The following reflections describe the experience of the authors at the protest of a columbus day parade in Denver in 2007. The American Indian Movement of Colorado, in which author Mark Freeland is a member, has engaged in protest of this parade since the late 1980s in alliance with numerous progressive social change groups. 2007 marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the columbus day holiday, which originated in the state of Colorado. Author Julie Todd was among a number of students organized for the protest by Mark Freeland at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, where they are both still doctoral students. Mark and Julie wrote these words in 2010. They used them as materials for a required course at the school called Identity, Power and Difference during one session of the course that deals with allyship and solidarity. The protest of the columbus day parade in Denver continues. For more information, go to: http://www.transformcolumbusday.org/ and http://www.colorado-aim.blogspot.com/.

Disclaimer: Language used in the publication below
might be considered offensive to some readers.[1]

Dear beloved friends, I am Emilie Teresa Smith, an Argentine-Canadian Anglican priest, theologian, mother, writer, and community member of the town, Santa Cruz del Quiché, in the western highlands of Guatemala. I have been a companion of Guatemala, since 1984, though I have lived in this particular town for only two years. Here with dear friends from the Quiché, we have set up Peace House, a place of rest and healing, for any who come through our door. Here we host the Christian Chapel of the Holy Innocents, and also, the Chilam Balam Council of the K’iche’ Peoples, a spiritual and cultural project of the Maya-K’iche’ peoples in this region. We are focused on creating alternative spaces for human and other relations, especially during these days when (popularly-elected, but ever horrifying) military power is returning to rule the country.

***

They went down to Xibalbá, quickly going down the face of a cliff, and they crossed over the bottom of a canyon with rapids. They passed right through the birds –the ones called throng birds– and they crossed Pus River and Blood River, intended as traps by Xibalbá. They did not step in, but simply crossed over on their blowguns, and then they went on over to the Crossroads. But they knew about the roads of Xibalbá: Black Road, White Road, Red Road, Green Road.

Popol Vuh, translated by Dennis Tedlock¹

The Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice. He saw that there was no one, and was appalled that there was no one to intervene.

Isaiah 59:15b-16a

Outside the thunderous rain erases the world, and all who are able are under cover. The cat cowers, the dog barks at the lightening, as if only by making his voice heard will the world calm down again. Peace House is at rest, empty of all but me, and the furry ones who live here too — everyone else has gone home. The longer-term visitors done for this year of pilgrimage, and those who come here every day, Zoila, Mario, don Juan, their door clicks shut early, as the sky blackens, before the rains come down, and the world is gone, again. The courtyard stands guard, green and fresh, ready to shake its hair into the showering down, and be washed clean.

In one corner, closest to the entrance way through the house, that’s where I collapsed, when doña Maria and the other aj’kij’² came and cleansed, and washed, and prayed, and named and remembered the things that these walls, that these doors saw. Terrible things, when the generals and colonels – their bloody hands – lived in this house, their sleeping quarters, away from the base, during the worst years of the genocide. Here the walls and doors remember things, says doña Maria, and I am overcome with an impulse to vomit, and to here lay down in defeated tears. She struck me with rue, and brought me back and we all came down, and we broke bread, and ate beans in bowls, and were quiet.

***

I am white, don Juan laughs at me, because he’s almost always laughing. We are on the opposite sides of the coloured circle, he says, I of the north, he, the yellow people of the central and the south. Don Juan, son of a Christian martyr,³ now an esteemed aj’kij’, draws me in, and we come together to worship, when we can. He doesn’t suffer questions though, so, of the Maya-K’iche’ practice, I can say very little. It is not something you learn in written words, but by shared life, and I kneel at his burning circles, and know that I am a child. Pastora Emilin, the people who care for this House call me, from the Lutheran church of Christ (close enough, Anglicans/Lutherans, we’re in full communion now). Don Juan says he loves me, and what I am in his eyes, an evangelica that doesn’t hate him, that doesn’t call him a practitioner of witchcraft.

