These conversations typically start out with semi-routine discussions and at some point always involve my mother ridiculing my racial identity. For a mixed-race person these conversations are always a possibility, certainly because our race is more apt to not fit into those static and constructed categories that the world is so eager to place our family members into. When someone negates your identity it feels like they are trying to erase your history. But why would my mom want to do this?! Although my mother is also mixed-race she does not always think of herself in this way. This has always confused me, since my mother had grown up in a bona fide non-English-speaking, downtown-D.C.-living, non-white family.

But, this year, I finally asked my mom why she was reluctant to accept my identity as a mixed-race person. Evidently, it was just envy that drove her to poke fun at my identity. When she was growing up, she and her darker skinned half-sisters (who had both an Indonesian mother and father), could not find a place at the table as people of color. Mom even applied to a few historically Black colleges (to which she was not accepted). At that time there were no “people of color,” only “colored people.” But regardless of labeled identity, my mother was still not white. This is contrasted with my experience of being accepted into the Mellon Fellowship which not only recognizes my identity, but encourages me to explore and strengthen it strategically to work in solidarity with other people of color (note: this may be more Peter Rachleff’s influence than any institutional objective on the part of Mellon!).

George Lipsitz has ably demonstrated the purposes for retaining “Black” within the identity of “Person of Color.” It is clear that in almost all situations, Black people face many more structural injustices based upon their race than any other group in the U.S. However, as a “Person of Color” I feel confident in saying that this inclusive identity is as empowering as it is useful in brotherly/sisterly struggle against structural racism (and universal oppression).