how mixed race identity works precisely in this way. It tends to conform to what's known as hypodescent, in which an individual is identified by the ancestral group of lower racial status. In the US, because we're like so obsessed with whiteness, anything that's not white is considered lower racial status. So if you're half black, half Asian, you're likely to be read in our society as black or as Asian, rather than as white.
David: 11:19
Yeah, that's true. And I've seen that in my family also to inject here a personal point, but I mean, simply speaking, those from racial groups with skin colors that are closer to the white norm can assimilate more easily, let's say within one or within two generations, whereas people from races that are phenotypically more distinct from the white norm have more difficulty precisely because of that requirement of conforming to hypodescent that you're talking about, Ellie. And so for instance, in my case my family migrated to the United States. Several of my siblings and cousins have married white Americans and their kids are much more assimilated, not just culturally, but also physiognomically in terms of just their bodily traits and their look, look
Ellie: 12:10
Which is also culturally dependent, right? What we're considering to be physiognomically white, as we know, is so historically specific, were not read as physiognomically white, you know, within the past hundred and fifty years. So it's not that far back in history that you have to go. But this is, yeah, it's just so, it's not subjective, but it's cultural, right? It's definitely socially constructed and relative, even though it's not purely subjective because it has like very cultural elements and structural consequences.
David: 12:42
Yeah. And some of those structural consequences are very hefty legal implications, right? Like who has certain rights, who has access to certain resources. And it just makes me think, thinking back to Naomi Osaka of the history of Japanese Americans not being registered legally as white, even though technically based on the anthropological criteria that were used in the 19th and 20th century for, identifying who is a Caucasian and who is not, you could make the argument that many Japanese people, just in terms of the look, could be considered white. And in fact, there are a number of Supreme Court cases that deal with this precise issue.
Ellie: 13:19
Oh, really?
David: 13:20
Yeah, in the middle of the 20th century, especially in the wake of the Japanese internment camps during World War II,
Ellie: 13:27
In which some of my family was interned, actually.
David: 13:30
Yeah, there were a number of legal cases where some Japanese Americans said, Look, by your own anthropological sort of physiological definition of whiteness, I qualify, I have white skin. And it seems like that's the one that best describes me. And in most cases, I don't know if there are any exceptions. It might be in all cases, the Supreme Court came down and said, no, you really aren't. And we can't really explain to you why you're not. It's the, we know it when we see it, and you just don't have the it factor. The it being whiteness.
Ellie: 14:03
Oh my gosh. So classic. And I think that really speaks to the fact that whether or not you're white versus non white is always a classification that's defined by white people. And what you see in that, as well as in the identity of mixed race people is The fact that whiteness is always defined by white people and something that comes up over and over again in the philosophical literature on mixed race identity is how people who are mixed and or just not white are really comfortable with a lot of flexibility and ambiguity about racial classifications. I mean, you definitely see this outside of the US context, whether it's in the Caribbean or in South Africa, or not that that's like a model of racial justice, but just like those kinds of ambiguities or complexities, but certainly in the Caribbean, certainly in Latin America, which we'll come back to a bit later. But there's, this sense, especially in the U. S., that like people are just like, are you white or not, right? Which I think also pertains to the proliferation of black and brown identities. Linda Martin Alcoff, a philosopher whom we're going to discuss in detail later, I think makes a really interesting point about this, where she says that in cultures that are by racialized identities and infected with the illusion of purity, mixed people who are at least partially White have an irresolvable status ambiguity because they're rejected by the dominant race as she puts it as impure and therefore inferior, but they're also sometimes distrusted by the oppressed race because they have certain privileges. They're more associated with whiteness than those who might have darker skin or who are not mixed.
David: 15:43
Yeah, no, and I like the way she puts it. And again, we'll talk about this in more detail, but she says if you're a mixed race in one of these societies like the U. S., either you're accused by the dominated race of trying to pass off as white or you're accused by the dominant race as trying to pull the race card whenever you do affirm your dominated race affiliation. And so it's a catch 22 situation where you're either trying to hide it or you're trying to exploit it.
