exercise in ethnographic writing 2

It's a night in March, and I am sitting in the dim quiet of my dining room, scribbling furiously in my journal, lamenting the loneliness of my life here, the difficulty I've been finding in creating an identity for myself. I blame my father, my skin color, the fineness of my hair. But as much clarity as hatred from my father brings, it does nothing to make me feel any better, does nothing to lift my awareness from the shadows.

I had just come from an open mic slam poetry event for POC, where I had felt the familiar silencing feeling of guilt, of being the whitest person in an audience (this wasn't even close to true) and the darkness of the room, the brightness of the stage, the power of the words as they surged from the featured speaker, stung as I succumbed to imposter syndrome. 

Fast forward to the next day, to a preplanned trip "as friends" to the Oakland Museum with my very recently ex-boyfriend. The night is warm, it's one of those Fridays where food trucks line up outside of the museum, and there's a band singing songs in Spanish in one of the mini amphitheaters in the mostly-open-to-the-outside-elements museum. We get two different types of french fries from two different food trucks, and split them. We laugh together at something nondescript, I brag more about how much he will love the history of California section of the museum, on the first floor. I pride myself at knowing people well enough to recognize things they'd like before they do. 

We explore the history exhibit, me noticing things I hadn't yet seen on my first trip here, pointing things out to my ex that I want him to enjoy in the way I enjoyed thinking of his reactions when I first saw them. Eventually we arrive at the Black Power exhibit, the one that opened shortly after my first visit here. We're in the middle of watching a video interviewing descendants of influential Black Power activists, when he gets a call. It's very unclear to me who is on the other end, but what is clear is that it involves some happening I know nothing about. He hangs up and I try not to ask questions.

It's inside the model of a commercial jet--the kind with the circular windows and leather seats that could let you fool the world into believing you're on a private plane if you angled the photo right--that he begins telling me a story. A few nights ago, being the only clearly nonwhite person in a group of clearly white people, he had to break up a fight between his hardass white friend from Boston who wanted to get physical against the male friends of a girl who said something nasty in response to his poorly-timed joke. My ex knows the consequences of fistfights well: he has broken his hand more than once for his propensity to punch things out of misplaced spite and angry confusion. He tries to diffuse the situation, tries to soothe his friends and the people, all people of color, against which a few of his friends have found a vendetta. In the midst of things, someone from the latter group yells "you're a traitor", and it stings my ex in a way other insults haven't, couldn't. It stings him in a way that I deeply, intimately understand. In the middle of the museum, outside the art exhibit into which we have wandered while discussing this story, I feel compassion, feel empathy, feel pride, feel a sense of connection with another person's experience that I have never felt before. As we discuss other instances of denial of our blackness, the lights in the museum get a little brighter, the walls seem to be bursting with color, and I feel my heart swell with attachment to him more than it ever has. 

We do not get back together. Instead, we go into an exhibit called Question Bridge, and watch a black man with dreads ask the public on camera whether it is ethical to date outside your race. I lean over to my ex, tell him with all the eagerness of someone who has suddenly found a purpose upon which to attach her life, "they're basically discussing whether people like us should exist." And in that moment, the room cracks open, and the two of us split apart, though neither of us recognizes it yet. The longer the time spent talking about ethics of interracial dating without mentioning already existing multiracial people as a result of generations of interracial dating in history, the more I put my hands to my sides, pull and twist with a desire to open myself wide enough so that I will be noticed. And the more defenses of and defenses against interracial dating are presented by people who claim monoracial identities, the smaller my ex looks, the tighter he seems to squeeze himself in, to try and forcibly allow himself to exist outside of the questions I want to use to rip the world wide open. 

The thing about moments that change your life, is that sometimes they feel exactly like the kind of moments that you will tell the story of again and again in an effort to explain your journey in personal development from point a to point b. Being in this museum, with someone who I had always attached to a pedestal of unattainable blackness, I felt an insatiable desire to have more of this clarity, to understand more about how and why he had felt the same things as me. I knew as soon as it happened that those moments were setting me onto an entirely new path.