just right

Malik Earle (he/him/his) has lived in Massachusetts, Florida, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Minnesota.

Songs from Malik's Spotify playlist are embedded throughout the story; scroll to the bottom or click here to listen to the full playlist.

What communities do you consider yourself a part of? I am mixed race. I consider myself part of LGBTQ ally community. I guess part of why I’m here is because I consider myself part of the black community, but that’s kinda here and there.

What drew you to this project? The idea of being in a grey space. Something that I’ve always had in my life is that grey space: first with my parents not being together, and that being a thing that other people didn’t really get. And also being in a household that’s both white and black and mixed, but being surrounded mostly by communities that were white as I was growing up. By blood, I’m not black. All my siblings are, and my dad is, but my biological dad is Puerto Rican.

What was your experience with some of those communities? I guess the most aware I was was in New Hampshire, when it was usually [a] pretty affluent white community, and my family was this middle-class, mixed-race family. But also, there’s a really large working-class white group in New Hampshire where we lived as well. But in Massachusetts, the community that I was always in was the black community, when I was with my cousins from my stepdad’s mom...essentially everyone on my stepdad’s side of the family, because he’s black and his whole family lived [there]. I spent lots of time with them, more than anyone else.

How long were you in Massachusetts for? I lived there until I was eight or nine.

That’s a pretty formative time to move. Yeah, I’m often surprised by how vivid my memories are of living in Massachusetts. We were in Florida for two years after that, and it was kind of like New Hampshire, but there was more diversity. I was surprised that I [hardly] saw any black people in New Hampshire. Even when I was in fifth or sixth grade, I understood it was a very white state. In my graduating class, out of two hundred kids, maybe ten of us were not white. The way I dealt with that was I just passed as white, because that’s a thing that’s pretty easy for me—I look pretty white. But the music I listened to and the ways I talked became more mediated as I lived there, until junior or senior year when I was just like, I’m just gonna listen to the music I wanna listen to and speak the way I want to speak and not embody these white archetypes that existed in New Hampshire.

"Can I Kick It?" by A Tribe Called Quest (1990).<

Can you describe the feeling of having restricted yourself and then “letting yourself go”? It came a lot with playing basketball. Two of my close friends, who were African American, were on the basketball team, and when I was with them I felt like I could be more a part of that community that I felt I identified with. But at the same time, I was also surrounded by all the white kids on the basketball team, who were also my close friends, and being confused at my flip-flopping between these two cultures. Not that they’re completely distinct, but in my school, it was always “the black kids do their thing and the white kids do their thing,” and it was very rarely the same thing.

I don’t know if much changed, but I felt less self-conscious of the music I played and the way I talked. Because sure, a lot of the kids liked rap, but they liked rap in the sense that they liked popular rap songs. If I were to play something from Atlanta in the 1990s, they wouldn’t recognize a single lyric. That’s where my dad’s—stepdad’s family is from. I call him my dad, and I think that’s part of my identification with that community, is that he’s just my dad, so it’s my cousins and my grandmother, not my step-cousins and step-grandmother. I think that was the biggest thing, was being okay with listening to the kind of music I wanted to listen to in public.

What were your experiences with this like growing up? A few times, at a family gathering, I would be hanging out with some other kid of color who would be like “You’re not black, white boy!” And I was like “but…but that’s not fair.” I think that’s what’s been a struggle for me: I can’t physically identify with the community, but I can identify with the community familially, culturally, in all these other ways. But the physical aspect of it means so much because of the discrimination that has been existing for so long.

I’m only now just getting used to calling myself a person of color. All through high school, it was just like yeah, whatever. The only time I’d acknowledge it otherwise was on surveys and stuff.

When did you start calling yourself a person of color? Has that changed how you perceive yourself? It was around the end of senior year [of high school] into these past couple of years. I think it really intensified once I came to Mac, that I understood better what it meant. I took a class my first year, “The Problem of Race in U.S. Social Thought and Policy,” and we would use the term “person of color,” and I felt like that terms applies to me. [It] makes sense as an in-between sort of thing, like a catchall. That’s what I’ve thought of myself: I fit into the catchall, but I don’t really fit into the other groups, necessarily.