Ellie: 16:10
Oh my gosh. Yes, David. This gives me an opportunity to talk about a text I have been so excited to discuss with you today, which is a piece by Adrian Piper called Passing for White, Passing for Black. I love Piper's work. She's best known as an artist, and I've seen a couple of her exhibitions that were just really mind blowing. But she also has a PhD in philosophy from Harvard, which she received in 1981. And Harvard, as you can imagine, in 1981, the philosophy department was not exactly a welcoming time or place for a woman of color in philosophy. She is mixed race, white and black, and quite light skinned. She grew up in Harlem in a sort of upper middle class black family, and she talks in this essay about going to the first event of the semester after she had started at Harvard as a philosophy PhD student. And the most famous faculty member comes up to her at this reception, a white man, obviously, and says with a smirk, Miss Piper, you're about as black as I am.
David: 17:11
Oh, okay. That is very cringe.
Ellie: 17:16
Yeah. And so the subtext, this is why I mentioned in the context of what you just said, the subtext is you got into our PhD program because you were a diversity candidate. You're, you were the, beneficiary of affirmative action. But then it turns out that you're not actually black, so you're not doing your job right as the diversity candidate. And Piper says that she had really struggled when applying to Harvard's PhD program with whether to identify as black on the application or not. Her parents told her not to because they were like, look, if you put black on your application, you're always going to wonder if you got in because you're black. So don't put it in there. Get in on your merits alone. But then Piper was like, okay, but that's also kind of messed up because then that means I'm hiding my identity from the admissions. process. And that feels like passing. I don't want to white pass. And she had come from a family in which some of her family members had ended up severing their ties with her black family and passing in white society. And so she talks about an aunt who had passed as white after getting her education. And then was never to be seen or heard from by the family again. And so for her to not mark black on the application felt inauthentic as well. It felt like a form of passing and she didn't want to be guilty of that either. So she's caught between a rock and a hard place in this application process.
David: 18:42
Yeah. And in this case, it seems like her dilemma is specifically tied to her being a biracial woman who passes as white under certain circumstances. And it's, here's something that we can contrast with the experience of somebody, let's say in philosophy, who doesn't pass as white because of the color of their skin. And this, the story that you mentioned about this faculty member telling her that I'm just as black as you are, it reminded me of this story from Anita Allen. And Who is a black philosopher, and she tells a story of being told in the 1970s that when you are black, such that you are not passing a swipe in professional spaces, you are basically guaranteed a position in the professoriate because Obviously, you're going to get a kind of racial hire, even though you don't merit it. And she tells the story of a very famous philosopher telling her, look, Anita, the only way you won't get a job in philosophy is if you literally squat and piss in the middle of the American Philosophical Association during the round of interviews. Yes.
Ellie: 19:48
Oh my God. And there's a huge problem in philosophy with people of color, especially black people ending up leaving the profession because of aggressions like this, right? I was going to say microaggressions, but that's so far from a microaggression. And so is the comment that Piper's faculty member told her. But this was a bit of a strange experience for Piper to put it mildly let's say it was a unique experience for her because it gave her this inadvertent feeling of shame, of not being right. She'd done nothing wrong, but she felt like she was wrong. And she says that growing up, she had this experience a lot, but In her Black community of Harlem, it was most often coming from other Black people. She was called Paleface in her elementary school. She was assumed by many of her peers to be white, and she says that other Black people sometimes required her to prove her Blackness by passing what she calls the suffering test.
David: 20:47
And it seems like that suffering test morphs from an internal test in the face of this working class black community. to a purely external test in the eyes of this white faculty member who thinks that the only thing that matters is literally the amount of pigmentation on your skin, right? So in this case, it's almost as if the only way that she could prove that she is black to him is by morphing herself into the image of blackness that this random white guy has in his mind, which is reductive and limited just to pigmentation. purely physical appearance. So the cultural, the historical, the experiential elements are completely gutted out such that only what is at the level of the skin counts. And I have to say that it strikes me that this is such an American problem. I want to talk more in the next segment about how this is not at all how people experience race and racial discourse in Latin America.
Ellie: 21:44
Yeah, and I mentioned that this also doesn't apply in other contexts, including the Caribbean. Piper notes that in Jamaica, which was a country that also had a lot of enslaved people, it's taken for granted that everyone has mixed ancestry. I do think, though, that whatever the specificity of your own society in relation to mixed race identity, in any society where there is a system of racial thinking in place, the lived experience of being mixed race is going to be something Individuals have to contend with,
David: 22:19
yeah, and I think insofar as there is a race like thinking in most contemporary societies, it would mean that in most places, if not all, the reality of mixed race would always bring with it these liminal experiences that, as you say, individuals have to work through without necessarily having recourse to a pre existing set of cultural ideas about how to resolve them.
