Identity, Voice, and Audience

This post is dedicated to all my students of color.

 At the start of the last academic year, a colleague recommended that, as the proverbial new kid at school, I take the opportunity to introduce myself at our morning assembly. We’re encouraged to “bring our souls to Morning Meeting,” so I told them the truth: that I was surprised to find myself there, working at a high school in southern California, given that I had had such a challenging high school experience myself in a town just up the road. I shared a few details about a childhood rooted in migration and cultural collision, an adolescence colored by racial otherness and isolation, gesturing faintly at family dynamics and social dynamics along the way that all yielded a budding angry first-generation female (soon-to-be outright feminist) sensibility. I thought it would appeal to young girls in the auditorium, and particularly young girls of color with whom I always imagine myself in community. And I thought that after the talk, some of those young girls of color might see themselves in what I’d shared and seek me out, as they have often done in the past. 

Much to my surprise, however, it was four young white girls who approached me in the weeks after the talk. As it turns out, they had also just been given an assignment to write about someone who had been “silenced” at some point in their lives and, although I didn’t realize it, I suppose I must have broached precisely that theme (in retrospect, it seems obvious that I would). Most kids wrote about family members and loved ones, but this small handful chose me. It was humbling, in the way that anyone who approaches you after you’ve shared your truth can humble you. With that simple act, they were telling me in their own way “I see you and now maybe I can see myself better, too.” But it was also a reminder that your audience may not be exactly who you have in mind since you never really know what will resonate with people. They, in fact, may not know themselves until it happens. That is, after all, the magic of storytelling. While I was glad that these young women could see versions of a recognizable self in my story, I’d be lying if I didn’t also admit that I was a bit perplexed: where were the girls of color and why didn’t they see themselves in me? 

As I’ve spent the last few months thinking and writing about the identity politics of various storytellers – from authors and actors to screenwriters and playwrights – I’ve occasionally touched on the question of audience. Given my interests, I’ve been most curious about the relationship between identity and authenticity, namely how who we are allows us to speak to what we know, yielding authentic stories that ring true for those who share our identity/ies. I’ve also been attentive to what happens when storytellers get that calculus wrong. But to understand what took place after my morning reading requires that I ask different sorts of questions. As I reflect on what it means to have an audience, any audience, I now wonder how my identity, my very self, translates to “the public,” broadly conceived. When I use my voice, on whose behalf do I speak and for whose benefit? How do my identities shape my voice and thus the ways in which people connect with what I’m saying – or fail to? Above all, what role have I played in modifying my own voice, and with what consequence?

Since joining the world of secondary education, I’ve learned that fellow educators often discuss the dynamics of self and other, identity and representation, through the language of “windows and mirrors.” It’s based on a concept proposed by Professor Emerita of Education at Ohio State University Rudine Sims Bishop, a specialist in African American children’s literature. In a 1990 article entitled “Multicultural Literacy: Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Doors,” Sims Bishop proposes that stories, and books in particular, have many different functions, particularly among children who are gradually coming into their various social identities. When books are windows, they offer “views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange.” And these windows can become sliding glass doors, she contends, when readers “walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world is created or recreated by the author.” But when the “lighting conditions are just right,” these windows can also serve as mirrors offering a reflection of our lives, our experiences, our selves. In this manner, reading and, by extension I would say, stories writ large “become a means of self-affirmation.” 

When she first wrote this article, Sims Bishop sought to highlight how very few Latinx, Native American, Asian and Asian-American children in this country would ever have the opportunity to find their mirrors given the sad state of children’s publishing (which, based on a previous blog post, seems like it’s about as diverse as adult publishing). While the number of books by and for African American audiences rose since the mid-20thcentury, it too trailed off come the 1980s. Judging by current statistics, little has changed. In addition to considering how few children of color are able to see themselves reflected in books, she also takes the occasion to remind us that white children, who find mirrors aplenty in books, TV shows, movies and the like, are similarly robbed by the lack of stories by and about people of color. For white children, books are one of the few places in our increasingly segregated world where they might learn what it’s like to be a minority in this country. Most importantly, as Sims Bishop avers, “If they see only reflections of themselves, they will grow up with an exaggerated sense of their own importance and value in the world – a dangerous ethnocentrism.” 

A year ago, I had only just begun to grapple with the phenomenon of diverse representation in fiction, primarily from the perspective of a reader and through the lens of what Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called in her Ted Talk “the danger of the single story.” At the time, I wondered if it was a “banal kind of narcissism” to be made whole just by seeing a self that somewhat resembles you in this or that novel. Thanks to Sims Bishop’s framework, I judge myself less harshly now. After so many years of peering through windows, I see that, as a reader, I simply yearned for a mirror or two. As Sims Bishop suggests, the lack of stories by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) not only robs children of color of their own mirrors, as it did me, but it robs people in the majority of windows onto our lives. In other words, the lack of stories by BIPOC prevents them from seeing their humanity reflected in us. In this sense, then, the young girls who approached me in the weeks after my morning reading were the very realization of the full potential of “diverse storytelling.” 

