On Northern racism and home

If I said Southern accents didn’t make me nervous, I’d be lying. I’d also be lying if I said there wasn’t anything prejudiced behind that thought. Northern racism is so insidious that it has convinced us that the only real threat to eradicating racism in the United States is what (and who) exists below the Mason-Dixon line. And so, as I neared Washington, DC this afternoon, the Southern accents behind me made me a little anxious as to what I would find.

This isn’t my first time in DC. My first time was two years ago, and I hated it. Part of the reason why I disliked my time in the Capital so much was because upon arriving to my friend’s suite on Fourth of July, she (a Chinese-American woman) and I were greeted by drunk college students (friends of her other roommate) who shouted “Hola!” and “Konnichi wa!” at us. The power dynamics in an elite dormitory in the nation’s capital (and center of political power) was enough to make me uneasy and wish for the next train ride back to New York.

There is much to unpack here about the privilege of (social and economic) mobility and access to such amenities, even as a woman of color. However, there are moments, like tonight, where I am reminded that my perceived class and respectability politics aren’t enough to protect me from racism, or even my own fears.

Upon arriving to the hotel where I would be staying this weekend, I decided to go for a swim. Swimming is a recreational activity I’ve found much solace in. It’s helped me through traumatic and stressful moments. However, once poolside, I noticed the two elderly white women swimming glaring at me. Or maybe I just felt hypervisible. Was I simply making a big deal out of a little thing?

On June 23rd, 2016, two major rulings came out from the United States Supreme Court. One was the ruling on Fisher v. the University of Texas, where the Court upheld Affirmative Action in a 4-to-3 vote by rejecting Fisher’s challenge of race-conscious admissions programs at UT Austin. The other, United States v. Texas, in which Texas sought to challenge President Obama’s executive actions on DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents) was voted 4-to-4. The tie served as a blow for immigration reform. That same day, a couple of things happened:

I was congratulated on my admission to my graduate program. Admission into graduate programs, particularly Masters programs, do not guarantee financial aid. (My undergraduate college offered need-blind admissions, meaning my application would be reviewed without taking into consideration my financial need, a blessing.) The process for my graduate program would not be as generous, I was told. You might need to take out student loans, I was told. I’m not complaining about receiving financial aid. However, as I watch my peers and colleagues drown in debt, how was I not drowning, too? For that matter, how did I even manage to stay afloat throughout and after college?

Later that day, someone made a joke about undocumented statuses. Everyone in the room laughed. I didn’t. But I wish I could say I was brave enough to explain why I didn’t find the joke funny. On a pyramid of violence, the base is made up of jokes and microaggressions. Eventually, this foundation serves to uphold more physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological, sexual violence. If this is the base, could I just be lucky to not have seen anything at the top?

Additionally, if there’s anything I got out of my American Studies seminar (which I got a lot out of), it is that the foundation of this country is laid by law — legal rulings set precedents on what is to come. And often, we have to ask what these rulings mean for the racial formation and hierarchy in the United States, especially as we witness the definition of whiteness change in order to maintain political and economic order and power.

On a phone call with my prospective graduate advisor, we spoke in depth about the work I was interested in (civil rights, immigrant rights, housing, diasporas, etc.) When I mentioned my experience working with immigrant groups, we began talking about the ICE raids of the beginning of 2016.

“Something you’ll find here,” she said, “is that ICE raids are a lot more frequent. Nothing you’ve seen in New York.”

Two months prior to that phone call, ICE raids were conducted in the early morning in Queens and Staten Island, the former of the boroughs known as holding the largest population of immigrants in the metropolitan area. When I told my mother this, she remained glued to the television.

“They’re looking for Central Americans, not Mexicans.” Would they even bother to note the difference?

I have nothing to worry about should an ICE raid occur while I’m at graduate school. Rather, it is the fact that I cannot hide from them that makes them all the more fearful.

In a meeting with a professor at my alma mater, we were supposed to discuss possible exercises for an upcoming intersectionality training for faculty. The exercises we included ranged from topics on the Black Lives Matter movement, to discussions on the Israeli occupation of Palestine, happening anywhere from their offices to their classrooms. How would you handle it?

“A student wanted her parents to attend Commencement one year,” a professor began. “However, because they were undocumented, they couldn’t fly out here. Instead, they took the train going through Syracuse.”

What no one had told them was that ICE raids were conducted in Syracuse, and other places in the North. The student’s parents never made it to Commencement.

In the early 2000s, long before my mother became a naturalized citizen, she made the journey from New York to Oklahoma. My uncle had been involved in a car accident. As a legal permanent resident at the time, it was safe for my mother to make that trip. Or, as safe as it could be at that time. If harassed for papers, she would have them. There was no denying her place in this country.

I stayed up that week, waiting for my mother to call from Oklahoma, for her to say that she made it okay through the South. And she did.

But I never once thought about her safety here in the North. I didn’t have any reason not to.

In the North, my mother worked at a factory under less-than-ideal conditions. She couldn’t protest these conditions because she needed to feed her family. On her commutes home, she would be sexualized by leering men, in part because of her gender and because of her ethnicity and national origin. She couldn’t fight back because she didn’t have the words in English yet.

The realization here is that we depend on the invisibility of a big city to hide us from individual acts of racism, and even xenoracism. However, the seemingly dilution of racism in a metropolitan area doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist here. Actually, it makes us more susceptible to thinking racism could never happen to us, individually. Or worse, we experience racism at such a high frequency, in form of microaggressions or institutionalized policies, that we don’t notice it at all.

…Negroes represent nothing to [the Northerner] personally, except, perhaps, the dangers of carnality. He never sees Negroes. Southerners see them all the time. Northerners never think about them whereas Southerners are never really thinking of anything else. Negroes are, therefore, ignored in the North and are under surveillance in the South, and suffer hideously in both places. Neither the Southerner nor the Northerner is able to look on the Negro simply as a man. It seems to be indispensable to the national self-esteem that the Negro be considered either as a kind of ward (in which case we are told how many Negroes, comparatively, bought Cadillacs last year and how few, comparatively, were lynched), or as a victim (in which case we are promised that he will never vote in our assemblies or go to school with our kids). They are two sides of the same coin and the South will not change — cannot change — until the North changes. The country will not change until it re-examines itself and discovers what it really means by freedom. In the meantime, generations keep being born, bitterness is increased by competence, pride, and folly, and the world shrinks around us. — James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown”

This didn’t mean to turn into an essay examining Northern and Southern racism. I had meant to write about leaving home, about the worries parents of color harbor about the safety of their children. My mother often wonders if my brother and I will make it home every night. We stay up for each other, just to make sure we’re physically okay.

However, on nights when I am far from where I grew up, I wonder, what is home? This question is complicated. As the daughter of two Mexican immigrants, I have often struggled with feeling like I’m in two places at once and also nowhere, too. I’m also racially ambiguous. I’m not indigenous, but I’m not black, but I’m not white. Am I all of these things? Will the U.S. census let me check off all of these boxes? Questions of racial divisions intensify when we take into consideration that race and class is divided differently outside of the U.S. (Don’t get it twisted, though — anti-blackness is a global phenomenon.)