Ellie: 22:46
Yeah, and I think this also speaks to the really complicated relationship between race and ethnicity in these contexts, because even though race and ethnicity are conceptually distinct, they're often appearing for mixed race individuals as overlapping, especially when we're talking about a lot of the people under 18 in the US who are mixed race, many of whose parents are either immigrants from Asia, or are like, Second gen, Asian Americans, that sense of what languages do we speak at home? How do we preserve food cultures or religious cultures, etc.? Those are questions about ethnicity, but I think they're also not lived as distinct from mixed race identity by mixed race youths.
David: 23:31
Yeah and I have to say as somebody who has had many sweats running down my brow while filling out government and university forms about race versus ethnicity, I really for a long time struggled knowing what the difference was because as somebody who identifies as Latino, I was asked to choose White as my race, even though that's not a category that most Latinos identify with and to choose then Hispanic as my ethnicity, but from the standpoint of my personal experience of racism, the two are not separable. I cannot really say that I am a white person who happens to have a particular ethnicity, right? Especially in my case, since I grew up and was born in Mexico. So my connection to whiteness is a lot more complicated than that.
Ellie: 24:23
Yeah. There was actually a campaign of Latinx people in the 1990s to be called white on the U. S. census. And you're right that Hispanic shows up. That's an ethnicity category rather than a racial category. And so it shows up as such on the census. But I think what you're saying is like, when a racist is saying something racist to you, they're not being like, I'm targeting your Latino identity, not your Hispanic identity.
David: 24:49
Your ethnicity, not your race.
Ellie: 24:56
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David: 25:17
The concept of mixed race in the U. S. tends to be, I would say, familial and summative. In the sense that when people think about a mixed race person, they think of somebody who's mother is one thing, whose father is another thing, and they are the combination or the result of the addition of those two elements. In Mexico, I grew up with a very different concept of mixedness, and that concept is mestizaje. Mestizaje is a Spanish term that refers to the mixing of races that happened in Latin America overall, but especially in Mexico as a result, of course, of colonialism and the intermingling of the Spanish and the Amerindians. And mestizo refers to the offspring of that blend of a Spanish parent and an Amerindian parent who give birth to a mestizo race. And then those offspring keep on blending their already mixed racial identity over and over again. So that over time, and this is essential to the concept of mestizaje, you cannot identify the elements that go into the mix and you cannot trace them to the familial unit. You cannot say what element was brought in by the mother or in what element was brought in by the father. Now, the concept of mestizaje is nowadays, I would say the default national self understanding of Mexicans when it comes to race slash ethnicity. Although again, in this case, the distinction between race and ethnicity is a lot more blurry. And in fact, I looked up, Ellie because you had talked about the census categories in the U. S., I looked up the racial categories for the census in Mexico, and it is also a huge mess when it comes to racial classifications because it asks people to identify their race, but the options are not options that any Mexican who identifies as Mestizo would identify with because Mestizo is not considered a race. So, you know, like we're not white, we're not Asian, we're not Pacific Islander. And since Mestizo is not there, you basically just have to Choose any of the other categories, even though you don't see yourself reflected in them. And so it turns out that the demographic statistics in Mexico for race are really unreliable because most people end up either not choosing a race on the census or just choosing all of them because they see themselves as mestizo, as mixed, or they just like write in on the side that they are something else altogether.
Ellie: 27:51
Huh, huh. Yeah, and this concept of mestizaje, I think it's almost similar to the concept of queer in the sense that it's meant to disrupt neat categorizations, and the idea of having a mestizo category on a census, I don't think would necessarily be the solution either, but maybe it would be better than what there currently is. And the concept of mestizaje has gotten really popular in philosophy in recent decades, in large part due to the work of Gloria Anzaldua, whom we'll talk about in a bit, and also to other Latina feminist philosophers, especially in the tradition of phenomenology. And I think what you see there is that the concept of mestizaje really disrupts the very notions that we have about self identity and the relation of self and group identity. So this concept has been so influential because It really destabilizes common sense in the English speaking world of philosophy about who we are.
