By Monica Torres

When I sign my name, it’s Monica, not Mónica. When I order pupusas at my favorite restaurant, the waiter will give my accent an approving nod, as if to say, you’re one of us. But it will only take a harder question for me to reveal the lie. I speak Spanish at a remedial 7th grade level. I can only write this essay in English.

To this day, my father has followed my teachers’ suggestions and speaks exclusively to me in English, even though he cannot fully express himself in it. It was my perfect SAT verbal score that earned me the interest of top schools, and it was my minority status that sweetened my deal with many of them. My mother is frustrated by the rejection of my first language, and when she questions me in Spanish, I answer her in English, unwilling to communicate in the staccato rhythms of a song learned half-heartedly. Language is a battleground, and I prefer to fight in the tongue with which I am best armed. That lesson was passed down from my parents. My parents fought to their divorce in Spanish, the language of lovers, and when I was told everything was going to be fine, it was told to me in English, because in English, it doesn’t have to be true.

I’m an English major. It is a language of conquest.

What does it say that I’m mastering the same language that was used to make my mother feel inferior? Growing up, I had a white friend who used to laugh whenever my mother spoke English, amused by the way she rolled her r’s. My sister and I tease Mami about her accent too, but it’s different when we do it, or is it? The echoes of colonization linger in my voice. The weapons of the death squads that pushed my mother out of El Salvador were U.S.-funded. When Nixon promised, “We’re going to smash him!” it was said in his native tongue, and when the Chilean president he smashed used his last words to promise, “Long live Chile!” it was said in his. And when my family told me the story of my grandfather’s arrest by the dictatorship that followed, my grandfather stayed silent, and meeting his eyes, I cried, understanding that there were no words big enough for loss.

English is a language of conquest. I benefit from its richness, but I’m not exempt from its limitations. I am ‘that girl’ in your English classes, the one who is tired of talking about dead white dudes. But I’m still complicit with the system, reading nineteenth-century British literature to graduate.

Diversity in my high school and college English literature courses is too often reduced to a month, week, or day where the author of the book is seen as the narrator of the novel. The multiplicity of U.S. minority voices is palatably packaged into a singular representation for our consumption. I read Junot Díaz and now I understand not only the Dominican-American experience, but what it means to be Latina/o in America. Jhumpa Lahiri inspired me to study abroad in India. Sherman Alexie calls himself an Indian, so now it’s ok for me to call all Indians that, too. We will read Toni Morrison’s Beloved to understand the horrors of slavery, but we won’t watch her takedowns on white supremacy.

Even the English courses that analyze race and diasporas in meaningful ways are still limited by the time constraints of the semester. Reading Shakespeare is required, but reading Paolo Javier and Mónica de la Torre is extra credit. My Experimental Minority Writing class is cross-listed at the most difficult level, as a 400-level course in the Africana Studies, Latina/o Studies, and American Studies departments, but in my English department, it is listed as a 300-level. I am reminded of Orwellian democracy: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

In order to graduate from my college, you must take one course that “actively promotes a self-conscious and critical engagement with diversity.” It’s called the Exploring Diversity Initiative. Columbus called it exploration, too. Michel Rolph-Trouillot called it a sweeter word for conquest. In theory, the goals of exploring diversity–empathetic understanding, critical theorization, comparative studies of cultures and societies, and examining power and privilege– should produce my favorite kind of course, but the conversation shifts depending on who’s in the room. Conflicts arise when students try to map the trajectory of race from Point A to Point B without studying any of the legend. Without realizing that their landmarks may not match mine.

When my English professor asked my class to relate the recent campus hate crimes to the topic of captivity in America, I braced myself. I held myself back until the pressure under my ribs reached my lips, and I was buoyed by its depth.

I disagreed with the student who said that the solution to our campus hate crimes is to mentally rehabilitate the ones who do it. I disagreed with the student who said that she was a freshman who was not there for last year’s hate crime, and could therefore have no opinion on it. I disagreed with my professor who could not get his students to care about slave narratives and had to resort to provoking students with reductive questions. Would you have freed your slaves if you were a slaveowner? What is diversity and why has it failed at our school?

After I spoke, no one else did, not because they agreed with my statements, but because, in order to speak up, they would have to look me in the eye. I faked my bravery, jutting my chin and daring someone to contradict me. I am glad no one else could hear the blood pounding in my ear as my heart worried, Fight or flight? Fight or flight?

