Link to Poem

Insights 20/14

I have really traveled a ton of emotional distance this year and feel like I have a lot to be proud of. This reflection is for me to put into words some of the things I learned. I am using the practice of writing the things I learned down and reflecting on them to solidify them in my mind and to retain these lessons and have them be permanent learning that I continue to build on.  I enjoy the opportunity to share this with others, as it might spark conversations, and it can help me be feel accountable to have let other people in on what I’m up to.

I’ll be saying “I learned” but it is more accurate to say “I am learning”, as this is all ongoing subject to continual upkeep and monitoring.

I learned to identify some of my interaction styles and behaviors as “codependent”**. I have read and reflected a lot on my dynamics of past relationships and ongoing friendships.  I find labeling my interaction defaults as “codependent” to be 1. Extremely helpful and hopeful because it means it has a name; it’s a thing. There are patterns of my childhood that fit with why I have developed this way of interacting, and there are things to do to change it.  2. Kind of hilarious to be so TEXTBOOK of a case 3. A bit humbling to realize my problems aren’t all that unique, special, or mystifying—they are almost predictable.

I’ve made a lot of progress in identifying codependent patterns and working to operate in reality and express what I want from my relationships, to change dynamics with friends and to insist on connections that are healthy and satisfying for me.

I learned that I distort things in my mind and often don’t allow positive messages of love, attraction, or acceptance to come in. I am totally relearning how to interact with my social environment and to accept reality good or bad and to take peoples words and actions for the truth instead of trying to make up meaning for it, whether I exaggerate it to be more or less caring than it is.

I learned how to let people leave from my life. I learned to let people go. I was honest and I didn’t say anything I regret at all. I was compassionate towards others but equally compassionate toward myself, insisting on keeping myself happy and safe.

I really, really learned A LOT about valuing myself and letting people who aren’t valuing me leave and not come back. I really absolutely had to love myself and for being me and not for the role I play in other people’s lives or the things I give to them. I learned to stop compulsively giving at the expense of myself.

I learned to stick up for myself and say when I was hurt by other people.

I learned to say no in a lot of ways. I learned to be compassionate toward people but not let them hurt me or stay in my life if they were being destructive.

I learned to distance myself from my parents and the feelings of guilt and wanting to do things for them or make their lives better. I have been better at not feeling responsible for their happiness.

I learned how to listen to my intuition and to recognize signs of people that are toxic and not good to me.

I learned to not bond with people over suffering and low points and addictions and misery. I learned to demand more out of my relationships than simply commiserating and being down in the dirt with each other.

I learned to open up to people I trust and to let people in a bit more than I usually would.

I am learning not to act preemptively or reactively. I am learning how to stop trying to control my environment or do detective work about what could be wrong or try to assume other peoples intentions, desires, or needs. I am learning how to let people be adults and interact with them as competent and capable adults instead of charity cases, socially inept, needy people who can’t advocate for themselves.

I have learned to be open and clear and to not expect the worst or that things aren’t working or that something is wrong. I am still working on this, but assuming the best and assuming that people are adults that can communicate if something is amiss is a huge new way of interacting for me.

I am learning to enjoy my strengths and be strong and happy and proud while acknowledging this doesn’t make other people shrink or feel bad. If it does it is saying something about them, not about me. I am learning to value people and think highly of them and not assume them to be their weakest selves. I can interact with people with respect and faith that they have the ability to accomplish what they want.

I am learning how to be supportive towards people without assuming responsibility or giving them advice or trying to solve any of their problems. I am assuming people are strong, even if they show weakness; they aren’t defined by their weakness, depression, or problems. They are strong and capable.

I am not letting people lean on me or leach off of me or depend on me too much. I am keeping emotional boundaries with all of my friends.

I am remaining emotionally self sufficient and not letting others impact me too much. I will keep good boundaries with myself and be honest and aware of how I am feeling.