David: 28:49
Yeah, and I actually find it somewhat paradoxical that now this term is used to destabilize categories when originally it was a legal category. So after the arrival of the Spaniards and for the few centuries following especially 17th, 18th, and 19th century. Mestizo really meant a legal category for identifying people on the basis of their specific proportion of Spaniardness versus Amerindianness. And in fact, there were a number of other categories that were meant to really demarcate a particular person based on their composition. racially. So there were criollos, there were mestizos, there were castizos as well. And over time, people realized that this attempt to come up with more and more categories to name and denote all the possible variations of mixing just was not going to work, right? It was just getting too complicated. And over time, the concept of mestizo then evolved from a legal category to sort of a cultural, all encompassing category for thinking about the experience of mixedness in Mexico. And in Mexico, the person who is credited for helping, quote unquote, institutionalize this concept in this way was the Mexican philosopher, José Vasconcelos.
Ellie: 30:13
Okay, tell us about Vasconcelos.
David: 30:15
So he was a Mexican intellectual and a philosopher who became a very important voice in Mexico, especially in the post revolutionary period. You know, the Mexican revolution started in 1910. It ended in 1920. And immediately after the revolution, of course, Mexican people were faced with the challenge of reinventing their society. Literally, how are we going to organize the economy? How are we going to organize government? And also, how are we going to organize education? Because one of the things that came out of the revolution and that was codified into the Mexican constitution is that every child has a right to public education. And it's it's here in this context of this post-revolutionary debate about how to educate the next generation of Mexican citizens and subjects that Vasconcelos is really important because he believed that the new system of education in Mexico had to be traditionalist, and by that I don't mean that it had to maintain tradition without changing the status quo, but rather that it had to train the Mexican mind in understanding the tradition out of which it emerged. And that meant really having an education system that was founded on the specificities of Mexican history and Mexican experience. And so Vasconcelos asked the question: who are we as Mexicans? And the answer that he gives to that is very simple. We are mestizos, and our children need to know this, and our entire culture needs to be organized around this as a racial concept. And so that's where Vasconcelos emerges actually as a really determining figure for Mexican society because after the Mexican Revolution, when he had already made a name for himself by writing and spreading his ideas, he was appointed as Secretary of Education for the whole country. And so he really got to put his philosophical ideas into action because he was given the power to engineer the Mexican system of primary education.
Ellie: 32:25
It's giving Mexican John Dewey. But this is really interesting because as you're describing it, Vasconcelos is a representative of one popular way of conceiving of mixed race identity, which is that to be mixed is not to be, as you put it earlier, a combination of such and such and such and such racial categorizations or ethnic classifications. But to be mixed is rather to have your own mixed identity. And this mestizo identity in particular is a unique form of that. And this means that the mixed race person has their own substantive or positive identity that should be celebrated in its own right, right? It's like green is not blue plus yellow. It's green.
David: 33:15
Yes, and so Mexican people are like Mestizo green. It's just that it's not an individual identity. It's not that I, David, I'm Mestizo. It's that I, in my identity as a Mexican, I'm mestizo. So it's something that we Mexicans share with one another.
Ellie: 33:31
Which also seems like a way of disrupting something we were mentioning earlier, which is the idea that mixed race identity tends to be more individualistic, even within families. It's something that maybe siblings share, although of course, siblings proximity to whiteness or to different races within their own family depends so much on phenotype, skin color, etc. But it sounds like what he's saying is rather than being this kind of individualizing feature, mestizo identity is collective.
David: 34:00
Yeah, no, that's correct.
Ellie: 34:02
And that seems to distinguish mestizaje in general. I feel like that's a common theme you hear from philosophers of mestizaje, from how we tend to think about mixed race identity in primarily U. S. contexts.
David: 34:13
No, that's exactly why I began by saying this. This is just alien to me in many ways, even though by now I'm familiar with the American system because I've lived here for 20 years. But in Mexico, if you ask somebody, are you Mestizo? Are you mixed race? Yes. Well, what are your parents? Your mom and dad? Well, they're also Mestizo. What about their parents? Well, they're also Mestizo. And eventually if you push it far enough back to the arrival of the Spaniards, then at some point you would be able to say, well, This person was Amerindian, this person was Spaniard, but it's really far back.
Ellie: 34:45
In Mexico, David, would you say that you're mestizo?
