Minneapolis Adventures

On Saturday afternoon, I met a friend, "SaxPrincess," for lunch at an Arby's halfway between our respective apartments. We ordered our requisite roast beef sandwiches and curly fries and sat down to enjoy a long-awaited chat. Instead, I was presented with two very compelling reasons for never, ever procreating. All of my previously held beliefs concerning how children are actually God's punishment for sin (therefore NOT a gift from heaven) were thoroughly corroborated.

Reason One: Social Responsibility
Our girl talk was largely thwarted by a toddler two tables over. He literally did nothing but emit lusty squalls. He screamed in excitement over his meal; he screamed in frustration when his sister took his beverage away from him; and he screamed in between times for no reason at all. His mother said nothing, despite the dirty looks cast her direction by ourselves and by Arby's staff. She merely sat and smiled at her brood while her youngest made noises reaching impossible decibel levels.

My take was, "I have never believed in harming children...but now it's time to start." SaxPrincess announced that her children would be muzzled before being permitted to screech indiscriminately. Both of us were pretty sure that long-term exposure to such volume was sure to exacerbate stress-related health problems. I just couldn't forgive myself if I spawned a child who proved detrimental to the health of those around him.

Reason Two: Personal Embarrassment
After the loud child left, another family came in with a little boy who looked to be about four. He seemed to lack any propensity for screaming, but SaxPrincess was still eager to leave before the second wave of squalling began and got up to dispose of her trash. I happened to look in the direction of the child, and I saw him dancing in a manner reminiscent of Michael Jackson. I found this rather amusing, so I kept watching him dance. Then I saw him grab his crotch, just like Michael Jackson.

Tonight was my first experience at a gay bar. I went out with a really fun group of women, several of whom I knew from college. We went to The Townhouse, which is on University Avenue in St. Paul. It's kind of a hole in the wall, fairly small and pretty much a dive. There was a small dance floor, a big screen hooked up to one of those interactive trivia games, and an area with seating and a couple of pool tables. People were relatively scarce, which I found surprising for a Friday night; Courtney told me it's usually crowded.

Meghan and Court and I situated ourselves on stools overlooking the dance floor and observed. The Townhouse is probably - with the exception of the CC Club - the best place for people watching I've ever been. We saw a girl with purple hair, and we watched a very small man with attitude tear up the floor until he got too drunk to stay with the beat.

Courtney noticed him first. He was tall, clad in low-slung baggy khakis and a white wifebeater. A black stocking cap adorned his head, leaving a healthy five o'clock shadow as his only exposed hair. One gold hoop hung from each ear, and he had tattoos on his muscular arms. He had an intensity about him, and he was off in his own world, dancing like he was the only person on the floor.

He looked exactly like a cross between Eminem and a pirate. Ahoy, First Mate Slim Shady.

I wanted to watch a DVD while doing homework this evening. However, my DVD player is useless without the remote control, since I can't select the "Play Movie" option without it. I cannot find my remote control. I have no idea where it is. I searched the floor by my bed (where such things are usually hiding). Nope. So I decided to search the wasteland that is my desk. I still haven't found the damn remote control. But here is a list of things I DID find:

1. Dryer sheets

2. My Evanescence CD

3. A button I got from a guy at Bryant Lake Bowl when I was there with ParadiseLost; it says, "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber"

4. A bandanna

5. Quarters

6. My smoke detector, which IrishTenor removed from my wall months ago because he can't bake a pizza in my oven without setting it off

7. Catnip spray

8. My hands-free kit for my cell phone (why it's on the desk and not in my car, God only knows)

9. Nail polish

10. My watch

11. Maya's collar

12. A contact lens case

I could go on and on. You get the idea. I know. It's pathetic.

I live in White America.

I am not white, but I live here and I have the White America stamp on my cultural passport to prove it. I have lived here all my life and know very little of the other America, even though I am aware it exists. I learned about it in college, and here in Minneapolis I see it sometimes as I walk down my street and see other nonwhite faces. This other America, this other side of the proverbial tracks, is real, I know, but I haven't really been there even though its citizens are my neighbors and I see them daily.