I am learning to not be afraid or distrusting of my feelings and learning to look at them as tools to uncover how I am responding to current situations or past/future scenarios. I am learning to question both my emotions and my thoughts equally and be looking for outcomes that lead to a happier me.

I learned to feel more competent socially, to be more outgoing and open to sharing myself and my sense of humor and thoughts with more people and have received positive affirmation from that.

I learned to be a better student—to learn the shit I need, to work the system, to not berate myself or feel bad if I am not perfect.

I have learned not to value myself for my grades and have learned to be pretty confident in my abilities as a person who can learn new things.

I learned how to navigate uncomfortable work situations and how to make connections with people in professional settings.

I learned a ton about social justice topics, politics, and perspectives.

I learned a ton about white identity and my spot in the US as a white settler (always learning more about that).

I learned how to use humor and be upbeat in stressful situations. I learned ways to not feel bogged down and how to pull and push on humor and others to stay energized.

I learned how to be at peace with not doing everything possible. I learned how to let myself have time and be okay with not going to every social event or every opportunity. I learned to forgive myself when I don’t do it all.

I learned to take care of myself and make myself comfortable in my surroundings. How to plush things out, get cozy, spend money on small things that make me happy, make my environment a place I want to be and to set things up in my home the way I want them.

I learned to take care of myself.

I learned to be my own friend.

I learned to have fun with myself.

I learned how to be alone but not feel lonely.

I learned how to shift my perspective and be generous to myself and caring toward myself.

I guess part of my reason for writing this is the desire to make a stronghold on what I have going on and the progress I have made and to really set that shit in stone and keep on moving without losing any ground. I learned so much this year and I want to keep learning.  A lot of this year was painful and kind of miserable. I cried a lot. I felt a lot of things. I had a rough time of it for a while but it has really transformed my relationships and has lead me to better self understanding and self love. I did take care of myself and I did learn to love and be there for myself.

*https://experiencelife.com/article/no-boundaries-overcoming-codependence/

*http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/co-dependency

Loveblindness: Race is sexed, Sex is raced

Julia McKenna

Introduction

Interracial same-sex relationships face a unique set of circumstances as the combination of a relationship that defies both race and gender boundaries. Further, many racialized sexualities go unexamined in the dominant white queer movement. These racialized and sexualized formations of “the other” are often ignored under the guise of “colorblind” rhetoric with individuals declaring their “preferences” as if they are innate and formed within a cultural vacuum. Additionally, white queers, being a stigmatized group themselves may foolishly/naively believe that they and people of color are “all in the same boat” and dealing with similar oppressions, and as such they couldn’t possibly be acting in racist ways or perpetuating racialized stereotyping and fetishization of people of color. Same-sex interracial relationships are a unique target of scrutiny and the people within the relationship are objectified and sexualized in racialized ways and their relationship itself is “sexualized”. I would like to examine the intersectional construction of identities as it pertains to same-sex interracial coupling and desire. My primary lenses of analysis are race, gender, and sexuality.

Sociological Perspective

People operate within a system of simultaneous, interrelated social relationships, what Andersen & Collins (2013) terms matrix of domination ¹. Socially constructed categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality are often articulated as binaries “man/woman, Black/White, rich/poor, gay/straight, or citizen/alien” ². These categorizations allow for “the other” to be identified as these socially constructed categories map out onto individual lives in the form of identities. These identities are built into society and are a result of social and historical processes ³. It is through these categories that are tied to systemic forms of inequality that we may examine their impacts intersectionally, in their many combinations. These intersecting identities are ubiquitous, present in the realms of ideas (symbols, language, images), interactions (norms, behaviors), and institutions (government, law, education) ⁴. To examine some of the complexities of how these identities intersect in same-sex interracial coupling and desire, I will examine popular racialized and sexualized images in the media as well as the historical context of colonialism featuring genocide, slavery, and ongoing wars.