David: 34:48
Yeah, I don't know of any Mexican who would say no to being Mestizo, and anybody that would disavow their Mestizo heritage would actually be highly suspect in a Mexican setting because it would mean that they are ashamed of their indigenous roots, which is something that Mexican people officially claim to be very proud of. proud of even though we treat indigenous people very poorly, but like just rhetorically and symbolically we claim it. And so either they're ashamed of that or they're trying to pass off as foreigners just for, you know, like looking cool in the moment. But yeah, I don't know anybody who would say no.
Ellie: 35:24
did go to a fancy Catholic all girls high school that had a boarding school attached to it. And there were a couple of Mexican international students who did not identify as mestiza. They were like, I'm white because they and their narrative was that they didn't have Amerindian blood.
David: 35:41
I want to talk for a hot second about the details of mestizaje as articulated by Vasconcelos because after serving this role as Secretary of Education, he wrote a book in 1925 called La Raza Cosmica. The cosmic race, where he lays out the details of his understanding of Mestizaje. And he has this whole anthropological theory about how there are four fundamental races and how they have a tendency to mix among them slowly over time. And Interestingly, he does say that one of the engines of this mixing is the colonial brutality of one of those races, which is the white race. So because the white race has this imperialist sort of tendency, they tend to bring about their own mixing with other races because as they try to conquer new territories, they make contact with other races and are transformed as a result of that contact. And the essence of Vasconcelos' theory of mestizaje is that because one of these confrontations of the white race with another race that has led to a lot of intermingling happened in the Americas, the Americas are the space where this world historic destiny, because he does define it as a kind of like historical telos that history is moving towards, is going to happen, which is the ultimate mixing of all the races. And so Mestizo for him is something that begins with the intermingling of Amerindian and Spanish blood, but it really captures the synthesis all races that Vasconcelos believes is where history is moving toward, and it's something that ought to be celebrated for its complexity and for its overcoming of racial distinctions.
Ellie: 37:35
Okay. Okay. So there's this future in which there are no races. We're just like kind of varying shades of brown and nobody any longer has a distinct racial classification, which I think is a vision that a lot of people share today as a hoped for future. I also think it's important to point out that this makes more sense within the context of Spanish and Portuguese colonization of Latin America than it does of, let's say, British and French colonization of North America, because it's very commonly noted that the Spanish and Portuguese were much more open to intermarrying than the British and French settlers, especially the British, right? Like my people are the pioneers who came over from Norway and were like, you know, moving West and definitely not mixing with Native Americans. there is that distinction between these two variants of settler colonialism.
David: 38:37
And he talks about them. He refers to them as I, I think the Germanic and the Latin approaches to colonialism. And of course it's not to justify the colonialism, but it is to recognize different tendencies and styles of domination. Because when the British came to the U S with their Protestant views, they mostly decimated the local American Indian population, whereas the Spanish really intermingled it. And Vasconcelos, as well as Octavio Paz, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990, who also writes about this, they trace it back to the Roman influence on the Spanish and the Portuguese. Because of course, the Romans, the way the Roman Empire worked, it was by really absorbing other people, not by killing them, but by making them part of the Roman Empire and mixing with them and creating new syntheses of culture, of language, and so on and so forth.
Ellie: 39:30
our very own Juan Dewey is saying you can only have a post racial utopia. Thanks to colonialism, folks.
David: 39:37
Well, in a way, he's recognizing that the violence is what caused the mixing. And I just want to share this one quote that kind of captures the core of his philosophical position. This is from La Raza Cosmica. He says, "What is going to emerge is the definitive race. The synthetical race, the integral race, made up of the genius and the blood of all peoples, and for that reason, more capable of true brotherhood and of a truly universal vision." So it's a synthesis that will overcome racial boundaries and culminate. in Brotherhood on a Universal Scale.
Ellie: 40:15
Okay, it's really interesting to me to learn about Vasconcelos because this is not a philosopher that I have read. But I will say, following this brotherhood point, it's feeling like we're overdue to talk a little bit about Gloria Anzaldua. The most famous philosopher of mestizaje in contemporary philosophy, who is very much not suggesting this sort of universal brotherhood. So David, maybe let's pivot for a little bit to her text, Borderlands/La Frontera. This is a very well known text that has written in a hybrid of languages, you know, the very title Borderlands/La Frontera has it both in English and Spanish. She is playing on the complexity of Hispanic, Amerindian identities and more in this text. So David, yeah, tell us a little bit about how you read Anzaldua.