***

I was born in the south, in Argentina, during an uprising, says my mother, which seems to explain everything about the rest of my life. My parents returned the family, eventually, to the north, but I came searching as soon as I was able, and here stopped, and now live in these rain-soaked mountains, after the war. I am not the colour of this earth, I am not exactly brown, or red – or yellow. I come from the north, in the Maya story, from where death originates, and death is thick on the ground in this land. The Spaniards and their strange yellow beards, in 1524, then the Germans, and their coffee plantations, wrenching away communal Maya land (1871), then the gringos, and their railroads, bananas, the CIA-invasion in 1954, destroying the only ever democratic experiment in Guatemala, then the evil refining of the practice of disappearance, tried out first in this country, with CIA council, in ’66. Then the full-out war, the genocide. No one knows, or remembers, there on the white road in the north, where death comes from, or here, except in how it carves into every heart and life – without being spoken about.

***

Her white, blood-drained hands, lie at an odd angle on her carved-up chest. Her face is only half-visible, smashed in and purple. A hanky covers her private bits. Her toenail is painted red. She is the death, that I walk into, down here, in Xibalbá, in the cavern of death, in the underworld, where the Lords of Death reside⁴. Beatríz, her name carved on my eyes, my sister, my sister-in-law.

What am I doing here? Who am I?

What are you, what’s a theologian, asks Maco the bus-driver, a devout Pentecostal Christian.

One charged, troubled, with thinking about God. All the time.

He shakes his head.

The war, no it didn’t touch me, he says. But his mother was a washerwoman for the army. She worked in this House and washed their filthy sheets. And his father was almost killed by the guerrillas, and his brothers were taken away, and forced into the army, and now they wander the streets, mad with half-remembrances of what they did . . .Maco, the bus-driver, remembers now, and he tells me, the dead, tripped over, while stealing ears of corn, in the cornfields, and his dog, crucified by a mad soldier (not his brother) to a tree.

***

So, I spend the days thinking about God, in this Holy Land:

– God, Ajaw, Señor, the great-father, star-sun, made all things, heated all things, and all things were shaped, by their hands in perfection. This earth is treasured and beyond telling in beauty.

– Corn is most Holy. Ground by Grandmother God and shaped into all flesh.

– First the Spaniards came and the blood of the Maya, the raping of the women. Their ladino⁵ children – the most despised, those who were no longer tied to their ancestors, and had no land.

– Cycles of violence carved these ravines and hills.

– Most recently, there were those who so loved God, who knew the God of Life, who treasured the Holy Bread, who knew the Word, and refused to leave Love strangled in the countryside. And they were killed, because finally, to die isn’t the worst that can happen — to learn to hate is endlessly-worse.

– This land was frozen in death, a quarter of a million died. Don Juan’s father, don Lencho’s father, Isabel’s father, Corita’s mother, the eight members of the Vasquez family down the road, in Río Blanco. Doña Carmen’s five children. Beatríz, oh Beatríz.

–The greatest shame of this day, is to be Canadian, and to know what is being done in our name. Recently, the great money-lovers came to these mountains, and found gold dust, and they ripped Our Mother in two, and ground her down and poisoned her, and shot her children and stole more water from the thirsty land than my mind can understand. All for gold, just like the yellow-bearded ones from before.⁶

***

I live here, I am not from here. I don’t understand very much, kneeling at the altar rail, or in the Holy Circle, around the fire. I am . . .lover, companion, friend. Sometimes the pain is too atrocious. Outside the door run rivers of hatred, of violence, justice is unknown, and no longer even longed for, by those who have lost heart. But sometimes, because I come in second-hand, I can reside in that pain, and not be undone. I don’t do much, I just live here, and hold this space, that once was so hurt, into its healing. Human hands, and God’s undying love serve to build a quiet place where all are welcome, a place where swallows can build their nesting place (while ever watching out for Lucho, the cat). Friends come and visit, and we plant a garden. Now the rain does its part, without our even asking.

Consciously, I know I’m in a South Africa that is politically, but not socially, post-Apartheid. Even so, the little old white lady’s racist comments surprise me. Complaining about the incompetence of black employees in grocery stores, she proudly notes how she nevertheless carefully pronounces the names on their nametags because they like it when we do that. We use their names – treat them as human – because we love the Lord. And then she tucks her purse under her arm and totters away with a smile and a wave to the three black pastors waiting in the adjacent room for my next interview. I don’t think she knows their names.