I am not one of them. Not really. Yet I am not wholly different either. I stand at the crossing between the two Americas, straddling the tracks.

I am an interracial adoptee. Along with this title came opportunities I would not have in my nation of origin because I am female and likely born to an unwed mother; educational support and an abundance of cultural capital inherited from my highly educated family; and the White America stamp on my passport.

The stamp kept me complacent for years. I was incredibly lucky – I grew up in a nonthreatening environment, devoid of any racial hostility, where I was treated just like any other kid. With such safety comes blissful ignorance, and I literally had no real concept of privilege resulting from race or class.

In college, I learned about the other America. I learned that White America, where I lived, was not the only America and that another world existed. A world of which I was a part simply by virtue of not being white, even though I had the requisite passport to get out and the stamp to go with it. The world with which I had identified throughout my entire life was not the only world anymore, and I resisted. I resisted my vulnerability as a partial citizen of two separate worlds, and I resisted the idea that I had been sheltered by class privilege rather than being truly a member of the club. I resisted the idea that anyone would think I didn't belong where I had grown up. I invoked my passport and my lifelong citizenship in White America as proof that this was my world.

In many ways it is. I carry myself like a typical Western woman. I stride fearlessly into any situation, expecting to be treated like the white girl I am inside. I identify with the white middle class and admit that I tend to see other people of color as very saliently nonwhite. English is my native language. I have a "white-sounding" name. Put a blond wig on me, and you'd have the all-American girl next door. One of my co-workers at the research office, who grew up in Hong Kong, described me this way: "She is a banana - yellow on the outside and white inside." Thanks to various forms of privilege, I have acculturated flawlessly. White people are "my" people, my in-group. White America is my world.

But I am not totally separated from the other. Even if I wanted to, I could not separate completely. Although I consider myself to be just "a white chick with different outside packaging" the fact remains that the outside packaging is different and is also the most salient thing when people meet me for the first time or see me on the street. To them I am Asian, but to myself I am a Norwegian-American. It is an odd position, this constant potential disconnect between how I am seen and how I see myself. I embrace it because of the unique perspective it lends me, but it is odd nonetheless.

I learned about positioning this fall in a course I am taking on research methodologies in education. Positioning, as defined by qualitative researchers, is an awareness and acknowledgement of one's own cultural biases going into a program evaluation, since these biases may have an impact on the effectiveness or conclusions of the study. Perhaps this positioning is inherently two-sided; not only must a researcher be aware of how he or she perceives others but also of how he or she is perceived. This, I realized, is something I have done since college, when I learned about the existence of a world outside of White America. Something I do in the background of every moment of every day of my life, that has become as natural as breathing. I simply had no name for it before.

For the most part, this process is invisible. I rarely feel oppressed – ironically I feel this way only when other nonwhite people tell me how I should view race, sometimes based largely on their experiences and not my own. In most day-to-day contexts, I think just like any other 24-year-old. I don't spend every moment acutely conscious of the phenomenon I embody. But I am constantly aware of the need to position myself, even if I don't process it until later. I am aware of that possible perceptual divide between myself and others.

I can't speak for every member of this particular collective, but I will conjecture that many interracial adoptees feel this dual citizenship that is in some ways profoundly incomplete. We define ourselves by the stamp, by the passport. It is our identity as we know it. Yet White America may not know this. They may see only our "different outside packaging" and may not buy this idea that our passport, stamped "White America," is a legitimate ticket in. The other America may see only the passport and the stamp and dismiss us as citizens of White America. Or not. In any case, people may feel confused when we are not who they expected us to be.

But I know who I am, and I have learned to be comfortable with positioning myself referent to the chasm between two worlds. Maybe this in itself is complacency, but for now I live in White America, and I balance by sitting on the fence and resting my feet on one side.