Why I Write About Race, Gender and Other Topics I Hope We Talk About More Together
My mother lives a half block from Martin Escobar, one of two Tucson police officers who filed a lawsuit against S.B. 1070, the anti-immigration law that made Arizona synonymous with racial profiling and “show me your papers.”
When a Stanford University classmate made a joke about Joe Arpaio, Phoenix’s anti-immigrant sheriff, I talked to him about the Escobar family.
My family members always linked discussion of politics and identity with a story about some specific Tucsonan.
Both my mother and aunt, who each spent 20 years employed by public schools, talk endlessly about school funding, the ban on ethnic studies curriculum and the rights of undocumented students.
From Tucson I went to Stanford University. The campus is physically isolated, and the institution spoon-feeds students a sense of shared institutional kinship. I started noticing which parts of a person’s identity or personal history could mostly disappear during four years on campus.
I became interested in how people talk about identities — like gender and race — that are generally visible and therefore (even in the surreality of the Stanford island) impossible to escape.
After a rape occurred in the campus co-op house where I spent my junior year, I started writing about what happens in difficult identity-related conversations. I remember discussing the incident with a male student in the house. He kept running the tips of his fingers across his forehead, like he was prospecting for some rage, some opinion.
He said, “I just can’t imagine it. I just feel like… when I can’t see the details of what happened, when I can’t imagine a specific girl, I just feel…some kind of blank.”
All the essays I wrote to try to capture the months after the rape, when we didn’t want to use the co-ed house showers and young men questioned themselves in small groups, were somehow for that housemate who needed something beyond an overview of the problem posed by sexual violence on college campuses.
Initially, I saw my housemate’s need as a kind of moral failure: why couldn’t he have a response that matched the gravity of the situation? I bristled at the idea that it was my responsibility to make a problem, which had long haunted my life and that of my friends, feel real to someone else.
But I think we all have issues that we know we should care about but that don’t breathe down our necks. In these instances, we rely (as my housemate did) on conversations with or about people directly affected by the issue.
A few weeks after that encounter, I asked a male friend of mine how he became committed to campus sexual violence reform. He told me that it’s hard to explain why you believe the deepest felt things, because explaining their origin involves locating them outside oneself as something distinct from one’s personality or innate inclinations.
During that conversation I was aware that part of his discomfort came from discussing sexual violence with a woman. My visible identity made him afraid of how he’d be interpreted in the conversation.
No one wants to say “I’d be more racist if I’d been raised in X place” or “I’d probably sleep with someone who was blackout drunk if I hadn’t talked to my older brother about sex.” Often the beliefs we are reticent to examine relate to topics we most need to keep talking about with other people.
During my undergraduate years, I became aware of how much my deepest beliefs formed a kind of religion whose practice revolved around family and place.
The topics I write about stem from conversations I need to keep having outside the safe echo chamber of my Tucson family.
Hi, I’m Nina. If you like what you read, please check out my other stories for Ripple.co’s Medium publication. A few are linked below.
You can also find my stories at ripple.co.
