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[Negative Xicanidades] “Only Together Can We Be a Force”: Identity, Obsessions, and Longings9/18/2021 “Only Together Can We Be a Force”: Identity, Obsessions, and Longings The piece below is a flourish of writing that was supposed to be a response to the curious yet monological debates happening around “racism,” “colorism,” and “white identity” on social media some year back. For one, the plethora of theories on race or racialization circulated and spoke across, above, and below each other—missing moments of clarity and clashing with divisive condescension that everyone’s perspective was wrong, “I am right.” I was reluctant to speak to “race” because of these incendiary debates—confused by “discourse”—that seemed to get us nowhere but a rhetoric of “uplift the most marginalized.” These paragraphs are left in their original, to mark my own thought and how I was thinking only a year ago, to now return and provide commentary in [brackets]. I don’t have the answers, and perhaps at one time maybe I thought I did. I am here to tell myself that I don’t and won’t have the answer, and this is a truth everyone must confront in their writing. We are able only to offer concepts, theories, and criticism—methods that might advance our conceptions or only fuse them more with misconceptions. I am here to offer a retrospective of my own thinking, however limited and naïve it possibly was. Hopefully it can generate some discussion or be lost to the internet void. That is all. * * * Third World Radicalism; or “What do you identify as?” It was the hot summer of 2018 and we organized a film screening for the short documentary “On Strike!: Ethnic Studies 1969-1999” on the UCLA campus. The Eagle and the Condor Liberation Front (ECLF) was a newish group of Indigenous students. We were an organization of students that were in the process of rethinking our world and its antagonisms. In many ways, we felt committed to the Ethnic studies project in the United States, inspired by the original calls for a Third World College in 1969. Those times in 2018 were tense for the struggle of Ethnic studies in California [and remains so till this day]. We gathered in the basement of the Student Resources Center where the Community Programs Office existed and housed many student-initiated, student-run projects that centered on outreach and retention. These projects were organized by “students of color” and funded by the university through student struggle. I was a peer learning facilitator for a transfer summer program at that time, working for the Academic Advancement Program (AAP) and another unit that focused on new UCLA undergraduate students. Housed in Campbell Hall, began as the High Potential Program organized by the Black Student Union in the 1960s where Los Angeles Black Panthers participated. This program was to recruit working-class Black students and other “students of color” to UCLA. After the assassination of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, two Black students associated with the Black Panther Party, this program slowly changed as the assaults against Black radicalism on the campus increased. In the basement, we welcomed community-members from Los Angeles as well as recent transfer students from AAP’s summer program. We invited San Diego State University professor Roberto D. Hernández to participate in this film screening that would turn into a discussion. Chicana/o/x studies professor Hernández was an undergraduate student organizer at UC Berkeley in 1999 when a re-awakened third world Liberation Front (twLF) emerged to defend Ethnic studies on their campus. He would later recall his experiences with administration and other faculty that made it difficult for students to meet their demands. “On Strike” is a documentary that draws a long history for Ethnic studies in California. Starting with a narration of Black students struggling for Black studies at San Francisco State University, it wasn’t long till other students from different historically constituted groups, such as Chicanos and Asians, that joined these efforts to jointly build the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF). Coalitional in its spirit, the TWLF of 1969 demonstrated a commitment to struggle for the autonomous education of “Third World” peoples in the United States. It was to be in the university but not of its structures. This coalition made a list of demands, the core of it being the formation of a Third World College controlled and determined by “Third World” peoples. It was a struggle for autonomy and a crack in the settler colonial institution of higher education. What we know today of Ethnic studies, in name, is a concession to the university domesticating the calls for Third World studies. It was to mimic the school of ethnic studies from the University of Chicago. Notwithstanding, Ethnic studies on various fronts has resisted subjugation and conformity. It’s legacy and persistent existence has threatened the university and its narrow systems of knowledge. It is constantly in struggle. The documentary made this much clear: Ethnic studies was a disposable project. UC Berkeley was antagonistic to Ethnic studies, set to defund the project and its affiliates. Students rejected this proposal and worked on organizing a full protest to these administrative goals. Culminating into a hunger strike, police violence, and the pressure from community stakeholders, the twLF’s demands were negotiated. The year of 1999 witnessed a strong win, but the war against Ethnic studies did not stop there. After the documentary we formed into a circle to have our discussion about Ethnic studies and the struggle to defend those projects. What started as questions about power, domination, and resistance from the ECLF organizers ended up about questions of identity. A circle consisting mostly of “Latinx” students, the newly transfer students from Central America and those who “identified” with Mexico and not “Chicanos” questioned the premise of Chicana/o/x studies. These students were finding it difficult to see themselves in Chicana/o/x studies at UCLA because they felt like they didn’t belong. Questions about indigeneity, Indigenous identity, and whiteness were also discussed—leading the conversation about Ethnic studies as