"Chum" by Earl Sweatshirt (2013). The line "too black for the white kids and too white for the blacks" is at 1:16. Warning: explicit lyrics.

Can you talk more about that internal conflict? Most of it is being able to identify myself with a group. There’s this Earl Sweatshirt song where he says “too black for the white kids and too white for the black kids” [sic]. The first time I heard it, I was like, “You’re talking about me.” I fit in with the white kids, and I sometimes I was just like “that’s what I am, just another white kid.” But like I said before, when I start playing rap or when I start to be that version of myself more, I’m too black for the white kids. But I’m still not black enough for the black kids because I haven’t experienced these other things. It some ways, it’s kind of a social requirement for being a part of the black community.

Can you tell me more about the idea of “social requirements”? I think part of it is being discriminated against because of the color of your skin. I don’t want to say that as an end-all, but I think that’s part of it. [Or] taking care of your grandmother, going to your grandmother’s house, getting babysat by your grandma. I did all that; I grew up under my stepdad’s mom. I grew up with this black grandmother in this black household doing the same kinds of things that my black cousins were doing.

Have you been able to have conversations with other people who share this part of you? I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who can pass as white, but who has grown up in a black, multiracial, non-biological family and deals with the cultural struggle internally. I’d love to.

What would you say to them if you did? I feel like I could meet them, and I wouldn’t know. We’d have to know so much about each other first, and then be like “oh wait, you’ve also had this experience?” I’d just want to know how they grew up, and how they balance between being in one culture but representing, physically, something else. Or being in multiple cultures and representing only one.

Can you talk more about that—being multiple cultures and representing only one? To anyone on the street or to people who don’t know me, I look pretty white and I’m just another white person on campus. But I’m a part of Puerto Rican culture, not as much as I could be or actively try to be, but I’m part of that through my biological dad. I’m part of the European descent, white middle-class American culture. And I’m part of the middle-lower class African American culture. And being a part of all those cultures, with all the different musics. It always surprises me how [music] can be so different between the groups, and how much it means to me in terms of identification.

"Friend of the Devil" by the Grateful Dead (1970).

How has music influenced this part of your identity? Like I said before, I listen to a lot of rap, and people don’t expect me to listen to a lot of rap. And hip-hop and R&B…every time my dad picked me up from school and brought me to the baby sitter’s or my grandmother’s house when I was little, I was listening to hip-hop or R&B. The first time I heard the Beatles, I was like thirteen. It was from my mom’s mom, my white grandmother. And that kind of brought me back into white culture, with the Beatles and all these nice 80s and 90s bands, and white pop culture during the 2000s. Like now, I listen to 70s acid rock because my close white friends’ parents were hippies. I was like yeah, this is my white culture, my 70s rock, and this is my black culture, my 80s/90s/2000s rap. I think all those different music tastes have blended to be an important part of me.

You said you would ask somebody how they balance that part of themselves—how do you? In high school, I was black with the basketball guys, and at home, and with my dad’s side of the family. But in school, I was just one other white student, doing well and going to college. But at Macalester, I don’t feel like I have to balance that—I feel like it all happens simultaneously. The one thing I struggle with is engaging in intentional conversations with black students, because I don’t want to go in and seem like I’m a white person trying to come in and say things, because I’m not. Like I kind of am, but I’m not. There’s more. I feel like I’m black, but it doesn’t manifest the same way as other people’s blackness. It’s not the same thing as if my skin color was black.

What’s that been like for you with all the Black Lives Matter stuff that’s been going on? Racial injustice in general gets me really heated. When I see a black man get shot on the street, I have the same thought as any other black person: that could be my brother, that could be my dad, that could be my uncle, that could be anyone in my family.