First, we can examine the media, where race, gender, and sexual stereotypes intertwine in different ways.  In the popular media African American men are stereotyped as hypermasculine and oversexed, and African American women are stereotyped as promiscuous. Latinos are stereotyped as “macho” and sexually uncontrollable and passionate. Latinas are stereotyped as either “hot” or virgin-like. White women are sexually stereotyped in dichotomous terms as “madonnas” or “whores”. These dominant images of sexuality are “part of the architecture of race, class, and gender oppression, revealing the interlocking systems of race, class, gender, and sexuality” ⁵.

Second, we can examine the historical context in which these categories are forged. Through the action of colonial discourses, the bodies of Native women and men are queered and racialized as disordered, unreproductive, and therefore nonheteronormative ⁶. Similar imaginaries are formed around the Orient and people of color from Africa. The Orient is cast as a “site of carefully suppressed animalistic, perverse, homo-and hypersexual instincts” and a space of “illicit and dangerous sex”⁷. African Americans have also faced oversexualized portrayals of black sexuality as primitive, wild, forbidden, and exotic.  In United States Culture “Black male genitalia have but one meaning (rapacious, threatening, titillating lust) and one size (BIG)”⁸. In this way, racial others are always in some way queered, their sexualities marked as perverse which is used as a justification for violent attacks. Not including narratives and histories woven into and making up the present formation of socially constructed groups in the U.S. allows us to overlook the structure of white supremacy and the logics of slavery, genocide, and Orientalism delineated by Andrea Smith (2001) that are at play ⁹.

Third, we can examine the complexity of intersecting identities in interracial couples and same-sex couples by examining the meaning that families and society place on these unions. Interracial couples exist on the color-line in societies “borderland” between white and black and the racialized/sexualized stereotypes, perceptions of difference, familial opposition, and lack of community acceptance should not be looked at as individual problems but as a reflection of the larger racial issues that reflect contemporary race relations ¹⁰. Mixed race relationships have been “sexualized”, meaning they have been viewed as essentially sexual, and are not seen to be about commitment, communication, or love.   In the way mixed-race love was/is viewed as something pornographic and essentially different from mono-race love, same-sex relationships are similarly sexualized ¹¹. A black person and a white person coming together “has been given many names-miscegenation, amalgamation, race mixing, and jungle fever-conjuring up multiple images of sex, race, and taboo” and responses to black-white couples “have ranged from disgust to curiosity to endorsement, with the couples being portrayed as many things-among them, deviant, unnatural, pathological, exotic, but always sexual” ¹². White people and people of color are both given messages from their families and communities about interracial relationships. White families may discourage interracial relationships to maintain white privilege while black families may discourage these unions to maintain strength and solidarity of black communities and may view interracial relationships as a “loss of individuals to a white society, weakening of families and communities, and the devaluing of blackness¹³. What does it mean then to have same-sex, mixed-race couples? They are perhaps doubly sexualized and inhabit a unique position of intersecting identities, both dominant and marginalized.

Theoretical Ideas

Colorblindness and Colorblind Racism

I would like to examine how the ideas of multiculturalism and “post-race” logics reinforce what Jasbir Puar defines as white ascendancy ¹⁴.  Bonilla-Silva a sociologist describes the concept of color-blind racism and reports “racism despite our desperate hope, has not disappeared, but that it has a rhetoric, as style through which it survives”¹⁵. An unexamined “colorblind” approach to desire allows for the repetition and upholding of sexualization and racialization of people of color through aligning with a white supremacist national narrative always contrasting “the other” against a white backdrop inherently rooted in racial and sexual violence and (operating through) the intentional silencing, erasing, and forgetting of those violences. Andersen & Collins explains colorblind racism as “a new form of racism in which dominant groups assume that race no longer matters-even when society is highly racially segregated and when individual and group well-being is still strongly determined by race” ¹⁶. To deny the significance of race is to deny the historical and contemporary realities of people of color and to allow the perpetuation of racism, unnamed and masked ¹⁷.

