{"id":38957,"date":"2014-12-17T21:56:33","date_gmt":"2014-12-17T21:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=38957"},"modified":"2014-12-17T21:56:33","modified_gmt":"2014-12-17T21:56:33","slug":"emerge-ing-identities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=38957","title":{"rendered":"EMERGE-ing Identities"},"content":{"rendered":"

EMERGE-ing Identities<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Middle Ground: Exploring the spaces between structures of race, class, gender and nature.<\/a>
\n2014-12-17<\/p>\n

Kaily Heitz<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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MERGE Mission Statement: \u201cTo provide a safe space for people of mixed heritage in which we may discuss issues of multi-ethnic identity and to raise awareness within the Claremont University Consortium community about the multi-ethnic experience.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the fall of 2010, I began my first semester of school at Pitzer College in Claremont, California<\/a>. Like my peers, I was shuttled between activity booths, clubs, activist organizations and affinity groups by an administration eager to help their students feel at home on campus. They were particularly keen on easing this transition for the more \u201cdiverse\u201d quotient of the student body. As a result, I was sent a letter from the Black Student Affairs office [(OBSA)] that encouraged me to visit their center and indicated that I would be receiving a black student mentor. A mentor? I thought that this seemed unnecessary and a little impertinent, but I wasn\u2019t about to turn down an offer of friendship so early in the game.<\/p>\n

I met with my OBSA mentor over dinner later that week along with two other girls from my class. When our mentor saw us, she descended upon us like a mother hen coming to roost, telling us to call her mom and herding us protectively to a table near the windows. The other girls and I, who I noticed almost immediately were also mixed with light skin and curly hair, looked at one another sheepishly, each of us silently thinking, \u201cWhat did we just sign up for?\u201d<\/p>\n

My fellow mentees, Katie Robinson and Sophie Howard, and I, became instant friends through our shared sense of unease with the enthusiastic induction to the black community that our \u201cmother hen\u201d had impressed upon us. The next week, we met up to discuss our initial perceptions about campus life and, more importantly, our struggles to identify as mixed race in a space that did not recognize us. We bemoaned the lack of an organized multi-ethnic presence at the Claremont Colleges and felt equally resentful toward OBSA for assuming that we wanted to be a part of an exclusively black community. \u201cWell hey, what if we started our own club?\u201d As fledglings in an entirely new environment, the idea seemed ambitious, but also amazingly simple. All we needed was a space and enough interest, which, from our interactions with other students, seemed to already be present.<\/p>\n

The following semester, after a number of forms had been filled out and ads printed, we had a room booked and a steady following of a grand total of about five students. A few months after our first meeting, we had a name: MERGE, the Multi Ethnic and Racial Group Experience…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EMERGE-ing Identities Middle Ground: Exploring the spaces between structures of race, class, gender and nature. 2014-12-17 Kaily Heitz MERGE Mission Statement: \u201cTo provide a safe space for people of mixed heritage in which we may discuss issues of multi-ethnic identity and to raise awareness within the Claremont University Consortium community about the multi-ethnic experience.\u201d In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2895,8,20],"tags":[18535,18796],"class_list":["post-38957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-campus-life","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-kaily-heitz","tag-middle-ground"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}