I started participating in some of the Black Lives Matter stuff; I went to a couple of protests, and I wish I could go more. It’s been pushing me to figure out what I’m doing—how can I do all these things even though I pass as white? Everyone in that space will see me as white unless I explain everything. And even then, they might still see me as white. It makes it hard to establish my solidarity, and establish my actual connection to it. I feel like if I can establish that, it’ll give me more legitimacy to really be doing these things, and like I’m really doing something for my community. You can be an ally, but if you’re part of the group and you’re seen as an ally, you don’t feel like part of the group. And that’s confusing to me; I don’t know how to balance those two things.

"Catfish" by Jimi Hendrix (1967).

How did you put your playlist together? Essentially, I took the two big musical forces in my life, hip-hop and rock, and juxtaposed some of my favorite songs from each genre from across time. I decided to split the playlist up into three parts. There's a number of songs that I have heard since my childhood, most notably Missy Elliott and B.I.G. These songs influence my taste today, so I included some rap songs I came to love in my late teens. While I lived in New Hampshire, I got into the rock scene and specifically the 60s-70s rock era, so I included some Doors, Led Zepplin and Pink Floyd to shows that sort of whitewashed music taste. Finally, I included songs which had overlaps or had a lot to do with being in a confusing space; these include Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed's song, Can I Kick it?, and Radiohead's “How to Disappear Completely.”

What do you love about mixed race in the way you are? It gives me permission to perform my identity how I want. I guess you always have the option to perform your identity how you want, but being in a grey space has made me realize that there’s not a defined thing I should be doing in this grey space. There’s no socially-defined thing. I pass as white, so maybe that’s what society would expect of me, but I really fit into so many different things that I can do, can project however I want. But then again, it brings that challenge of fitting into the group, being legitimate.

I love the history that I’ve adopted, I love the struggles that I can understand. I love the different cultures that I get to see and be a part of. It’s given me breadth of experience, and I like that.

When I was in high school, my sister and I loved watching a show called In Plain Sight. Its first two seasons were filled with nuanced storylines, characters and relationships. But before season three, the network fired the show’s creator, and the new director changed the tone and general experience of the show considerably. Although we did like some of the changes, it was never really as good. Yet we were so invested in the characters that we kept watching. We weren’t surprised to find out the show was going to be cancelled, but we still made an occasion of watching the finale together.

And it was terrible. It was contrived, it was cliché, it was rushed and it threw so much of the characters’ development out the window.

That was over three years ago. But a couple of weeks ago, it came up when I said something about how Marshall Mann, the main character’s partner-in-not-crime, is one of my favorite characters in fiction. My sister asked if I still watched the show, since I have the DVDs of the first two seasons. I said no, to which she responded, “Me neither. The finale just ruined the whole thing for me.”

* * *

A lot’s happened to me this year beyond my fictional realm. I lost my job at a place that has meant the world to me since since middle school; both my grandmother and great-uncle, both of whom I was close to, passed away within a 36 hours of each other; and I have continued to struggle with PTSD from abuse I experienced at the hands of someone who was once my best friend.

Of course, none of these events are good. But their surrounding circumstances weren’t always bad—in fact, each of these were once my go-to when I needed to feel happy. When school felt overwhelming, I could listen to “Safe and Sound” by Capital Cities and know I’d be back at my job soon. Just seeing my uncle sitting our big brown armchair—smiling, as I almost always saw him—was calming to me, no matter how many dozens of my family members were crammed and chattering in my house. In the midst of my most intense depression, playing Dance Central with my friend made me smile more than almost anything.

There are the standalone good memories, too. When a student stopped me between classes and in their rushed, nervous, thirteen-year-old voice told me I was the first person who actually made them believe it was okay to be different. My grandmother’s quiet, mischievous smile as she muttered a comment about how “climax” can have a different meaning depending on the type of film. Going to a fancy Lebanese restaurant with my friend and his family, where my friend laughed so hard that Turkish coffee came out of his nose.

