My dissertation "Mixed Race Identity in the Millennial United States: The Power of Naming our Intimate Realities" spent considerable time contemplating and problematizing the ideas and practices of authenticating socio-racial membership. These ideas of authenticity, and ultimately membership, often lead to monolithic characterizations of what is authentic. There is also a perpetuation of a very fluid and intentionally elusive set of standards by which one is tested in order to verify authenticity, which I would argue is unattainable as the goals and parameters for membership shift and move constantly. This process, these unwritten social-codes and invisible membership tests, work in concert to form what I am talking about as the "principal foundations of belonging".
The "principal foundations of belonging" move together to shape how we know who we are - through and with those who "love" us, by whom and when our authenticity is validated or denied and where we are allowed to claim or perform membership. For those in non-binary, non-genealogical and/or "non-normative" intimate and identity socio-cultural locations, authenticity and its contributions to dislocation and disruption are the place and space where psychic and emotional traumas persist even after one has been granted membership.
Where do I belong? Who are my people? How do I perform all the identities I live in ways that will allow me to be included - accepted - recognized as part of that identity, social and/or familial group? What performances of self will gain access to a wholistic membership in a community or identity? How do I gain membership without losing the multiplicity and depth of me (my) self. It is important to me that people realize, that if you have never had to ask these questions - especially about genetic relatives, you are privileged. It is a privilege to never have to navigate the compartmentalization of self. It is a privilege to not bear the weight of the psychic undoing that is rejection from genealogical and socio-racial - intimate and identity memberships because you are able to perform the arbitrary characteristics of authenticity. It is a privilege to belong
Issues of authenticity and the declination of membership are not new to me, not in any way. As a transracial adoptee, I have experienced the disruption and displacement of space, place and person on a nearly daily basis. Most of these moments have been focused on my race and my performance of blackness. I am just starting to understand that some of this is also due to my adoption, in particular my white "parents" performances of whiteness in relationship to my blackness. I have attributed this experience to different things over time, but I have always understood my socio-racial dislocation to be the direct result of the community I grew up in. Or, the community I grew up without. Now I am realizing that the severing and abandonment that resulted in my my adoption also leaves me inauthentic to my genetic "family". My being raised outside of "the family" has rendered my membership as a relative to my genetic others null and void. There is no belonging. The rejection is not undone by so called reunion. There is no buy back or buy in to being or belonging as family. I will forever be an outsider even to those in the "family" who are not genetically related but have passed an authenticity test that I have been rendered ineligible to even take.
As I gain access to ancestry information, which takes a good amount of time and testing of/at different levels of authenticity, cannot help comparing my exclusion to that of the process by which my genetic relatives became or were rendered "no longer legally native - Choctaw" through a series of failed authenticity and membership processes. I listen to genetic relatives talk about being Choctaw and their lament over having that identity and membership stripped away. I am struck every time by how those same people cannot see the ways in which I have been rendered no longer legally kin to them. In the same ways my genetic relatives fight to prove they are Choctaw, I am fighting to prove to them that I deserve to be recognized as an insider, as someone to be considered and connected with - as family. But the goal keeps moving. The DNA has proven both that we are not Choctaw and that I am in fact genetically related. And, in the ways that authenticity and membership are measured, weaponized and resisted, communities and families choose what to believe. In the case of their Choctaw heritage they choose to ignore authenticity to preserve a particular identity and socio-cultural reality. They choose to withhold my familial membership to keep from reckoning with my existence as a child born outside my father's very damaged marriage.
In the absence of reflected identity- socio-racial, cultural and familial, I developed and performed a responsive identity. I have become a reader of culture. I don't really have nor have I cultivated a culture of my own. At best, I have a multiplicity of fluid cultural performances that move in and out of each other depending on the context of space and people around me. Now as an adult, I appreciate the huge problems that arise from what in essence ends up being appropriation and imitation of socio-racial cultures and expression. What I have not been able to figure out is how or where to find a culture or cultures that I can cultivate without the claims of in-authenticity - claims of trespassing into membership spaces in which I am not welcome. How does one avoid claims of faking or denying who one is expected to be. Perhaps academia... but even then, I am performing something that is not inherent in my genetic or environmental realities. But my scholarship and teaching spaces are where I am most connected and run the least threat of failing the almighty authenticity test. I work daily to produce enough scholarly proof that I belong in academia. And, I mourn the way in which there is no way to produce enough proof - familial, racial, genetic nor genealogical - to be authentically anyones kin. Worse, I can never produce enough proof to be anyone's child.
They call it impostor syndrome in higher education. All the ways one does not feel or is told they are not authentic. I fail authenticity tests every single day. I will never be black enough, educated enough, published enough, motherly enough, child enough, sibling enough, feminine enough, 'woke' enough... I will never be enough. What I never anticipated, however, is not feeling genetic enough or adopted enough. How can someone fail being authentically adopted? What does it take in the face of a DNA test to not be genetic ... enough. The constructs of authenticity, membership and belonging are damning for those of us who live in this liminal space of disruption, abandonment - the losing ... the lost?
The challenges to my socio-racial and familial identities are some of the most violent things that I endure. I have no place to rest and land. There is no identity home where I can just kick off my shoes and feel safe or welcomed. I own the keys to no home-space nor familial membership. I talk about liminality a lot, but this issue of authenticity, membership and belonging has relegated me permanently liminal. I am giving some deep thought to whether liminality is actually the place or a place for people like me to belong - like diaspora. Perhaps we, the severed and surrendered - the abandoned and lost - the unwanted and erased, are diasporic in relationship to ourselves. I also wonder, when the weight of this is at its heaviest, if a person doesn't find a place or places to belong - what happens to them? If one doesn't land or at least light from time to time in a space where they belong, do they ... die? disappear? dissipate? Or do they, we, those who have no home nor membership, float at the edges - at the gates - waiting for the possibility ... an invitation ... a promise ... a pronouncement ...
Belong.
In liminality,
Baby Girl
