After contemplating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, discussing disencapsulation, reading Obasan and my fellow classmates’ blog posts about hyphenated identities, and considering the process of othering through the lens of District 9, I feel I’ve begun to sift through my ideas about race and ethnic identity enough to craft a single statement based on my emerging ideas: Race, cultural heritage and ethnic identities are complicated things.
The older I get, the younger I feel. When I was young I assumed, as many of us do, that growing up would give me all the answers. In my early teenage years I was passionate and vocal about a lot of social issues. Race featured among them, but so did sexism, homophobia, ableism, and several others. The world was black and white. Injustice was everywhere and it was easy to point my fingers at it and say: “There! That is the wrong that needs fixing. And this is what needs to be done.”
It doesn’t seem quite that simple anymore. Injustice is ever visible and easy to identify. A solution? Not so much. The complexity of identity isn’t reducible. It’s easy to say “we’re all one race! The human race!” or “We all have the same sexuality, we’re all into people!” or “Forget gender, we’re the same species after all.” But it isn’t that simple. Ignoring the things that make us different doesn’t make them go away. In fact, ignoring the things that make us different is a way of dehumanizing ourselves that is even more despicable than focusing on our differences. Instead of demeaning others by stripping them of their rights, we demean those around us by stripping them of themselves. Things like our ethnic and racial backgrounds, our gender and sexuality, and our physical appearance and capabilities make us who we are.
No one is champion of their own destiny. We are all products of circumstance, shaped by the invisible hand of random occurrence. To disregard things like race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and our physical attributes is to deny the unique voice those things lend us as individuals. Had Obasan’s Naomi been white, her story would not have been as heartbreaking. Had District 9’s Christopher Johnson been a human, the movie would not have been as great a tale of injustice.
The trouble with these aspects of our hyphenated identities isn’t our acknowledgement of them- its the pretension that we can use them to define ourselves and each other. No one is just “Japanese-Canadian.” Naomi was a female-cisgendered (I think?)-introverted-able bodied-second generation-Japanese-Canadian, and even that is a reduction of her personality. These strings of identifiers don’t tell us any more about a person than a photograph would; they are incomplete reflections of the inconceivable complexity that lies within a human soul. To imagine that we can understand and categorize one another by the labels we adopt or apply to ourselves and our acquaintances is dangerously naive.
But more dangerous still is the unfamiliarity of the privileged with life inside the hyphen. As Toni Morrison once said: “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” I must confess, consciously thinking of myself as having an ethnic background feels strange to me. But at the same time, how many of us honestly refer to or think of ourselves as able-bodied? As able-minded? I don’t think of my privileges as being some of my most salient attributes, but in honesty, they are. I am the product of my labels as much as anyone is.
So what do we do with our labels? They can’t define us, can’t explain us, can’t categorize us, but they do provide some background information for why we are the people we are. Should we hyphenate? Should everyone hyphenate? Or are our salient attributes visible enough that we need not share them through identifiers like “Japanese-Canadian?” Is there a simple answer to any of these questions?
No.