Who Are You? Spring 2018

Dear Serena Williams, In reality, you should be recognized as one of the most dominant athletes of all time. I purposely make this statement without saying most dominant "female" athlete because you have proven yourself to be one of the greats across gender lines. The public does not recognize your achievements, which is apparent by the comparisons to your mediocre opponent, not rival, in Maria Sharapova. Although you've continuously proven your greatness, it is still downplayed so it can be seen in comparison to your white "counterparts." Your black body has been mocked in 2012 by your competitors. Your black body has been challenged the treatment you knew it needed by doctors who see it one way. Your black body has been criticized in recent days because you still perform at a high level despite being an anomaly to the conventional athletic body norms associated with whiteness. In your attempts to break down barriers surrounding black women, the sport and m

We talk around it, even when we're talking explicitly about it: whiteness. What is it? How does it work? How is whiteness embodied in "non-white" people. How did whiteness come to be intertwined with European people? I think a lot about that evasiveness of whiteness in conversation, even in conversations specifically focused on interrogating it. Sadhana mentioned earlier in the course the real implications of the racial paradox, in reminding us that while race is a socio-political construct, it still has impacts on our lives. We can deconstruct all the fallacies that racism superimposes over our lives as invalid, creepily motivated, and not "technically" real, but yet we still live in a world defined by it? The question of how to address/cope with/understand a concept that in itself is fictitious, man-made in every sense, but still real in the way that it moves and reproduces and consumes people. I feel that the prerequisite to diving into such a black-hole/ca

Sing, Unburied, Sing was a harrowing emotional read that forced me to imagine existence beyond the physicalities of life. Through the supernatural and surreal Ward makes the dangers of black life in the United States and historical traumas of Black America visible and omnipresent. The way Ward uses the imaginary to encompass the holistic narrative and context of Jojo’s family’s life is extraordinary. Given that the title of the course is “Racial Identity in the American Imagination ”, and especially after looking more at Claudia Rankine’s work with “The Racial Imaginary”, I have been thinking a lot about the power of creation of ideas. I have a lot of questions, and one thing I really want to learn more about is how contemporary people of color are imagining the possibilities and futures of their identities. I also think that much more historical imagining must be done, and I want to learn about what and how both black and white folks, especially young people, are actively

The great unanswered question for me from the class is the one that was raised in our conversation about Citizen and White Rage. Throughout our discussions (even the discussions themselves) have been deeply concerned with the Foucauldian notion that the power of whiteness is operating everywhere in American life. Insidious and pervasive, white supremacy has wheedled its ways into our thoughts and speech, into our self-conceptions and our plans. It is like a tumor with long tendrils or a virus that has sickened us cell by cell. As Rankine herself said (I paraphrase) "it's killing you guys too (--->and so, all of us then) you dumb motherfuckers."  Citizen is concerned with the ways in which whiteness operates everywhere. The horror of Citizen is it's notion that whiteness is a silent, horribly engrained sickness. Often, its host are unaware of its symptoms. It is nonetheless strangling the hosts themselves and black life indiscriminately and inexorably. Many of the d

Dear Class, On this journey of reading narratives and challenging notions of identity, one essential question still lingers in my mind. I don't exactly know how to simply ask this question, it finds itself to be multifaceted in the same sense of all other topics of discussion so far. It is related to the question I asked on the first day of class: How can one escape the perceptions of someone else's reality? Thinking back to how we discussed how people are misidentified, how people pass, and this all relates to the treatment of a given person; who has the final say on identifying people? Indeed a complex question, I want to open this back up for discussion to see if we can get to the root of this issue. It was mentioned that some identities seem to be shaped from whiteness or striving towards whiteness as it currently stands as the "societal standard." Are all identities, from the standpoint of racial imagination, shaped from the notion of how they differ and intera

Come the end of this class, I find myself still thinking about how place, space, and migration funnel into identity formation. In regards to matters of migration, mixed-race identities, and citizenship, for example, I still have a lot to sift through in terms of what it means to be in flux, to be at rest, to be in departure, to encroach upon an arrival, and to be in a comfortable proximity to different types of personal and material security. I am also still curious about racial identity formation as/within a framework of collaboration. Many of our classes engaged with one specific identity at a time. Although minority identities are necessarily woven together by a common struggle for freedom and understanding in various capacities, I am wondering how these different identities actively work to inform each other cross-culturally. We spoke about passing and some of the negotiations and consequences mixed-race identities carry and eject, but that relationship often times seemed told