{"id":61063,"date":"2021-07-14T22:56:33","date_gmt":"2021-07-14T22:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=61063"},"modified":"2021-07-14T22:56:34","modified_gmt":"2021-07-14T22:56:34","slug":"the-heights-of-anxiety-and-the-color-line-racial-ambiguity-in-a-culture-of-absolutes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=61063","title":{"rendered":"The \u2018Heights\u2019 of Anxiety and the Color Line: Racial Ambiguity in a Culture of Absolutes"},"content":{"rendered":"

The \u2018Heights\u2019 of Anxiety and the Color Line: Racial Ambiguity in a Culture of Absolutes<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Nerds of Color<\/a>
\n2021-07-09<\/p>\n

Lara Stapleton<\/strong><\/a>, Lecturer of English
\nBorough of Manhattan Community College, New York, New York<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

I once heard the great political philosopher and activist Angela Davis<\/a> argue that Americans are so obsessed with race as an identifying feature that when we meet racially ambiguous people, we are anxious until we know on which side of the color line they fall. Upon hearing this, I was relieved by the articulation of something I had suspected was at the heart of my experience. It was like experiencing great art, that rush of adrenaline that comes with recognizing what we\u2019ve known all along presented as fantastically new.<\/p>\n

I say this because I am extremely racially ambiguous person, particularly in the United States<\/a> where we traditionally discuss race as an absolute. I am bi-racial, Filipino and white, and I hear, from day-to-day, wildly different interpretations of who I am. I have been recently called \u201cKaitlin\u201d on the train, and also described as many permutations of light brown people: Latinx, Native American, and Arab. I get Mediterranean, Jewish, and Sicilian and quite often, I am asked if I have some Black ancestry (which coincides also with being Latinx<\/a>)…<\/p>\n

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

At times, my identity feels like an MC Escher lithograph, a thing that cannot be logically coherent as a whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,14646,8,20],"tags":[240,31598,31597],"class_list":["post-61063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latino","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-colorism","tag-lara-stapleton","tag-nerds-of-color"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61063","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=61063"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61065,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61063\/revisions\/61065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}