A couple weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending Hapa-palooza’s night of 8 stories, a celebration of mixed-race identity and culture. As a grassroots organization, Hapapalooza brought in many speakers from all walks of life with students, professors, music artists, writers, even a radio host! The talks were very inspiring in their general trend of questioning identity without a clearly identified race.
One of the most interesting parts of the night for me was a young woman’s story about the racism that her grandfather faced when he was alive as a Japanese-Canadian. Her mother was allowed to be exempt from the War Measures Act that interned Japanese people living in Canada due to being a Canadian citizen and half-white. At the end of the talk, this young woman said how she found it hard growing up between various racial identities, feeling the spit on her grandfather’s face as if it were her face, and feeling the racist words he heard in her own ears. As I sat there, I found this difficult to digest. Being able to “pass” as white allowed this girl freedom from not only racism, but it allows her inclusion into two cultural circles: Japanese and Canadian culture. How does being a passable mixed-race person allow one to take racism that has been directed at others and internalize it?
I feel uncomfortable with the rhetorical strategy of taking someone else’s pain and using it to situate one’s own narrative within the context of overcoming. Can we really feel the pain of use it as our own? In family, we can learn from the pain and suffering of our ancestors to inform our own understanding of their identity, but that pain was dealt to them. We can empathize, learn from, and be enraged by tragic incidents, but someone listening to a tragedy hasn’t had a crime committed towards them. Where does that justification begin?
We can’t pick and choose the ethnicities we are born with, but we can choose to understand how we identify with the cultures that they originate from. Picking and choosing, like Fred Wah choosing Chinese, the “struggle of being a Chink,” yet saying that one is “passable” and “on the hyphen” is difficult for me to digest as a mixed-race person myself.
I would love to hear your feedback, please leave any comments you have below!
Hi James,
I am really glad you chose to write about Hapapalooza! With regards to your point about appropriating someone else’s pain into your own narrative, I completely agree. I am not sure to what extent does the pain and experience of others who endure racism or other hardships can transfer onto those who have not directly felt it. And whether that internalization/adoption of someone else’s pain is productive at all.
However, I can see this as the tangible products of “storytelling” and “family roots.” If one grows up being told time and again about the hardships of your grandfather and the racism with which you ancestors endured, then they perhaps inherit a sense of guilt, responsibility and privilege. The guilt, responsibility and privilege of having come out of that situation or benefiting from the pain of others where one’s more positive experience nowadays was made possible only after the pain of others.
Another concept that I have trouble understanding is the collective Post-Traumatic-Stress-DIsorder (PTSD). Lawrence A. Gross, an Aboriginal scholar has coined the term Post-Apocalyptic-Stress-Disorder (PASS) for the PTSD that is felt at the level of an entire culture or population. Here, Gross is referring to the loss of land, resources, relatives, and heritage which has led to the current increase in substance abuse, violence, suicides, abandonment of religious practices, loss of hope and sense of despair in many First Nations.
Perhaps, similar to this, individuals can feel the effects of racism or pain inflicted on their family in the past as very tangible and therefore, integral to their identity-forming process. I do not doubt that this phenomenon is experienced by all to varying degrees but literally “feeling the spit on her grandfather’s face as if it were her face” is, I feel, a melodramatic hyperbole.