Horizontal Hostility: Racism in the Queer Community

Narratives that are glossed over and unseen by a colorblind white queer majority that allow for the replication and continuation of racialized stereotypes, racialized fantasies and desires to reproduce these conditions and roles, without being marked as connected to these processes of violence and control historically. These racial formations and narratives can be theorized as present but unexamined backdrops to modern queer identities, especially in light of colorblind and multicultural formations that seek to nullify past abuses of power and violent deployments of sexuality by erasing their presence, often through a process of willful forgetting in efforts to escape the specter, the ghost, of genocide, slavery, and torture.  The hegemony of whiteness and white supremacy is the bedrock on which white queer identities exist. It is so normalized that it often goes unexamined, “whiteness in the gay community is everywhere, from what we see, what we experience, and more importantly, what we desire” ¹⁸.

The film Tongues Untied (Riggs 2008) details the theme of white masculinity and its construction as powerful and desirable or the “ultimate” in maleness, the theme of black oversexualization and objectification and the stereotypes about size and physicality. The film critiques subordinate and dominant imagery and language, the use of “master/slave” and animalistic imagery, the assumptions of self-hate attached to attraction to the “white other”, and the complicated desire of attraction to difference ¹⁹.  The gay mainstream casts Asian men as feminine and black men as hyper-masculine while Latino and Native American men are seen as exotic. "No femmes, no fats, and no Asians" is a common quote found in many gay personal ads, both in print and online ²⁰. The dilemma of queer people of color can be illustrated by the following description:

Gay men of color are told, by both communities, that we are somehow not masculine enough to be full members in either community. Some of us have tried to attain this mythical masculine norm. We spend hours at the gym toning our bodies and building our muscles to fit with the gay masculine norm. Some of us disguise our speech, alter our style, and watch our steps in an effort to appear more straight to the untrained eye. And while a few of us may escape the cage of the masculine abnormality, we leave our brothers behind. "You're pretty masculine for an Asian guy," we are told. "You don't act like a black guy," they say. Ironically, both of these betray the cage of acceptable masculinity that binds us to the mythical man. Asian men are not masculine enough, black men are too masculine. The narrow range of acceptable masculinity is reserved for white men------gay or straight-because, ultimately, it benefits them. Rather than see the explicit racist statement embedded in this compliment, we secretly blush and giggle at the attention ²¹.

Darieck Scott (1994) gives an analysis of the assumed racial dynamics and the divisive tensions between “gay blacks” and “black gays” and problematizes lines of reasoning that are sometimes used in support of a strict adherence to Joseph Beams statement “black men loving black men is the revolutionary act of our time” (featured in Tongues Untied).  Scott points to the problem of essentialized and politicized identities and Scott declares that these identities are always conflated and complicated and that power dynamics exist in all sorts of spheres in relationships. The discussions of black men hating themselves or being emasculated through the act of being with white men are complicated and complex and Scott advocates for an examination of how these essentialized identities and understandings of them in narrow and unyielding ways leads to further rigidity and restrictiveness (in thought and actions) ²².

Cutrone (2000) responds to Scott and puts forth arguments as well as poetry/descriptive language that contests the rigidity of  mandates to stick to one’s own race, stating “all desire is racialized, but only interracial desire is required to answer for the reification of race” ²,which concisely states the problems with viewing intimate connections solely in a racial dynamic, ignoring the personal experiences and attractions, all of which are within the racial hierarchies and matrixes in the US context. These racial dynamics are not strictly interpersonal and may manifest as internalized racism that “makes gay black men see other gay black men as unsuitable sexual partners and white males as the ultimate sexual partners” ²⁴.