The professor took no one’s side, distancing our arguments as she said/he said, while reminding us that the problem of America is our miscommunication with one another. After class was dismissed, the boy who sat next to me turned to the boy who refused to look at me, and said, “You just can’t reason with those kinds of people.” Those kinds of people being me. The Angry Minority label is a label that once stuck, will never peel away. As a freshman, I avoided it, speaking carefully, never calling anyone out, and framing racism as something that only happens between pages, in faraway cities, but never to us. It took a campus bias incident, a campus hate crime, and all of my Ethnic Studies courses to articulate my rage into a language that could not be dismissed so easily. Speaking and writing English are considered necessary requirements for playing the political game of the American education system. Crying and complaining get you disqualified, but if you appropriate their words of statistics, of fancy book learning, of speaking when it’s your turn, you can play the game of English thrones, and possibly win it. Checkmate by the Angry Minority. E1 to FU.

But there’s no prize for winning. The game is played with or without your consent. You are never quite sure who is this year’s gamemaster: is it our schools? is it the media? is it the government? is it you? The rules shift for each player, but one rule remains the same for the minority: you may wear the jersey, but you’re not on our team. I am reminded of this division when my favorite English teacher compliments me for speaking English so well. I am reminded of this in AP Spanish Language, where I’m the one whose accent needs to be Standardized. I am reminded of this when my career counselor tells me I need to italicize the foreign, to separate Spanish from English for the sake of my white interviewers. I am reminded of this when my mother’s misspelled pleas to a lawyer are never answered, but my politely worded complaint earns me a reply.

I have been the only person of color in my creative writing courses. I have been the only person writing about persons of color in my creative writing courses. I was never just a writer, but I never wanted to be just anything. The only grammar lesson I enjoyed promised me that in good writing, you never qualify someone as just-. Some minority writers don’t want to be hyphenated, and that is their right, but I welcome its conjunction. I don’t want you to forget that when I address ‘you’ in my stories, it is not always to you. The first attempts in a creative writing course are often thinly veiled versions of ourselves, but when I got the peer critique, Your white character needs to be more sympathetic, I was still stung by its implication. Why does any character need to be sympathetic at all? I wrote myself into the white stepmother as much as I did the cheating Latino father, the disillusioned Latina mother, the Latina child caught in the middle of it all. But out of all the characters in that story, it was the white woman that my reader was most concerned with saving. The U.S. education system trains you to read the universal voice as a white heterosexual male’s voice, and too many deviations from that path get you sent to the Ethnic Fiction section. I reject the notion that writing realistically means accepting a sympathetically sterilized vision of the world. “Historically,” “realistically,” “in my experience,” are the qualifiers that let literary genres off the hook because it’s easier to qualify your ignorance as a product of the system than to admit that you share responsibility.

For the dominant majority, I can pass for white: I speak their kind of English, my skin is their shade of white, I wear their kinds of clothes, and I go to their kind of school. I don’t want to tell you which school, not to let my administration off the hook, but to demonstrate that this exclusion is not a problem limited to one institution. The older I get, the more aware I become of the contours of exclusion, and its shape does not fit the easy metaphor of a barrier. There are not only two sides, and participating in any side doesn’t mean you’re a member of it. Hegemony requires your consent, and when it opened its door to me, I held the door open for those that followed. I told my younger sister she needed to do better in English, not Spanish, if she wanted the good kind of college to notice her. When my close white friend told me those kind of girls were all so ghetto, I did not correct her.

My family and I have all fallen prey to the intoxicating allure of the American Dream, the vague, unsatisfying answer of America as a “better life.” To help me claim this “better life,” my mother gave me a name that could be accepted in both English and Spanish, accented and unaccented. How many ways can you say a name? This was the acting exercise I failed. I thought that if I stretched the syllable hard enough, the word would break even, and it would be enough to pay the toll –Miss Mahnn-i-cuh for my teachers, Monica for my classmates, Mónica for my relatives, and Móni for my family. How is the name meant to sound? It depends on who’s in the room. I carry my father in my last name and my mother in my middle name; the first name is mine to accent, at my privilege. For their daughters, my parents stretched their wallets and then their marriage, and one did not break even. My sister and I are the remainder of this fraction, and I am indebted to my parents, who gave up their dreams so I could major in my own.