David: 41:10
Yeah, so I mean, I think I just have to take a hot second to recommend this book to anybody interested in mixed race identity, because it's a really good text. It's very experimental, as you point out with the language, but even in terms of genre, because half of the book is poetry, and half of it is argumentative essay. And so it merges a lot of different things together as a way of precisely making a point about hybridity. And what's happening with this text is that Anzaldua is trying to do what she calls an auto historia, like an auto history of her own experience as a queer woman of color who grew up on the U. S. Mexico border. And she believes that borderlands, so places where cultures touch and mix and clash, have this ambiguity built into them that is transferred to the subjectivity of the individuals who inhabit them. And one of her central insights, I think, in this text is that for people who live in the borderland and who move back and forth between multiple cultures, the act of moving back and forth results in an appreciation of complexity and also a heightened tolerance for ambiguity and even for contradiction because people need to learn to cope with the contradictions that they embody in their own existence.
Ellie: 42:31
And the reason why Anzaldua has been so influential in some of the philosophical conversations that I'm a part of, which have to do with phenomenology and selfhood, who are we, what makes us us, is because of the way that she figures a sort of hybridization of identity. There are a lot of debates within contemporary Latina feminist phenomenology about whether the self is multiple or singular. And if it's singular, then it's multiplicitous, right? So do we have multiple selves or are we a singular self with multiple dimensions, facets, or whatever it might be? I don't think Anzaldua's book gives a clear answer to this, but it has spawned a lot of these conversations in as much as this sort of flexibility of the borderland identity, which we might even not want to call identity at a certain point, shows us just how insufficient a lot of traditional philosophical categories are, especially when we're thinking about like the self as a substance with properties.
David: 43:31
Yeah, and at one point in the book, she talks about how the way in which she thinks about herself is not as having this or that identity, or even a mix of identities, but rather as having what she calls a mental nepantlism. And the term nepantlism is, uh, Englishification of the Nahuatl term, Nepantla, which is Nahuatl for in between. And so she says, as a Latina living in the setting, being queer and in the borderland, all I experience is inbetweenness. And so she tries to reclaim this nepantlism as the quote unquote source of her identity. But even the language source and identity seem misleading. And rather what she wants to do is simply create new myths and tell new stories for people who occupy this liminal space where neither A nor B feel right for them.
Ellie: 44:31
Yeah, and this idea of Nepantla has some really rich similarities to phenomenological accounts of situatedness and ambiguity, where when we're talking about personal identity, we can never talk about that as some like independent, autonomous thing over and against our history, our culture, our interdependence with others. And for that reason, a philosopher who's been really influential on my thinking in the past 10 years or so, Mariana Ortega. who has a book called In Between, you know, in sort of allusion to La Frontera, talks about Anzaldua as offering a moving Latina feminist phenomenological account. Even though Anzaldua's approach is not traditionally phenomenological in the philosophical sense, her account, as Ortega puts it, serves as an inspiration for those who wish to move beyond traditional understandings of the subject or selfhood that don't consider the importance of situatedness, liminality, ambiguity, and plurality. And so according to Ortega, Anzaldua offers a rich picture of what it is to have the lived experience of being at the borderlands, and that in turn has really important implications for how philosophers conceive of selfhood.
David: 45:47
Yeah, and embracing, I would say, avowing that inbetweenness, according to Ansel Dua, and I would take it by extension, Ortega, it leads you to see who you are and even what you already do in a new light because you push to the foreground elements of your existence that because of the political conditions that surround you, and maybe out of shame, you have had to repress or bury underground previously. And one of my favorite examples of this from Borderlands La Frontera is her analysis of the Virgen de Guadalupe. And so just for people who don't know, the Virgin of Guadalupe is a Catholic virgin that exists only in Mexico. So she is very specific to Mexican people. You won't find her in South or Central America. And there's a whole story about how she represents the Amerindians' conversion into Catholicism in the wake of the Spanish conquest. Now, long story short, and there is really a much longer story here that we don't have time for, Anzaldua has an entire chapter on the Virgen de Guadalupe, and she argues that we need to come to appreciate the Amerindian origins of the Virgin, even though they are not recognized officially in Mexico, because she makes the argument looking back at the origin of the Virgin and at the myth behind her, that the Virgin of Guadalupe is not in fact the Virgin Mary of Catholicism, as most Catholic Mexicans today are led to believe. But she's actually an instantiation of the Aztec goddess, Cuatlicue. and says, look, if you are a Mexican and you are Catholic and you wanna foreground your Mexican identity and your Catholicism, you don't even realize that you are already doing so through a kind of pagan, amerindian, Aztec folk religion that has survived, but that has hidden itself behind a Catholic front. It means that most people who are Mexican nowadays and who pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe are not really Catholic in the way that they think that they are because Mexican Catholicism is itself a mixture, like we are, of Spanish and Amerindian roots.
