Unlike “progressive” Americans who embrace race, the caste reformer B.R. Ambedkar envisioned a world where race/caste distinctions were annihilated – and specifically by mixing, by intermarriage. The view of racial purity shared by the mainstream American left and right – where Barack Obama’s white ancestry counts for nothing – makes that annihilation more difficult. But not everyone in the Americas – or even in the United States – shares that view.
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is an eccentric book now often considered a classic of Chicana (Mexican-American) literature. It mixes essays and poetry, English and Spanish – perhaps appropriate for someone whose ethnic identity is itself mixed, the mestiza of the subtitle, as indeed are most Mexicans. In striking contrast to the life story Ibram X. Kendi tells, which struck me as generally comfortable and middle-class, Anzaldúa lived in a more clearly oppressed world, of the migrant workers of South Texas; the poetry paints a poverty-stricken picture of rapes, of lice, of cleaning shit from toilets, in the face of a racist Border Patrol. So she does often speak of her people in contrast to “the whites”, falling sometimes into the oppressed/oppressor binaries of standpoint theory on which she was an influence. Yet she also acknowledges and praises mixing in a serious way that moves beyond the binaries.
Anzaldúa says in a poem, “To live in the Borderlands means knowing… that denying the Anglo inside you is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black…” (194; page references are to the fifth edition) Notice how much this claim contrasts to the anglophone American world. It would be very surprising to hear an African-American (in the narrow and confusing sense) say that denying the white inside you is as bad as denying the black! There’s an understandable reason for that, of course: while most African-Americans are of mixed European and African origin, that’s often the case for a terrible reason. Not in Obama’s case, though – and yet even in his case, for most people, denying the white inside him seems like it’s just the usual state of affairs. And that terrible reason is also not the history of the rest of us, the many, many other Americans of mixed race who are not descendants of slavery – and that includes the majority of Latinos. (Most Mexicans are of mixed white and indigenous heritage – mestizo – but American society had been so structured around racial purity that for a long time it somehow managed to slot Spanish-speakers in as a wholly separate “race” of their own.) We have reason to embrace both sides of our heritage, not just the more oppressed one.
And so for Anzaldúa: not for her the hypodescent of the one-drop rule. Like me, she is mixed and proud of it. I wouldn’t want to deny my Indian heritage, but neither would I want to deny my Scottish and English (“white”, if you insist) heritage. I am proudly half, in the face of ignorant white do-gooders who think they’re helping by proclaiming that’s a racist thing to be.
Indeed, just like Ambedkar, Anzaldúa envisions a better world being made through mixing. Following the earlier Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos, who thought that a new “cosmic” consciousness was emerging from Mexico’s racial mixing, she says:
En unas pocas centurias, the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By creating a new mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave—la mestiza creates a new consciousness. (85)
Not for Anzaldúa the neo-segregationist ideology of “cultural appropriation“, according to which “white” culture is “white” culture and indigenous culture is indigenous culture, and any crossing must be viewed with suspicion. Rather, for her, learning from other cultures is exactly what white people should be doing – taking them up in shared learning and exchange, even coming to be involved in their “religious” traditions, rather than putting their cultural products up as sterile museum pieces:
Instead of surreptitiously ripping off the vital energy of people of color and putting it to commercial use, whites could allow themselves to share and exchange and learn from us in a respectful way. By taking up curanderismo, Santeria, shamanism, Taoism, Zen, and otherwise delving into the spiritual life and ceremonies of multi-colored people, Anglos would perhaps lose the white sterility they have in their kitchens, bathrooms, hospitals, mortuaries and missile bases. (76)
I read this and I think: preach, hermana. There are better and worse ways to learn from other cultures; perhaps Anzaldúa and I might have different ideas about what’s respectful. But I deeply appreciate the encouragement she provides for doing so. My whole life’s work has been an attempt to get non-Indian Westerners – white, black and whatever else – to learn from Buddhism and other Asian traditions, to “delve into the spiritual life” of people usually darker-coloured than me. Anyone who says that that’s a bad thing is no ally of mine.
(Author’s note: It’s been a while since I’ve posted on Indian philosophy – that just hasn’t been where my blogging muse has taken me in the past couple months – so while this post is only tangentially about Indian thought, it does touch on Ambedkar and on the “appropriation” of Indian thought, so I thought I might as well put it up here.)