Tell me about your school experiences? What was primary school experience like? Tell me about your family? In what ways? Tell me about your friends? How are they like you or different from you? Tell me some things or words people friends and family would say to describe you to others?
Did you ever feel like you were treated differently from other students at school?Did you ever feel discriminated against in school?
Tell me about your child rearing practices? How did you deal with discussion of "difference" with your child/children? Have you ever felt that your child was discriminated against, can you tell me about it?
Tell me what the concept of race means to you?
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Monday, September 7, 2009
Starting up again
I woke up this morning all worried about virtually everything. School, money, the mortgage, the house repairs, not having a TAship, Thorkell not coming home for days, the money I spent on Brother Gregario, whether or not I am doing the right thing, the empty apartment downstairs... I could go on and on, but I will stop here because I trust myself to do the things right and have the proper outcome even while it might not seem like it at the time.
So after reading a Sun article on biomimicry, I thought of writing again. I have had a longish hiatus from it I would say. So now to think out the problems in my thesis I am currently facing. Since I have to be a bit spartan for the moment I think I will be low tech and record the interviews for the time being as I sort out the questions I plan to ask. So, I will ask Julie and Cherry maybe Hrafn to talk to me, and then also talk to Jordan. I think with the students I am going to do it in a very casual fashion like a come over and cook with me so that we are doing something while we talk. I find that a bit easier to do with Thorkell. It seems as I have their captive attention and keeping them engaged in something is as important. And in the mean time I will rewrite the 3rd chapter as much as possible to hand over to Peter. The most important thing right now is to get going, the sooner I start talking the sooner I will start writing and producing usable data. I am not sure what has me so nervous about this paper. I know this topic like the back of my hand. I know the pitfalls, not black, special catagories, trying to create a new status (intermediate) for multi-racial people, black is black.
Really what people like Rainer are arguing is that black is black and white is white, which falls into the same fallacy that he is arguing against. I realize that many or even most people see it that way. Just the notion that I still get surprised responses from people to find out that Thorkell is my natural born child is and indicator of how entrenched racial dichotomization is in this society. I think one of the things I will do is start each chapter with an anecdote from our lives, and trip of discovery of this highly racialized world. Yes race is a fallacy as Rainer claims, but that does not mean the racism and racial ideology are not real lived experiences. Just say that you are not going to claim your "mixed" heritage does not eliminate or even measurable change how society views you or your ideas. By saying I am not black I am not white or mixed race, does it mean that you have transcended race? I am not so sure, because it is such a strongly constructed social value to deny it, is perhaps to be a bit complicit in arguing for the melting pot notion, where we don't see race or rather we should not see race. I am not by any means arguing for assimilation, or for children to argue for blackness status, but here in the US where the tradition has been assimilation or exclusion based on phenotypic identifiers, trying to stand outside of the group has insidious consequences. It keeps people out of the mainstream of success and in groupings that affect them economically, educationally and socially, not that I haven't talked about all this before numerous times.
The other side the advocates for separate identity are to my mind equally misleading. There are some excellent points made in their writing. But they are too insular in many ways. Root (1999, 2000...) repeatedly references her own writing on the issue. Her view of the multiplicity of identities that a person has, has been written about in the multicultural literature. Most of the models discussed by people talking about race are deviation on a theme. There is very little attempt to move past Cross and Erickson's schema on identity and identity development. Yet here we are at a major cross roads in how the world works as a whole, we are more interconnected, more travel savvy, more worldly in many ways. The number of people marrying or co-habitating outside of their culture and ethnic group has continued to rise in the last few years. Before it was a matter of and Irishman marrying an Italian woman, or as in Sweetland, a Norwegian marrying a German right after the First world war (, 2007). This type of marriage has been fairly well tolerated by mainstream white culture for a long time, but to move beyond that and marry not just a black person, but perhaps an Arab, Muslim is still seen as a bad thing. The most common argument that arrises is how terrible it will be for the children. They will be so confused? They will never have peace since they have two halfs or even smaller partitions that will continuously be at war with each other. This thought process was believed not only to apply to mixed color families, but also to people like my parents who married outside of their cultures, and produced two bi-cultural children. What really happened with us was that we found ourselves to be more flexible more aware of peoples otherness with out it being something to judge, fear or ridicule. Our parents were well educated academic professionals, who in many ways were not as racially sensitive as we are, but they were people who were always willing to question whatever beliefs that failed to meet their equity criteria.