In a few months, I will have a fancy degree in English, but my parents are more fluent in language than I am. To master a language, you have to understand differences that no grammar book can teach you. So much comes down to tone. No one wants their speaker to be unclear. After my father and I got into a fight about his money and my future, he sent me a long email explaining himself through Google translator. I’m the daughter who never calls him enough, and argues in heavy English consonants when I want to confuse him. He is the father who boldedwould do anything for you, and said he loved, loves, and is always loving me. His English was not grammatically correct, but it was more emotionally honest than my feelings shielded in sarcasm. I pull it up when I need a reminder of my complicated, contradictory love for a hybridized language that is ours alone.

“I am extremely happy for Google Translator and spell check. I typed very slowly so don’t expect me to email you every time.  I wish I could speak English better because I know your english is good but unfortunately I don’t write spanish well either.

Love you,

Papi”

From Colorlines: “My ambivalence toward Justin is, to a large degree, a matter of aesthetics. But it’s also rooted in a very real anxiety about white artists “borrowing” black music and style then taking a break when it becomes inconvenient. Yes, Timberlake has rightfully earned his place among modern pop music legends, but he also embodies the historical mistrust that exists between white performers and black listeners that dates at least as far back as Elvis Presley’s 1950s foray into what was then called “race music.“”

While Colorlines author Jamila King does a decent-enough job at exposing the differential and preferential treatment of white artists in pop culture and hollywood,  she fails in driving her main point home. The main issue underlying Justin Timberlake and his musical aesthetic is not simply an historical and recurring phenomenon of “racial mistrust”, but rather, an embedded assumption that “traditional” and “authentic” black aesthetics can only be elevated through their assimilation with dominant, white cultural aesthetics. This assumption highlights the pervasiveness of a white-supremacist and imperialist notion of “elevation”, which incorporates all artistic forms into a model which trend towards “refinement”, “civility” and “high art”—all creations of a global white supremacist capitalist complex. As much as Justin Timberlake can “[choose] and [perform] suave and often provocative black masculinities embodied by the likes of James Brown, Michael Jackson, and Prince” (though why Michael Jackson and Prince, and not say, Jay-Z or Ray Charles are chosen as archetypes of black masculinity is a dubious judgement call), he can also choose to, and does choose to modify these black cultural and aesthetic traditions into an anodyne form that is concertedly non-threatening to middle-class white, suburban audiences, claiming no authentic allegiance to the black traditions from which his style derives. So as King correctly points out in the case of the Janet Jackson SuperBowl Scandal, “[Justin’s] whiteness acts as both an entryway into a popular culture and a buffer against its criticisms,” while Janet’s career, on the other hand, stagnated—she became a Jezebel. 

We should be able to hold Justin Timberlake accountable for his sublimation of black cultural traditions into tepid, deceptively non-subversive reinforcements of white artistic hegemony, and should be able to do so without hating him as an artist. We possess the capacity to understand how taste and aesthetic desire is crafted—how we become particular kinds of aesthetes and consumers—and become less passive and complacent with our participation in a White Supremacist Cultural Capitalism. It’s as true of Justin Timberlake as it is for Vampire Weekend, Macklemore, Of Montreal, Grimes and Die Antwoord. They take an “exotic” tradition and assimilate it into their conception of “high art” (which is, at the same time, a conception embodied by the majority of consumers), implicitly condemning black artistic works that don’t follow that particular model of success (with all of its implicit assumptions and intents), while capitalizing on their supposed “subversion” of the original form. 

It’s funny how many white people (particularly white, gay men) use the ferocity, tenacity and super-stardom of Beyonce and Michele Obama as symbolic tokens of their progressiveness; championing black women’s achievements in the face of their adversity becomes a way for them to tag along to a supposedly “race-conscious” and “radical” politic without having to interrogate their fetishization of the most normative (i.e politically neutral) depictions of black femininity available in contemporary socio-political discourse. The same way basic white-washed 2nd wave feminists champion Lena Dunham for her “progressiveness” while ignoring the intricacy of her complicity in perpetuating antiquated tropes about femininity and “womanhood” (which becomes, immediately and expectantly, a metonymy for white, cisgender femininity), the majority of white, cis gay men privilege Beyonce and Michelle Obama’s ascendance in mainstream American culture by treating their success as being an a-racial, a-gendered, and as such, a-political phenomenon, which is, obviously, a myth. In reality, Beyonce’s superstardom elevates the archetype of the black woman as a musically gifted, hyper-sexual, infallible deity who can have no flaws (and is thus not human—not “really” a black woman); Michelle Obama through her political positioning becomes the archetype for the black woman embodying the politics of respectability. Both tropes are easy to latch onto because they are historically embedded: a fetishized jezebel vis a vis a mythicized mammy—-a kind of Magical Negress. For white men of all stripes, and white people in general—their fetishization of Michelle Obama and Beyonce illustrates painfully clearly just how willing a white liberal media is to use these mythic portrayals of black women to fuel their own color-blind post-racial fantasies, completely ignorant to how their privileging of these women necessarily depresses the value of black women who can not embody these tropes of white fantasy. The situation for black women in media, politics and pop-culture becomes all too quickly a matter of access and control as opposed to celebration and structural reform for black women. Beyonce’s most recent single, “Bow Down,” though criticized (rather tepidly) for its misogynistic lyrics, does nothing more than satisfy white society’s desire for a completely fictitious, masochistic fantasy of a (light-skinned, rich) black woman as the untouchable leader of the new post-racial empire, one which rests, necessarily, on the admonishment of other women who aren’t up to par (and are, almost definitely, other black women); Michelle Obama gets to deliver the Academy Award for Argo. Not having it. 