I’ve been struggling with the way I remember these moments. My idealistic side says I should be able to take the joy for what it was—I was happy, and I should remember being happy. But the rest of me can’t make that separation; to remember the joy is to remember what I’ve lost. Loss doubles-down: not only does it hurt to lose something or someone, but you also can’t have that exact support you would have sought in a time in difficulty.

I’m not someone who spends much time wishing things didn’t happen; I don’t like to waste my energy on something I can’t change. For me, it’s learning how to let those memories exist as times where I was happy, rather than letting the pain of the story’s end cancel that out. I want to be able to feel that unadulterated warmth I used to when “Safe and Sound” comes on shuffle, when I see pictures of my grandmother and uncle, when someone mentions Dance Central but right now that warmth is pushed down out by a cold, sinking feeling in my chest.

Bridget (she/her/hers, neutral nouns) has lived in Minneapolis, MN her whole life, but attends college in St. Paul, MN.

What communities do you consider yourself a part of? Broadly, I consider myself a part of the queer community. I also consider myself a part of the Macalester community, and then within that, the theatre community and the athletics community.

What aspect(s) of yourself drew you to this project? The whole “being enough” of something, or being “too much” of something. I feel like [that] a lot of the time. It’s limiting in a way, because I can’t participate fully, because I’m already too much of whatever it is. A lot of where I find that in me is with gender, and being “too masculine” or “too feminine” to do something.  

I was thinking about how I really love being strong and getting stronger, and as a DFAB [designated female at birth] person, a lot of people assume I can’t, or that I want someone else to do it, or that I [will] fail. And so there are these different things of “if I’m masculine enough, then maybe they won’t think that,” and that’s really...gross, to say the least. I’m always very determined to prove people wrong, even if that’s me getting really angry or messing something up or hurting myself [laughs].

There’s this “strong woman” component, where I want to be a feminist who supports women doing whatever they can do. But I sometimes feel I can’t be too close to that, because I also want to be like “that’s not me!” I don’t want to ever say “I’m strong because I’m not a woman.” I’m nonbinary, and I’m strong, and neither one caused the other.

Can you give a brief timeline of your relationship with gender roles/your understanding of your gender? My parents are very much not into gender roles. There was never any “You have do this because you’re this.” And I was never very good at being a girl in the way that society expects that to play out; I remember in elementary school I always wore hand-me-downs from my brother, and I would always talk about “I’m wearing boy’s jeans!” I was also really angry that I had to play softball instead of baseball.

That’s why I stopped playing sports! That, and you had to be on an all-girls’ team. Yeah, yeah, so true! That was a big thing when I got to Macalester. In high school, I did cross country and skiing, and both were co-ed teams except when we were racing. We all practiced together, we all worked [out] together. But then at Mac, it’s like, “you’re on the women’s cross country team!” and people will cheer “Go female runners!” to you. Yes, this happened. And so I said, “And Bridget!”

Did you always understand yourself as nonbinary? I think so. I don’t think anything about myself has changed in the recent past, as far as gender. There was a time in third or fourth grade when I insisted that everyone call me a tomboy, not a girl. I just think that I’ve had more of the words to describe it; it was a big deal to find out “Oh, other people actually think this way too, it’s not just me.”

How have you navigated athletics since coming to college, where it is so gendered? Mostly by ignoring it, honestly. My first year, I didn’t run, partially because I had never not run with a co-ed team, and so it was kind of weird. I also wasn’t sure if I wanted to do cross-country for me, or because of other people. But on deciding that it was an important thing to me, I’ve just had to put that aside, in some sense, because there’s no nonbinary team. Deciding that this is the team they want me on not because of who I am, but because of how I’m built, and just accepting that they’re not really talking about gender. And some days it’s harder than others—because some days people cheer “Go female runners!”

