yeloson: (LookFool)
"This is not the typical, tragic Mulatto story..."

I just got back from seeing Lisa Marie Rollins' Ungrateful Daughter - a one woman play about transracial adoption, and it was super awesome and worth seeing if you get the chance.

She does a series of vignettes of different scenes of her life- some real, some metaphorical (like having an argument with Aunt Jemima about representation or having her life reduced to an oversimplified platitude on the Oprah show). There's a good mix of comedy and tragedy, and a lot of scenes of human vulnerability and mistakes. She plays all of the characters with great effect, and though caricatured, you see the stuff that makes them human under the extreme.

There is one scene, where she's 7 and her white mother is trying to do her hair for her first solo in choir... and her mom's frustrations with her hair and inability to deal with her blackness roll together in a heartbreaking, horrifying way that just... UGGHGGHGHGH - exemplifies white people's issues overall.

So, obviously, this is some deep shit Rollins is digging into here, and not all of this is easy to watch. There is no sexual violence, and there's no use of white people's favorite racial slur, either. So yay, but still, emotionally wretching scenes at times.
yeloson: (southside)
We wander between cultures like islands and faraway lands, distanced by time, history, meet at common experiences, trade tales of differences, even within our own, we fight off the piracy of those who would shackle us to the identities they demand we wear, we raid our elders' stories for old roots to make stews of our history, to make our bones strong, cobble together pieces of ourselves to repair the ships to carry us across, we dig tunnels and lay down tracks to build trains to underworld railroads and beyond.

Our hopes and dreams and fears and past and future: built of blood - our own, and others, and so we respect it. Those who throw away pieces of themselves were never meant to sail these waters. So we look to each other, ramshackle and whole, make-do, doing creating, traveling deeper, darker, brighter, hotter in a cold night, guided by lights from our hearts that only the stars dare reflect.

Diasporado, distant, just trying to get to a home in our hearts.
yeloson: (How white of you)
So. One thing that's always interesting to deal with is white identified POC. I'm not going to buy into BS about sell-outs and race traitors and all that trash which also serves the purposes of the kyriarchy for dividing and cutting us.

What I will say is that I'm still pulling out the shards of broken glass that is self hate from internalized racism - self esteem, acceptable roles as an asian male, being biracial, etc., so someone who's even more cut up? Who believes that taking honorary white status by protecting/serving the privileged to get 2nd tier in the system? The one who goes for being an overseer? Or at least glad to not be on the bottom tier?

That person I have no time for. If you have a well of self hate and I look like you? I already know what I become in your eyes - an externalized target for your self hate. And I totally don't need that while I'm nursing my own wounds. The last thing that will help me is having someone who looks like me trying to cut a deal to receive being 2/3rds a human in exchange for supporting white supremacy.

See, 3/3rds of me belong to me. You never owned any of it and you have no right to it. It's a trade I never agreed to. And only because you think you're worth 0/3rds without the grace of white folks, you think you're trading up.

There's many steps to freedom, but there is no half stepping.

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yeloson

November 2012

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