Ellie: 48:06
So the Virgin of Guadalupe, our, our icon, our patron saint of mixed race identity. David, I want to take this last part of the episode to consider a chapter from Linda Martin Alcoff's book, Visible Identities, also really important work of philosophy from the past 20 years and really important contribution to Latina feminist phenomenology, I would say. And the chapter is called On Being Mixed. It's the final chapter of her book, and she talks about growing up in Panama as a bilingual young girl who has a mixed Latin American and white American, let's say, identity, but then who moves to Florida as a child and is read as, quote, Latin. And in this chapter, Alcoff develops a notion of mixed race identity as hyphenated. And this is in distinction to the concept of mestizaje that we just talked about before this. So for Alcoff, one of the ways to think about mixed race identity is as a substantive, unique identity onto itself. This is the Vasconcelos view that we were talking about. Another way to think about it is as a sort of generic mixed race identity, like anyone, the world over, no matter what your racial origins are, your ethnic origins are. If you're mixed, you're mixed, right? So this would mean that Naomi Osaka would be the same race as you, which is different from Vasconcelos' view, where Mestizaje is specifically this sort of combination of Amerindian, Spanish heritage, etc. Alcoff's view is a bit different. She wants to uphold this idea that mixed race identity is a hyphenated identity. She identifies as both white and as Latina rather than just as mixed, whether that's generic mixed or mestiza mixed. What do you think about this view?
David: 50:21
Yeah, so the hyphenated view is very interesting. I think it coheres a little bit with what we talked about American society, so on and so forth, where you identify the elements. But she also does recognize that there are certain challenges that the hyphenated view of identity must contend with. And one of them is the fact that even if you have a hyphenated experience of your own racial identity of A versus B or A plus B, sometimes society, as we talked about earlier, will make the decision for you. And independently of you, right? So in Yeah. America, we see Osaka as black rather than Japanese. And so there are ways in which one identity is pushed into the background because of things like the one drop rule, right? Where like, if you're a little bit black, you're just black, period. And we don't care about what else goes into the hyphenation of your being.
Ellie: 51:14
Yeah. And to that extent, Alcoff says, Okay, sure, but we shouldn't let the white supremacist society that we live under define whether or not we identify as mixed. So sure, American society sees Osaka's identity as Black as more visible and more salient than her Asian identity. But Alcoff's like, okay, so what? I mean, yes, there is an extent to which our racial identities supersede how we identify and they have more to do with how people identify us, right? As a Black woman, Osaka is more likely to be mistreated by the medical community than she is as an Asian woman. However, Alcoff says that shouldn't be the last word. We also need to take into account people's own kinds of identification. And I also wonder about this in the specific case. I mentioned earlier that I have a lot of multiracial family members and a lot of those family members are half Asian, half white. We have like, half Filipino, half white, half Japanese, half white, half Chinese, half white. And I do feel like that, a sort of, especially East Asian, but maybe also Southeast Asian plus white identity, is probably the most, like, genuinely appearing multiracial kind of identity that we have in American society because of the sort of model, minority myth that we have around being Asian, right? And so if we think back to Zack's point about hypo descent, this idea that. When you're mixed race, whichever racial group is considered quote inferior will be the one that sort of sticks to you. I think it obviously goes without saying that we live in a society that prizes whiteness above all, but I think that there are also being East Asian or Southeast Asian brings you in closest proximity to whiteness without being white. in our society in a way that, like, a lot of half Asian, half white kids are read in this hyphenated way more than, say, somebody who's half Black, half Asian, or half Black, half white.
