Blurred Boundaries

I love reading blogs. Everything about them is interesting to me: posts, comments, bloggers, communities, long histories of hat tips, trackbacks and blog wars. Tonight I was really struck by a common thread I saw running through two very different blogs. It got me thinking about the concepts of culture and identity and how challenging it can be to confront their flexibility. 

The posts both are about culture being appropriated or exploited. The Racialicious post is is an introduction to thr idea of Global Hip-hip, and specifically about about Korean and Japanese hip-hop. At WWdn, Wil Wheaton is talking about taking part in the launch of a new website but then finding out Shaq and MC Hammer and Ashton Kutcher were claiming to be geeks just like him.

Both articles draw similar conclusions. Commenters at Racialicious point out that there were Latinos who shaped the hip-hop movement, and the beginning of Asian hip-hop was in direct response to Koreans being called degrading names in an Ice Cube song. In response to comments, Wheaton admits he cannot be the arbiter of who is and is not a geek.

When I first noticed the parallels between these two posts, I felt a little uncomfortable. Does it trivialize the rich history of hip-hop to compare it to identifying as a geek? Isn’t this post one more way to appropriate it? As I thought about it, this quote from “Keeping The Faith ” popped into my head

“We live in a really complex world. A world in which boundaries and definitions are blurring and bleeding into each other in ways that challenge us… as human beings.”

This quotation speaks to the way I have come to identify myself ethnically. My mother is white and my father is Latino. I do not identify as a woman of color because I appear to be white. I have done (and still do) a lot of thinking about white privilege, which due to my appearance I’d say I benefit from. Of course I’ve gotten the occasional comment I don’t fit certain people’s definition of whiteness. It hasn’t had much of an impact on my life. But it did drive home how powerful white privilege is, those who cling to it care a lot about keeping the club exclusive.

Just as a Korean hip-hop star might feel defensive about Latoya’s post, or an NBA star might insist that he is a geek, I get touchy when someone tells me "you’re not really white/Latina/mixed." I don’t go around saying “Hello I’m MissCherryPi and I identify as…” but some people feel the need to tell me what box they have put me in. This has made me a huge defender of Barack Obama – my antenna go up any time someone says “Well he’s not really Black” within 100 yards of me. An understanding of racial identity as a fluid, complex concept rather than a binary one is beginning to take shape, if slowly, and that’s a great thing.

The fluidity of so many aspects of our culture is something we are just beginning to understand and explore. I am glad that the tools like the blogosphere exist to exchange ideas on this grand a scale. It’s very exciting. If that makes me a geek, so be it.