I have to admit in many ways we were very marginalized as children, perhaps I was more so than my brother, since he was so much younger when we moved back to Iceland in 1978. I had already been in school for four years. I was a good student, liked by my teachers, I had some reasonable friends, and some not so reasonable ones as well. But when my mother uprooted us from Stoughton MA that summer, I doubt either she or my father really understood what it meant to bring two "half breed" children to live in a cultural homogeneous culture that still fails to count us as true members of the Icelandic culture. Icelanders are accepting of foreigners, but as in most places, they need to keep to their assigned place or it becomes difficult for the immigrant. But we were not immigrants per say. Both Hrafn and I were born in Iceland, born full fledged Icelandic citizens. At first when we got to Iceland I spent hours after school working on homework, as well as language skills. I could speak Icelandic quite well, after all I spent most summers with my dad there, while my parents were separated, and my grandparents spoke no English what so ever. But as many multicultural individuals know, speaking a language and writing it are to vastly different things. For me it just so happened that my parents picked one of the more complex languages for us to learn, by dint of my father being Icelandic.
My mother taught herself to read and write Icelandic, since in those days the only texts on learning Icelandic were based on old Norse and the Icelanders had still not devised a means to teaching Icelandic as a second language (it is questionable whether they have yet succeeded in this endeavor). So many an afternoon was spent at the dining room table in an endless struggle to remember how many n a definite noun needed, depending on its gender, number and case. My mother was nothing if not a demanding, but patient teacher, but then I was a good student. I had always loved school, school was fairly safe, although that became a little less so in Iceland where the students and even teachers would make fun of or ridicule my language skill, my lack of writing skill based on the Icelandic cursive rather than the American version, my inability to draw a house or to knit. Of course it didn't help that my parents put me in a class of students 1-2 years older than I was and then transferred me to the only catholic school in town where all of the students in my grade had been together since first grade. (I am not writing this as a pity party, but rather to explain how I came to be who I am and how I came to do this kind of research).
I was perhaps a classic definition of the marginal, which Park (193#) proposed as an identity for minority people in the US. I never really fit in. I spoke excellent Icelandic although I sometimes said things that were clearly not Iceland, words or phrases my brother and I made up. Which often garnered the comment "Æ thetta er bara Brynja." (“Oh, that's just Brynja."). Or when I returned to the US, the repeated “Wow, you speak excellent English.” That said I functioned really well over all in Icelandic culture. I was an odd duck anyway, my parents didn’t own a television, but we had a computer by the time I was 9, in 1979. I played the violin, read a great deal, mostly because I spent a lot of time as a pre-teen and teen very ill, with allergies and eczema. My parents were professors, my mother also chaired the Fulbright Committee for many years. We were well known, but always considered rather odd not really part of the encapsulated culture of Iceland.
So after reading a Sun article on biomimicry, I thought of writing again. I have had a longish hiatus from it I would say. So now to think out the problems in my thesis I am currently facing. Since I have to be a bit spartan for the moment I think I will be low tech and record the interviews for the time being as I sort out the questions I plan to ask. So, I will ask Julie and Cherry maybe Hrafn to talk to me, and then also talk to Jordan. I think with the students I am going to do it in a very casual fashion like a come over and cook with me so that we are doing something while we talk. I find that a bit easier to do with Thorkell. It seems as I have their captive attention and keeping them engaged in something is as important. And in the mean time I will rewrite the 3rd chapter as much as possible to hand over to Peter. The most important thing right now is to get going, the sooner I start talking the sooner I will start writing and producing usable data. I am not sure what has me so nervous about this paper. I know this topic like the back of my hand. I know the pitfalls, not black, special catagories, trying to create a new status (intermediate) for multi-racial people, black is black.
Really what people like Rainer are arguing is that black is black and white is white, which falls into the same fallacy that he is arguing against. I realize that many or even most people see it that way. Just the notion that I still get surprised responses from people to find out that Thorkell is my natural born child is and indicator of how entrenched racial dichotomization is in this society. I think one of the things I will do is start each chapter with an anecdote from our lives, and trip of discovery of this highly racialized world. Yes race is a fallacy as Rainer claims, but that does not mean the racism and racial ideology are not real lived experiences. Just say that you are not going to claim your "mixed" heritage does not eliminate or even measurable change how society views you or your ideas. By saying I am not black I am not white or mixed race, does it mean that you have transcended race? I am not so sure, because it is such a strongly constructed social value to deny it, is perhaps to be a bit complicit in arguing for the melting pot notion, where we don't see race or rather we should not see race. I am not by any means arguing for assimilation, or for children to argue for blackness status, but here in the US where the tradition has been assimilation or exclusion based on phenotypic identifiers, trying to stand outside of the group has insidious consequences. It keeps people out of the mainstream of success and in groupings that affect them economically, educationally and socially, not that I haven't talked about all this before numerous times.