Not once in the interview does she lower her voice. She doesn’t know that her condescension, not to mention her conflation of incompetence with a particular skin colour, is racist, so she doesn’t care if they hear. Mistaking my attempts at impartial data collection for affirmation, she misinterprets them as indicating we’re on the same team. I am now filled with anxiety. Did they hear her comments? Will they also mistake me for being on her team and, by extension, hear my attempts at neutrality to be perpetuating the white racism of the South African context? And if they do, will they be right? I know ethnography can’t be neutral when performed in such politically and socially charged situations. Indeed, it can never be. What then are the ethics of data collection when the aesthetic – the appearance, the identity – of the researcher itself functions as a symbol of the worlds that are colliding in her project?

I stop the recording, collect myself, check my notes, and walk into the adjacent room. I smile and shake the pastors’ hands. But now I feel strange repeating their names back to them. We sit down at the table and I realize once again that I actually have no idea what team I’m on.

This is my second day in South Africa. Ever. But I grew up hearing stories situating the lives of my maternal grandparents and their kids, including my mum, on the land I now tread. My grandfather, the principal of a “coloured” high school, was active in the ANC and, from what I hear, was a stubborn, tough, justice-seeking man who pushed things further than the racist legal system could handle. By 1965, he had stirred up enough dust that he was facing imminent imprisonment. And so in 1966, when my mum was eleven-years-old, the family left their homeland, making their way to different parts of Europe. None would ever return.

My mum wound up in a small town in England. Riding the train to her new home she would wonder, where are the mountains? Re-location changed who she was; it changed her body. She stopped being the coloured girl who white boys threw stones at and black boys scorned. Without the differentiating categories of the Apartheid system, her coloured body became black. White boys and the darker-skinned Africans she later met while working in London would still scorn. But throughout adolescence, as a member of the only black family in town, she also began to embody the exotic. Racism’s face, still twisted in a snarl, now also bore the look of desire.

I was fourteen before I started perceiving anything about my bi-raciality as more than a simple and, to me, lovely fact of life. Depending on who I was with and how I styled my hair, or if I had a good tan, the way others perceived me oscillated in ways I found funny, even charming. Sometimes if my dad picked me up from school, acquaintances would ask if I was adopted: “You just look so much more like your mum!” they’d exclaim. My high school best friend was a red-headed white girl, and when she joined us on family outings, people would assume that our family was blended – that she was my dad’s kid from a previous marriage, and I was my mum’s. Divorce was easier to see than racial complexity, and a better explanatory narrative than the idea that a white man and a black woman could produce a little girl who was in the between.

But racial ascriptions can shift over years and I, like my mum, would feel how their construction changes when they cross geographic borders. As we moved from England to Canada, complexion and context made my black identity more difficult to perceive. Now people would see family pictures and blindly accept my dad’s visage while asking awkwardly, “where’s your mother from?” And once again, “are you adopted?” Their questions didn’t bother me, though. They made me feel unique: I had a story to tell.

It wasn’t till I moved to the States that I began to feel the tension between the parts of me that made me me. I learned more about the history of privilege associated with passing around the same time I learned – by experiencing – some of the anger the lighter-skinned sister can evoke. Who I was and always had been stopped feeling clear-cut; it stopped being a simple and lovely fact of my life, and began, instead, to feel complex, confusing, even painful.

I wasn’t passing as white because I wanted to. I was passing as white because of the misconceptions of others and the fact that continually correcting those misconceptions was not only exhausting, but also impossible. How would I introduce myself at parties? “Hi, I’m Natalie – oh, and by the way, I’m bi-racial”? That’s not sustainable!

But the alternative entailed being privy to more types of racism than I could imagine. White racists, thinking I was on their team, would let something slip or, worse, wouldn’t realize they were racist – like the little old lady outside Cape Town. Black racists openly expressed disdain for passers, without realizing I was passing among them.[1] Such privy continually implicated me in narratives that weren’t mine. Each forced from me a story I didn’t feel like telling.