Formations of Desire

Media representations at large and within queer communities demonstrate the complexity of racialization and sexualization of socially constructed categories and their absorption into the ideas, interactions, and institutions the in the U.S. Dr. Herukhuti articulates this complexity:

Our desires are always our own and emerge from the rich network of energies swirling within us. But, at the intersection of race, ethnicity/culture, gender and class, structural inequality (i.e., imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy) forges our desires. The ocean of structural inequality in which we swim hammers away at our emergent desires, penetrates the boundaries of the Self and seeps into some of the most intimate recesses of our being. No matter how impenetrable or immune we may think we are, our tissues have absorbed some portion of this environment ²⁵.

By viewing socially constructed categories as mere individual identities and the formation of desire as an individual choice, we “obscure the social context in which individuals make choices, and discount the ways in which the state regulates populations, disciplines individual bodies, and exercises control over sexuality, gender, and reproduction." ²⁶. The system both rewards us in a variety of ways (social, financial, sexual) for coloring within the lines drawn to structure our desires and provides “consequences for venturing outside of the confines of pre-determined options: marginalization, delegitimization, exile, isolation or death”²⁷.

Conclusion

I hope I was able to articulate the complexity of same-sex interracial relationships through a sampling of the various intersections involved. Having conversations about race and situating oneself in the complex system of interrelated socially constructed categories can allow for greater awareness and integrity within romantic and social relationships. Further awareness can be gained by examining “craving the white gaze” while acknowledging the formation of desire as inseparable from a culture that promotes white European features as the pinnacle of beauty (for men and women). White European/ European American queers need to examine the racialized images they have also been exposed to and examine the power dynamics and abuses involved in those characterizations as well as the historical violence that has accompanied the sexually abusive structures and subordination of people of color.

This is a particularly sensitive topic because it involves identities and relationships that have been sexualized, stigmatized, and violently suppressed by the broader culture. Desires are complicated and do not need to be shamed, but their development occurs in relation to categories and boundaries that have a much deeper history than the lifespan of one person. They have developed over centuries of colonization and span the histories of genocide, slavery, and ongoing wars. Ultimately, these topics complicate our understandings of identities through the avenue of intimacy and relationships, which not only calls for genuine examination but also  acceptance of the fact that all of our identities exist in the realms of racial contexts (among many others), and we act, live, and love within and through these multiple contexts.

 References

1      Andersen, M. L., Collins, P. H. Race, class, and gender: An anthology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub. Co., 2013, 61

2     Andersen & Collins 63

3      Andersen & Collins 63

4      Andersen & Collins 66

5      Andersen & Collins 76

6      Driskill, Qwo-Li et al. Eds. Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature.Tucson: University of Arizona, 2011.

7      Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. 87

8      Darieck Scott, “Jungle Fever? Black Gay Identity Politics, White Dick, and the Utopian Bedroom,” GLQ 1 (1994): 303, 318. P.310

9      Smith, Andrea. "Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing." The Color of Violence. 70

10.  Andersen & Collins 341

11.  Andersen & Collins 256

12.  Andersen & Collins 344

13.  Andersen & Collins 344

14.  Puar 90

15.  Holland, Sharon Patricia. 2012. The erotic life of racism. Durham: Duke University Press. 30

16.  Andersen & Collins 68

17.  Andersen & Collins 68

18.  Andersen & Collins 252

19.  Riggs, Marlon T., Essex Hemphill, Marlon T. Riggs, and Essex Hemphill. 2008. Tongues untied.

20.  Andersen & Collins 254

21.  Andersen & Collins 257

22.  Darieck Scott 318

23.  Christopher Cutrone. "The Child with a Lion: The Utopia of Interracial Intimacy." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no. 2 (2000): 249-285. 254

24.  Darieck Scott 253

25.  Dr. Herukhuti “The Color of Desire: Interethnic Border Crossing (Part 2 of 3)” June 15, 2014. http://sacredsexualities.org/2014/06/15/the-color-of-desire-interethnic-border-crossing-part-2-of-3/ p. 1

26.  Andersen & Collins 435

27.  Dr. Herukuti p. 1