The other side the advocates for separate identity are to my mind equally misleading. There are some excellent points made in their writing. But they are too insular in many ways. Root (1999, 2000...) repeatedly references her own writing on the issue. Her view of the multiplicity of identities that a person has, has been written about in the multicultural literature. Most of the models discussed by people talking about race are deviation on a theme. There is very little attempt to move past Cross and Erickson's schema on identity and identity development. Yet here we are at a major cross roads in how the world works as a whole, we are more interconnected, more travel savvy, more worldly in many ways. The number of people marrying or co-habitating outside of their culture and ethnic group has continued to rise in the last few years. Before it was a matter of and Irishman marrying an Italian woman, or as in Sweetland, a Norwegian marrying a German right after the First world war (, 2007). This type of marriage has been fairly well tolerated by mainstream white culture for a long time, but to move beyond that and marry not just a black person, but perhaps an Arab, Muslim is still seen as a bad thing. The most common argument that arrises is how terrible it will be for the children. They will be so confused? They will never have peace since they have two halfs or even smaller partitions that will continuously be at war with each other. This thought process was believed not only to apply to mixed color families, but also to people like my parents who married outside of their cultures, and produced two bi-cultural children. What really happened with us was that we found ourselves to be more flexible more aware of peoples otherness with out it being something to judge, fear or ridicule. Our parents were well educated academic professionals, who in many ways were not as racially sensitive as we are, but they were people who were always willing to question whatever beliefs that failed to meet their equity criteria.
I have to admit in many ways we were very marginalized as children, perhaps I was more so than my brother, since he was so much younger when we moved back to Iceland in 1978. I had already been in school for four years. I was a good student, liked by my teachers, I had some reasonable friends, and some not so reasonable ones as well. But when my mother uprooted us from Stoughton MA that summer, I doubt either she or my father really understood what it meant to bring two "half breed" children to live in a cultural homogeneous culture that still fails to count us as true members of the Icelandic culture. Icelanders are accepting of foreigners, but as in most places, they need to keep to their assigned place or it becomes difficult for the immigrant. But we were not immigrants per say. Both Hrafn and I were born in Iceland, born full fledged Icelandic citizens. At first when we got to Iceland I spent hours after school working on homework, as well as language skills. I could speak Icelandic quite well, after all I spent most summers with my dad there, while my parents were separated, and my grandparents spoke no English what so ever. But as many multicultural individuals know, speaking a language and writing it are to vastly different things. For me it just so happened that my parents picked one of the more complex languages for us to learn, by dint of my father being Icelandic.
My mother taught herself to read and write Icelandic, since in those days the only texts on learning Icelandic were based on old Norse and the Icelanders had still not devised a means to teaching Icelandic as a second language (it is questionable whether they have yet succeeded in this endeavor). So many an afternoon was spent at the dining room table in an endless struggle to remember how many n a definite noun needed, depending on its gender, number and case. My mother was nothing if not a demanding, but patient teacher, but then I was a good student. I had always loved school, school was fairly safe, although that became a little less so in Iceland where the students and even teachers would make fun of or ridicule my language skill, my lack of writing skill based on the Icelandic cursive rather than the American version, my inability to draw a house or to knit. Of course it didn't help that my parents put me in a class of students 1-2 years older than I was and then transferred me to the only catholic school in town where all of the students in my grade had been together since first grade. (I am not writing this as a pity party, but rather to explain how I came to be who I am and how I came to do this kind of research).
I was perhaps a classic definition of the marginal, which Park (193#) proposed as an identity for minority people in the US. I never really fit in. I spoke excellent Icelandic although I sometimes said things that were clearly not Iceland, words or phrases my brother and I made up. Which often garnered the comment "Æ thetta er bara Brynja." (“Oh, that's just Brynja."). Or when I returned to the US, the repeated “Wow, you speak excellent English.” That said I functioned really well over all in Icelandic culture. I was an odd duck anyway, my parents didn’t own a television, but we had a computer by the time I was 9, in 1979. I played the violin, read a great deal, mostly because I spent a lot of time as a pre-teen and teen very ill, with allergies and eczema. My parents were professors, my mother also chaired the Fulbright Committee for many years. We were well known, but always considered rather odd not really part of the encapsulated culture of Iceland.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
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