In a time when clear-cut identity politics seem crucial for social movements toward reconciliation, the ability to pass without the desire to do so actually disrupts each and every configuration of them and us we might construct.

And the fact of that disruption intrigued me. I had a choice for how to connect this complex identity to my work. I could help construct a new identity category for theorizing about race, ethnicity (and class, gender, ability and sexuality…). I could tell stories that expand our stories for understanding what identity can be. I could tell the story or, and this is the one chose, I could use the story. I could deploy my identity – in its precise play of visibility and invisibility – to see what kind of knowledge it could produce.  And this is what I found myself, by surprise, able to do in South Africa.

So back to the three black pastors, all now facing me. We weren’t connecting or getting deep. Both my questions and their answers felt stilted. And then one of the men said, “all white people, when they meet you…you can tell they have hate for you as soon as they see you.”  He paused for a second and continued, “no offense to you”.

An awkward ethics had surrounded the conversation with the little old lady. Letting her in on the secret that I wasn’t actually white would have exposed her own assumption. It would have implied my judgment of her racist attitude. That wasn’t my job. And yet it felt icky nonetheless. I had let her leave not knowing who I was.

When the pastor said, “no offense,” he opened a place for me to come out. “It’s no offense to me at all,” I said, “I’m actually not white.” All three looked shocked, and one of them actually lifted his hand and rubbed his skin with an inquisitive expression on his face implying: but your skin is white!  “I know,” I laughed.  “But I’m actually bi-racial.” I told my story – narrated my identity – and then asked, “if you can feel white people’s hate immediately, did you immediately feel that hate coming from me?”  They looked to each other and back to me awkwardly. Then the man who’d made the claim threw up his arms and laughed: “no, no, not you…because you’re a sister.”  “But you didn’t know I was a sister when you met me,” I pushed.  “Nah, you’re cool,” he said dismissively, indicating that this line of questioning was over.

It was a pilot interview, and therefore brief. I couldn’t take the insight further, but I was struck. These three pastors encountered a white person whose heart they could perceive as black. My body, what my body hides and, more so, the revelation that happens in and through that tension, opened a space; this was not a space on which they could write their own story but, rather, one within which an imaginative performance of reconciliation could play out.

The awkwardness with which the pastors answered (and failed to answer) my line of questioning indicated that they had initially encountered me in a mode that now felt inappropriate. My visible whiteness inadvertently goaded their usual response. My blackness didn’t just reveal, but actually made that response a lie because I wasn’t who they thought I was. The pastors experienced how they too commit the sin that angers them so.

This experience was not uncomplicated. In a South Africa that is politically but not socially post-Apartheid, it’s true that these pastors most often do encounter smiling white masks over hate. And yet together we opened up imaginative space to embody future possibility: a genuine moment of reconciled racial difference.

Had they known who I was at the outset – had I immediately narrated my identity to them – we’d have missed this performance. I can’t say much came of this pilot interview beyond this flash of possibility. We lacked the time to open the space further with deep, honest discussion of what actually happened in that moment of misperception. But the experience points out that such conversations might be able to happen. The experience shows that identity can be deployed to produce the type of knowledge that is not just saying things about reconciliation, but which also could aid in the path to reconciliation. In sum, it reveals the possibilities inherent to playing with the aesthetics and the ethics of passing.

Natalie Wigg-Stevenson

Vanderbilt University

[1] I am using these terms, “white racist” and “black racist” somewhat provocatively to evoke what it feels like to be caught in the between. I do, however, realize that the latter especially is a hotly contested concept. Different historical cultural trajectories give rise to different forms of racialized tension and there is, therefore, a difference between forms of racism that grow out of privilege and forms that grow out of oppression. I maintain the language of racism for both, however, because I would argue that every form of race-based disdain should remain open to moral analysis in the fullness of its complexity. I maintain the language in this essay, in particular, because it points to a singular facet of bi-racial life: the experience of being called the N-word as a child hurt in much the same way as being told I wasn’t “black enough” to participate fully in a Black Seminarian fellowship as an adult. I experienced both as assaults on my racial identity; that is, I experienced both as racist.