Sims Bishop’s framework helps me to better understand what I have long experienced myself as a reader, and it gives me a vocabulary to understand the beauty of how, why, and with what consequence those particular students might have connected with me and my story. Still, it doesn’t help me solve why girls of color didn’t approach me, especially considering that they were my intended audience and at least I thought I had crafted my story in such a way so as to invite them in. Of course, there are many reasons why my target audience may not have approached me. As I’ve written elsewhere, students from whiter, wealthier backgrounds have greater ease approaching authority figures and can feel more empowered to ask for things than their less well-off peers of color. Also, as I’ve also explored before, people who look like me – that is, South Asians or, if you prefer, Asian Americans – have not always been allies to other people of color (POCs) in the US, and Black Americans, in particular. And, it’s true, that within a few months, I eventually formed very close relationships with many of these students of color. But the point is that it took time and work to earn that trust. It didn’t happen immediately, and I’m beginning to suspect why.

I’ve grown increasingly aware that my own sense of racial and cultural ambiguity as a nondescript brown woman with little affinity for “my people” has more often resulted in a proximity to whiteness than a proximity to Blackness in a country organized around a rigid Black/white binary. As many folks have explored, this is the quintessential plight of Asian Americans in this country, “model minorities” who experience a conditional kind of acceptance so long as they don’t raise their voice too loudly against the workings of white supremacy and systemic injustice. In spite of what English professor David Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han have recently called our collective “racial melancholia,” it is undeniable that we Asian Americans have the option of benefitting from a particular kind of access to whiteness and all privileges it thereby entails.  For my own part, this proximity to whiteness has been reinforced by a lifetime of attending and working in predominantly white institutions (PWIs), even despite the fact that my values have moved me progressively away from a white feminist politic and towards a Black feminist politic, as they have been historically constituted in this country (See Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class for more on this history). Then again, it was perhaps a lifetime of working in and through PWIs that pushed my politics to the left. 

All of this has affected how my identity and my voice “translates” to various audiences, and, to be fair, it’s also shaped how I have chosen to translate myself in various settings. I spent years trying to assimilate into the culture of academia, only to realize that such a thing was never going to be possible for a person like me. With a few notable exceptions, I found that world wholly inimical to my values, my beliefs, and the person I wished to be. Nevertheless, I made it into a doctoral program at an elite institution with a significant history of racist and sexist exclusion, no doubt in part because I behaved and spoke in the acceptable accents of whiteness, winning me the affection and support of faculty mentors along the way. Similarly, as I transitioned out of academia and into the world of DEI administration within PWIs, I found success precisely because I learned how to blend in seamlessly, and I often refrained from rocking the boat. Though it took years for me to see it, I now understand that, in those early years, the greatest hope I was capable of imagining for my students was assimilation into these schools and their worlds. It was the only way I could understand success, for them and for me. In the process, I often centered the very institutional norms of PWIs that over the years, I have come to reject. But – and this is key – that rejection has remained private, unspoken, unvoiced and so unheard.

This ability to maneuver the whiteness of PWIs has served me well. In recent years, I have been able to push forward all sorts of radical DEI initiatives within PWIs – even elite, traditional, hierarchical institutions – because I have learned to successfully speak the language of whiteness. For DEI administrators, that means adopting the language of “taking it slow” and “not doing too much.”  It means speaking in feel-good terms, what scholar Sara Ahmed has deemed the DEI “happy talk” that white leaders of PWIs respond well to. Often, it is to coddle and convince colleagues that they are still good people, fine people, even though the world is suggesting something else to them entirely. It means holding and nursing feelings of fear and rage, ensuring that they have enough emotional space – an enormous emotional space – to slowly, gradually, begin to consider the slight possibility that they might unintentionally take part in and actively reproduce systems of oppression day in and day out within our “community.” (I place community in quotes because our fellow faculty and students of color know that it is a figment of the white imagination, a construct that does not include us, though we would be the last ones to point that out to them) Above all, it is to never hold anyone accountable for their unjust treatment of our fellow colleagues and students of color.  I’ve became skilled in all these ways and so many more, believing I could turn these ways back on them in order to build something better and more beautiful, if not for me then for my students. 

So when I think about that morning meeting story I told a year ago, I now force myself to remember what I’d sooner forget: how subtly I sought to sow the seeds of my difference into that story. I thought I might be able to camouflage myself just enough so that the majority of my white audience, students and staff and faculty, would still be able to see themselves in me. In other words, I consciously aided and abetted that “dangerous ethnocentrism” about which Sims Bishop warns us and thus should not have been surprised that it was young white girls who sought me out shortly thereafter. And those girls of color who I expected would rush me after the talk? They were too perceptive for all that. Perceptive in the way that only children can be, they knew me better than I knew myself. And it was by getting to know them this last year — really know them — that I have begun to know myself, to see what I’ve been keeping hidden just below the surface, to hear that voice whispering, hoarsely now, after all those years of being ignored. Over a lifetime, I have become quite adept at silencing that voice, smothering it. No more.

May this serve as a declaration. May this be the groundwork for a mission statement to come, a mission statement that shows more imagination, more heart, and more courage than I’ve been able to muster in the past. I owe it to my students – all my students, and especially my young women of color – to imagine bigger, to use my voice better, to speak up – loudly – for all of us.