Jun 10, 2020
Whiteness Can’t Save Us
Whiteness cannot give us what we need, and this is not a disappointment. This is a testimony.
Whiteness cannot give us what we need, and this is not a disappointment. This is a testimony.
Maybe my dreams were trying to tell me something. Maybe I had what I liked to call, jokingly, “the ElGenaidi Gift.”
To this day, I can’t tell you the names of my extended family in Taiwan—but I can tell you their astrological signs.
Just as America’s horrors led Baldwin to flee decades before, I waded through my own fear as a gay, black man coming of age in an America burning once again.
Around the time I was in seventh grade, I started performing makeshift eye surgery on my grandmother.
“Hoba! Hoba!” my daughter screeches, using the short word for ‘hobotnica’—octopus in Croatian. My friend says, “She’s Croatian alright.”
I wish I’d known Molly years ago. I wish I had known her when I was twelve years old, wondering who in my life would still love me if they knew my secret.
I’m longing for the day when folk like me and Trayvon and Korryn and Lennon and Aiyana and Botham don’t need to be lucky to stay alive.
As biracial people, my husband and I should know how to raise a mixed-race child. But I find myself wondering just how much I’ve figured out.
The first generation of refugees have the power of selective memory. Children like me learned early to tiptoe around our families and their traumas.
It feels jarring to deal with “model minority” stereotypes in non-Asian American spaces while facing negative stereotypes within some Asian ones.
To lose whiteness is to compress the white half, to describe it awkwardly, to never know how to address it.
If my grandfather could remain optimistic into his eighties, then how could I let myself become jaded in my twenties?
As a child of many cultures, I wasn’t sure I could lay claim to one. But I learned that identity can grow and stretch, widen and encompass more than a single country or language.
Our mothers wanted to protect us. So they hid us, beat us for having opinions, for being too inquisitive in a world that doesn’t permit girls to be curious about things.
We’d denounce the marches and torches and chants. When that moment passed, we’d continue to live with the ghosts of our country’s peculiar legacy.
Something unexpected cracks me open every year: Tonight, it was my daughter, recognizing the name I’d given her because I couldn’t give her the woman herself.
All the wrong people are crying, and all the people who ought to feel something do not.
“I never knew my not looking like or having the accent of my father’s people would save my life.”
Patten didn’t undress for fifty days while onboard Neptune’s Car because “the threat of rape had never been far from her mind.”