a question of one’s personal identification with a group. We got lost in what some call identity politics. I left disappointed. [I think now to the work of José Esteban Muñoz’s formulation of an “anti-identitarian identity politics” and how useful that would have been for my perspective at the time.] Critical Ruminations on Identity Claims; or How We Obsess on Each Other’s Skin Why are we invested in identity? Why do we, all of us, invest so much in identity claims? A Mexican American who claims Chicano. An African American claiming Black. An American Indian claiming their respective nation/tribe/citizenship. Or is it the reverse? A Chicano who is actually Hispanic. A Black person actually African Indigenous. An Indigenous person identifying only with Indian. “I’m not Mexican, I am Central American.” “I am not Central American, I am Nawat-Pipil.” Labels, categories, identities [and the assertion of a constant negation that begins with stating what one is not]. White, brown, Black, light-skin, white passing, fake Natives, white Latinxs, pretendians, white Natives, non-white, non-Black, white body, mixed-race, multi-racial, Black body—words, labels, categories, descriptive statements of the flesh on individuals in the world. Identity situates a person’s (the individual subject) perception of themselves in a world they also perceive in a variety of ways [or so what we are told to think in our neoliberal era]. Identity becomes a self-actualization process, a mode of identifying with one’s category or counter-categories—it is a crisis of knowing the self, of thinking through the Western ways of being modern, of aspiring to Man [and I think how this might be our predicament: focusing on the individual and not the collective]. Who are you? Who are we? Theories, histories, and narrations of an ethnie or a people are abundant or scarce depending on the relations to power and domination. For instance, criollo elites in modern México will know their heritage, their lineage, and their nativism to lands their ancestors claimed as their own. Yet, for the ordinary working-class mestizo in a rural pueblo will perhaps have no [or little] recollection of their ancestral and disinherited Indigenous collective name, only fragmentations of their ancestors dominantly narrated as an interracial harmony between Spanish and Indian. Between race and class, this example points to the racialized class existence of many people within the Mexican context dominated by mestizaje and anti-Blackness, and the contentious urbanized class structures whose social power is rooted in whiteness, property, and [intergenerational] access to wealth. Yet, with “Latinx” presence in the US, migration, border-crossing, and movement characterizes a new label: migrant/immigrant/foreigner/Other. Conceptions of illegality, citizenship, and belonging to the nation take place, as it does with other groups that are in transit to the US or Canada or México. What does it mean to belong to a nation? What does it mean to be white? The popular consensus it seems is that to belong and be white is to “look” a certain way, to be in “proximity” to the supposed fixed, stable, and natural order of belonging as white thus being of the nation. I speak here of the US and its configurations of the nation as historically rooted in a white, Anglo-Saxon, and protestant imaginary that simultaneously was an empirical reality [for many early settlers and their descendants]. Black studies teaches us that this anti-Black world [we inhabit as a dominant world] was shaped through rendering Black Africans as non-Human, thus taking into account how the ethnoclass of Man—in other words white supremacy—garnered its power by possessing and investing in identity claims to whiteness as the Human. [What I was trying to unfold here is how the “Human” itself is loaded with baggage that is directly connected to how the early western European bourgeoisie’s conception of culture was overdetermined by white supremacist values—vis-à-vis Silvia Wynter’s theory.] Social problematic: is whiteness universal and natural? Is it translatable through different regimes and registers of racialization, dehumanization, and white supremacy? Current dilemma: are people of mixed-race existence, with phenotypes of pale skin color, white people? Are they constituted as white? Question: why or why not? We posit, if this is our position, that the primary antagonism of the world is both white supremacy and structures of whiteness if we are conditioned to read and categorize “white bodies” as white, rendering all non-Black, non-brown “bodies” as white and nothing else—completely attaching a sociality and totality to the naturalized condition of whiteness on a “white body” as a personal condition regardless of a potential mixed family, Indigenous affiliation, and a contradiction to white supremacy—i.e., will not be accepted into the (white) nation nor will belong to the nation (coded as white) because the regime and register of power absorbs only pure subjects. Thus, this position engenders the impossibility of whiteness onto “non-white, white bodies” as an unnatural but an uncomfortable fit—while the nation and its State insists, they will never be white. In digestible terms: white has a history of invention, of systemic self-actualization, and ethnoracial domination [and in other ways to understand this: “white” designates not a group membership but a condition that we have yet to understand in its complexity]. White is a historical violence, especially onto those cultivated to understand their non-proximity to whiteness—i.e., the US educational-system tracking non-white students for vocational and subservient labor sectors in the political economy. Why then, do we continue with this narrow position that overlooks other antagonisms? What is to be made of calling non-Black, non-brown individuals who are possibly part of Black and Brown communities and families as white when white supremacy itself will never embrace them, absorb them, or cultivate them in the same ways they do western Europeans and their descendants? White then, is an unstable, disordered, and unnatural condition—an entitlement that visibly has no clear inscription or historical value when oppressed non-white communities will render themselves as white or their own as white when they “look” white and “pass” as white from their subjugated registers and gaze. What does this do to ideas of liberation? Freedom? Life? The genre of the Human—to those who perceive in this perception I outlined—is biologically and phenotypically in a “white body.” Or, perhaps, we miss the opportunity to discuss the historically constituted white people who will never integrate our bodies because we are “impure.” White is pure, unmixed, and unnatural. [How does this help re-shape the debate?] [I think now to how my argument follows how whiteness is not a personal equation to be made: white/pale skin = white. If this were so, we wouldn’t be discussing whiteness, but “white” as an immutable category that reflects the empirical appearance of a body, thus white/pale skin = white. “White” is thus collapsed as only a sign of the body in its pure appearance as a rigid semiotic with a “code” that cannot be ambiguous nor confusing—and if it generates misperception then the body is probably rendered as white anyway. Is this where we are in the fold of things? Is this the way we are to interpret the power of white supremacy? As a body not a structure? I have no answers, but I personally refuse to accept this.] Naturalizing the Unnatural Paternalism. I first heard of this word reading about the work of Black Marxists like Harry Haywood and the contentious debates of the Black Belt Thesis when Haywood was a member of the Communist Party USA [and it was in Jodi Dean’s book Comrade that led me to this]. In this historical situation, many US communists were debating whether Black people in the South constituted a nation of their own [as these debates were grounded in Lenin’s thesis of self-determination of minority national groups]. Many Black radicals in the Communist Party USA advocated their position on the Black Belt Thesis that argued they were an oppressed nation. Interestingly, many white communists were afraid to make counter arguments, in fear that they would be called racists or white chauvinists. To make things worse, the social relationships that were created from this fear turned into a paternalistic relationship. White communists didn’t question, deviate, or challenge the words, ideas, and practices of their Black comrades—even if their decisions, choices, or rhetoric was problematic or anti-Black. Paternalism is the crux and crutch of radical organizers, critics, and activists who are at an impasse on their own politics—they hold onto what they understand as the hierarchy of suffering. The white communist example is not the best one, but it demonstrates how whites will reproduce their whiteness as allies rather than committing [ontological] white suicide to bring themselves out of whiteness. How do we create a force of collective power together? The political aspirations of many are to prioritize the hierarchy of suffering onto Black and Indigenous struggles only—and it doesn’t matter what their politics are, only that you “listen,” “follow,” and “uplift.” Anti-Blackness and settler colonial structures of genocide and land dispossession are the core of the analysis, whether or not the Black and Indigenous people we “listen,” “follow,” and “uplift” recognize it too. These are important places of struggle that require us all to destroy them in their totality—to really end the world of white supremacy, capitalism, and settler domination. Yet, the tensions, lateral hostilities, and indictments of whiteness casted onto groups such as Asians or Chicanxs across the spectrum of communities in struggle has caused an intensified debate. More so, many naturalize the unnatural rather than refusing the categories that hold us captive (e.g., race, gender, class, etc.). This takes us back to our commitment to struggle. I shared my disappointing experience with trying to facilitate Ethnic studies consciousness, only to return to our longings with identity. I also shared my imperfect and not so critical rumination on whiteness, yet only attentive with our overdetermined obsession with skin, pigment, and biology. I have no answers but to say that we are at an interesting juncture, not so much an impasse, that will require us to dialogue. Many organizations, collectives, and groups in struggle have had these dialogues, continue to create spaces for them—but it is an exhausting and frustrating imperative. I originally wrote this piece to reflect on the term People of Color as an organizational and political articulation of struggle, not identity or category, but I didn’t. Yet, I found myself reflecting on that hot summer day about Third World radicalism, and how the dreams of US Third World feminists hardly see the light in our contemporary politics. When Gloria E. Anzaldúa states in This Bridge Called My Back, “Only together can we be a force.” It led me to meditate deeply on the question of whiteness and the self-inscribing harm even Brown skinned people are doing to themselves by questioning if they too are white. I arrived at paternalism to reject its premise of a hierarchy of suffering. [It is here that I trail off and forgot to finish. It is here that I attempted to synthesize the writing but was probably over it—if not desiring to abandon this reflection altogether. I return now only to say that there are some kernels of my own truths here as I confront my “mixed-race” body and my “mixed-race” family that has many forgotten Indigenous ancestors, lost Indigenous tongues, and lost Indigenous cultural lifeways—yet its spirit remains as my “Mexican” family becomes something else on distant lands north of an imperial border. I remain confused as always, contending with Spanish ancestors and lost stories of Indigenous life. I remain trenchant in my own Xicano subjectivity as it is a body of knowledge I re-channel into the “losses” I face, building another world for myself and those around me—stitching together another story of memory, of love, and desire. “Only together can we be a force” and it starts with not rejecting identity politics but in articulating another kind of politics that is not the ground of identity but liberation for all. I hope we never stop. I hope we might live a good life together.] From the California central coast, Territories called Anisq’oyo, Chumash lands. White Mountain Rabbit
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