David: 53:26
Yeah, no, you're right about that. And, you know, aside from this question of society chooses for you, I think another potential problem that we need to consider in connection to hyphenation of identities is that the hyphen, and this is a Latin American point, right? Coming from my background in thinking about race as mestizaje is that it presupposes that the elements are separated by the hyphen because they truly are separate and stable and in some way pure. So if you are Japanese and Black, it's because. Your mother is Japanese and we know what that means and your father is Black and we know what that means and they themselves are not mixed or contaminated or hybridized, but you are. And so sometimes the hyphenation of identity can presuppose a certain kind of essentialism about the elements previous to the hyphenation. That maybe we should be wary of. And this is also something that Alcoff talks about. But one point I wanted to really mention is that Alcoff has a critique of Anzaldua and her concept of mestizaje, which is that mestizaje really presupposes border crossing. It's a kind of shifting back and forth, code switching, traveling and moving from one place to the next, even in terms of your identity. And that's very similar to the concept of nomadic subjectivity that the philosopher Rosie Braidotti talks about, where the point is to be nomadic and to not be attached to any one place or any one identity. And Alcoff says that the problem with this kind of hypermobile, nomadic approach to identity is that it's highly unstable. It can justify things like imperial projects, because ultimately the imperial colonizers are moving back and forth from one place to another. And it can also lead to people disrespecting their attachments to other people, right? Like you don't build attachments because you're always on the move. And I'm curious about what you think about this, Ellie, this critique of hybridity and mobility as something that is politically dangerous as well.
Ellie: 55:30
Yeah, well, I will say I think there's a subtle distinction between that view and Alcoff's own view because it strikes me that the biggest contrast between the Anzaldua view of constantly crossing the borders would actually be the Vasconcelos view. conception of your mestizaje as being a substantive identity in its own right. Alcoff is, to my mind, trying to do something a little bit more in between with this notion of the hyphenated mixed race identity because she talks about how she is neither simply white nor simply Latina, and she's both, and there's a gap between her two identities. So I would say maybe her critique of Anzaldua is that there is a fetishizing of the gap between the two identities, whereas Alcoff wants to hold on to the two identities and the gap between them, which I think if you're thinking about a sort of quote unquote melting pot society where there is an interest in maintaining racial identification and also ethnic identification, then the hyphenated view really makes a lot of sense, right? I'm thinking about my partner Trevor, who's half Indian, half white. And that, that distinction, I feel like is relevant for him. I think it has more to do with ethnicity than it does with race, because he's very white passing. But also just because he's white passing doesn't mean that he's not mixed. I think that's part of what Alcoff is trying to resist as well is this idea that what you are considered to be by others isn't the whole story. It is part of the story, right? Like to get white privilege because of being white passing is relevant, but also to be able to say you have some say in this too. And that half of you, even if it's not a half that other people are perceiving visually is not only crucial to your identity, but also something that's not encapsulated by the concept of being mixed, right? Like to be indian. and to be white is different than simply to be a mixed subject. Like it's, to go back to the analogy before, it is honoring the yellow and the blue rather than just saying it's green.
David: 57:40
Yeah. No, that's right. In my case, I actually really struggle when people ask me if I am mixed race and I truly don't know what to say because. Yes, I'm mestizo, I'm Mexican, I'm brown, and I do have Amerindian roots in my family, but I also have a lot of Spaniard. My biological father is of Irish descent. And so if I start listing all the things that went into this weird little mix, that is me, at some point, it feels like I'm just enumerating a lot of things that like don't really have meaning for me on their own. But I also feel weird saying that I am not mixed because when you say you're not mixed in the U. S., it sounds as if you're alluding to some kind of racial purity, which is impossible for any Latin American person. Like we don't have anybody who is not already mixed. And so when people ask me that, I just want to say yes, but not in the way in which that concept takes on meaning for you.
Ellie: 58:35
Yeah, because I remember when you mentioned this to me when we were thinking about this episode, I was like, David, you're mixed, like, you're Latino! But then that's like, isn't that so white gaze? I'm literally performing exactly what Alcoff and all these other people are warning us against. It's like, don't let the white person who perceives you as other define who you are.
David: 58:56
Yeah, I know, Ellie. Don't try to force me out of my cuatlicue mestiza identity that is always on the border between two separate spaces. My nepantlism shall survive. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Consider supporting us on Patreon for exclusive access to bonus content, live Q and A's and more. And thanks to those of you who already do. To reach out to us and find episode info. Go to overthinkpodcast. com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram at overthink underscore pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Emilio Esquivel Marquez, and Samuel P. K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.