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From Thought Catalog

I’d never even heard the name James Baldwin until my first semester at Union Theological Seminary. As a white, middle-class American, I was the product of a predominantly white, middle-class education that didn’t assign The Fire Next Time and Giovanni’s Room, two of Baldwin’s masterpieces, alongside 1984 and The Scarlet Letter. It wasn’t until I moved to New York and took a class on Baldwin’s life and writings that I was transformed by the black, same-gender-loving, 20th-century author’s honesty and candor.

Baldwin grew up on New York’s Fifth Avenue — not the Fifth Avenue of Saks and the Social Register but the Fifth Avenue of 1930s Harlem, where black Americans like Ellison’s invisible man were kept at a safe, 60-block distance from fearful, prejudiced whites. The child preacher turned writer experienced racism and homophobia firsthand and possessed an unflinching eye for the injustices of American life. Unlike many authors I have read before, Baldwin was filled with love, courage and an unrelenting imagination. It was precisely because of his abiding care for his country that Baldwin retained the right to critique her so harshly. He had faith that the United States could be better, not only for him but for all people.

I couldn’t help but be captivated by his audacity. He quickly became a sage for me and left behind a signet of courage on my conscience. “[Y]ou have to decide who you are,” he said in 1961, “and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.”

As a white gay man committed to advocacy, I was naturally drawn to Baldwin and eager to hear what he had to say about LGBTQ equality in America. What I discovered, though, was not at all what I was expecting. Baldwin, more than anyone else, taught me that although I am gay, I am white, and that being white always involves persistent privilege that must be recognized and accounted for. Baldwin explains that white LGBTQ men and women feel slighted precisely because they know that had they been straight, they would have been heirs to incomparable privilege. In a 1984 interview with Richard Goldstein, then the editor of the Village Voice, Baldwin said, “I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.” He went on to say:

Their reaction seems to me in direct proportion to their sense of feeling cheated of the advantages which accrue to white people in a white society. There’s an element, it has always seemed to me, of bewilderment and complaint. Now that may sound very harsh, but the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept black people than anywhere else in society.

Baldwin was not the only queer author to express this reality. Audre Lorde, a black lesbian feminist writer and a contemporary of Baldwin’s, says the same thing in her 1982 autobiography Zami: “[W]hen I, a Black woman, saw no reflection in any of the faces [in the lesbian clubs of New York] week after week, I knew perfectly well that being an outsider in the Bagatelle had everything to do with being Black.” Calling herself a sister-outsider in the gay community, Lorde reflects on the racist gay culture of 1970s and ’80s New York. “Non-conventional people can be dangerous,” she says, “even in the gay community.”

Mainstream gay culture privileges the white narrative, and it does so at the expense of its own legitimacy. As Baldwin understands and so eloquently states, the fight against homophobia and racism are undoubtedly entwined through their shared struggle for human dignity. However, conflating the two does discernible harm, both to those persons of color who are repeatedly forgotten in progressive social movements, and to white LGBTQ persons who tarnish their own humanity by forgetting the humanity of others.

As we celebrate Black History Month this February, and as we await the Supreme Court’s decision on marriage equality, we must remember that the struggle to restore dignity to people is not finished. The work to ensure that all people have access to fair and equitable employment, health care and proper medical attention and aren’t targets for violence by the police or their fellow community members must continue even after gays and lesbians are granted the right to marry the persons they love. This is not a new civil rights movement as some have said but a different one.

Baldwin’s legacy teaches me, as a white person and an LGBTQ activist, that gay will never be the new black, and that the fight for racial equality is far from over. 

—Todd Clayton, Thought Catalog