Interview Transcript

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MP: In our previous conversation, you mentioned that you could really relate to her (the author’s) experience. As a white woman, how did you find that relatability to someone who’s at the receiving end of racial microaggression targeted at racial minorities?

MW: I could relate because I had also experienced a lot of microaggression before because of my sexual orientation. I was constantly measured against my straight friends, how I act, how I speak, how I dress, and often in a not so pleasant way. While I’m a white woman, I’m not your traditional cis white woman. I’m a trans-gendered white woman. I might not have experienced racial micro aggression, but I can definitely relate to what it feels like to be stereotyped. 

 

MP: So would you say that some facets of your identities undermine your social position? Do you feel that in certain situations, where your subordinate or vulnerable identities become amplified, you feel just as vulnerable as people who are commonly considered as the marginalized minority?

MW: That is correct.

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Interpretations of MW's Response

I saw MW's response as an echo to the multidimensionality of identities where dominant and subordinate identities interact and define her experience of alienation and frustration.

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As the young Black woman who was constantly measured against her white peers, and MW against cis female, in society, dominant groups in general set the parameters and social structure within which the subordinates operate. Here I use the word “subordinate” not in a derogatory sense, but to indicate the imbalanced power dynamics between advantaged “dominant” and disadvantaged “subordinate” social groups and their identities, such as white, abled, male, upper-class, cis gender versus black, disabled, female, lower-class, trans gender. Identities are multidimensional. One could possess dominant and subordinate identities at the same time.  Because of the existence of norm set by the dominant groups, in which power and authority often reside, people who possess both dominant and subordinate identities might often face the situation, what I call “asymmetrical association”, where people tend to associate their achievements with their dominant identities and failure with subordinate identities, as the “social norms” suggest. Just like MW and the author of the post, who both experienced frustration, anxiety, insecurity, and ultimately the need to make an extra effort to assert her identity, people who completely or partially fall outside the dominant norm could experience exhaustion as they try to conform to or rebel against the fixed identity parameters that they had no control over. 

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To veture a step further into the “exhaustion” felt by people with identities deemed disadvantageous, I had to grapple with how social norms create a sense of disadvantageous otherness. Espinoza and Harris talked about “Black Exceptionalism” in the Everyday Language of White Racism, arguing that African Americans were uniquely damaged by economic loss and social-psychological degradations under slavery and Jim Crow, and that African Americans are uniquely centered in White racist imagination as prototypical Others (16).  As I read the post and interviewed MW, the same sense of “otherness” struck me. One might argue that the segregation of self versus others is ingrained in human nature and humans’ interaction with the world. However, how does a morally irrelevant divide lead to socially or even morally salient oppressions? 

 

White, Black, Asian, Jewish, Mexican, Homo Sapiens, Aliens… Physical characteristics might vary, and we might perceive and engage in categorization based on such variations. However, the existence of categorization does not automatically justify the unequal social, political, economic and moral salience placed on different categories/social groups. The problem of the self-versus-others perception does not lie in the categorization itself, but the politically and morally charged process of stratification. The discussion of racism, stereotypes, or any sort of “isms” should not stop at the recognition of the self-others categorization. Rather, we need to acknowledge, discuss, and correct the institutional processes, such as social welfare, legal practices, media coverage, and medical practices, that create the unjust associations between value-neutral categorization and value-laden stratification. 

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Reflections on My Interpretations

My interpretations here are deeply influenced by Beverly Tatum's work on identity politics, especially her essay The Complexity of Identity: Who Am I. 

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"Whether one succumbs to the devaluing pressures of the dominant culture or successfully resists them, dealing with oppressive systems from the underside, regardless of the strategy, is physically and psychologically taxing”. 

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My understanding of Tatum's multidimensional identities is ultimately embedded in the framework of intersectionality, and my interpretation of MW’s experience again turned my attention to this intersectional framework, a way of analyzing the complexity of problems by venturing into how diverse factors interact with one another to shape the final outcome of all sort of human experiences. 

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As Collins and Bilge suggested, “intersectionality’s core insight to be useful: namely that major axes of social divisions in a given society at a given time, for example, race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and age operate not as discrete and mutually exclusive entities, but build in each other and work together” (2016). Intersectionality is often used as a “problem-solving” tool that people employ in attempt to better understand the complexity of a certain issue. In this specific context, intersectionality lent me insights into the dynamics of complex discriminations rather than an isolated phenomenon of discrimination. The power associated with one’s identity, including but not limited to race, cannot be fully understood or generalized through the lens of one dimension of identities, but to be understood in relation to other dimensions of the identities as a whole as well as how different dimensions affect one another. 

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My tendency to use intersectionality as an analytic tool in understanding the complexities of social issues stems from my own life experience. It is hard for me to think of just one incident where intersectionality affected my life. Ever since I left home and moved to Singapore and later the States, I needed to grapple with intersectionality in almost every aspect of my life, be it college application, social circles, school performance, political orientation, and even spiritual beliefs. Applying to colleges in the US was one of the most transformative experiences in my life that really brought the concept of intersectionality to the fore front of how I think about myself and social justice. “You are Asian so you have to have the perfect SAT score”. "You are Chinese. Top US schools don’t like Chinese students.” “You are not American. Don’t get your hopes up.” “No one in your family ever went to a top university in the US. You have no connections there.” Every day I was bombarded with people telling me why a certain part of my identity will disadvantage me in process of college application.” It was emotionally exhausting to never know whether people value or not value you because of who you are as a person or because of all the identity labels that society enforced upon me. Sometimes, no matter how hard I try, I may not be able to do certain things simply because of my race, nationality, and family background. Complaining is not a luxury that I can afford.

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I need to survive, and I need to thrive no matter how much society wants to define me based on my identity labels. Rebelling against all the stereotypes is emotionally and physically tasking, but I has made me into the person that I am today. It’s not an easy life, but it’s certainly a wonderful life. Intersectionality is such a powerful tool that has allowed me to understand my own life experience, which inevitably drives me to look at human experience from the same theoretical framework. I tend to use intersectionality to examine specifically how power dynamics is created within an individual and among individuals, which is once again shown by my interpretation of MW's interview. 

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