Because of the new NCAA rules and how they’re implemented at Macalester, have you considered trying to run on the men’s team, even if it’s still not accurate? I’ve definitely thought about it, because being surrounded by so many girls is sometimes awkward, but I never get that same feeling with guys...and this [is] very binaristic. In some ways, there would be a level of comfort, but not from being in the right place. It’d just be kind of a “HA! So there! I’m not on the girls’ team.” But it would be so much work and still not quite right anyways, [and] I love my team and my coach a lot.

In the end [though], the reason that I've never tried to be on the guys’ team is because I don't feel like I can really fight that battle. I'm not "trans enough" to be the one to challenge the rules. I would be in full support of dismantling the whole thing, I would feel like I was talking over other people if I tried to lead that fight.

Have you met any other nonbinary athletes? Not that I know of. I’ve never met anyone on a varsity team who’s been out as nonbinary. But I guess I’m not really out to my team either, except for the one girl who running in front of me when I said “And Bridget!” But I probably have. Especially because I think people don’t think about it, so they think they are cis and don’t question it. And that’s fine, as long as they’re happy. But I think there are more people who are.

I think it’s also [self-perpetuating], because it’s not an easy thing to just say “I’ll forget about my gender identity.” And that’s not to say “look at me, I’ve done this amazing thing!”; it just happens to be how I’m able to engage with it.

What kind of conflict have you experienced in trying to assert your gender? There’s the obvious, “that’s not a thing” [response]. There’s also an interesting idea that, by saying I’m not this or this, I’m solidifying the idea that those things exist. My mom’s always like “But why? Why don’t you want to be a girl? What is it about being a girl that you hate so much?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. I just don’t think I’m in that category; I’m in the middle.” I’m not saying that this category has to be all these specific things, and going back to what I was saying that I’m not strong because I’m not a woman. Those are two completely separate things. I’m not trying to solidify gender roles, but that’s something that comes up a lot.

Is there a reason you’re not out to your team? It’s probably unfair, but I don’t think they’d understand. Because here I am, running on a women’s team. And there just never seems to be a good time to be like, “Hey, by the way, guess what!” And since I feel like they understand me anyways, it doesn't matter as much to me.

You talked about how you feel like it’s limiting, and how you can’t participate fully. Can you give an example of a time that happened? Often, if I’m surrounded by a lot of women, such as on cross-country, I feel too masculine. I can’t really participate in this discussion, or whatever it is, because I can’t relate entirely. There are some things I can connect with, because I too have been told by guys “Oh no, I’ll get that for you,” or “It looks like you need some help with that,” when really it was “Let me do that for you, and you do nothing.” But I can’t be like, “Oh yes, as a woman, I have also experienced these things.”

But then also, I don’t appear masculine enough to be accepted as that, and so I still do get told “You’re probably not strong enough to do that” or “You can’t participate in this conversation” or “That’s probably not funny to you.”

Have you had any internal conflict with this? Yeah, with how I present myself. Like, if I know I’m going to be around certain people, [thinking] what am I wearing? What am I projecting in order to not have a conversation, or to blend in? Or, maybe they’ll think something different, maybe talk to me a little differently, maybe ask me a question. There’s the conflict of how your dressing affects how people perceive you, but that it shouldn’t have to matter.

I get mad at myself for thinking that gender is something that can be seen, and read from someone’s clothes. Because people do that. And so I feel like I have to subscribe to that, but at the same time, I’m like, “But I want to wear this thing, and I want to do this thing.”

Do you find yourself subscribing to it more often or just saying “This is what I want to wear”? More towards subscribing to it. I think about it a lot. One of the other interviews that you did, she was talking about wearing certain clothes to be more of the stereotypical lesbian—choosing when to wear certain things because I know that it will help me look a certain way. I definitely have clothes where I’m like “These are my queer clothes!” But also, all my clothes are queer clothes because they’re mine! [My friend] said that my first year, and I was like “That’s brilliant, that’s me!”

Can you talk about the Vines you made? These all show moments that I've experienced in real life. On a bad day I get pretty Minnesota-angry about it and store up that negative energy for an explosion later on. On a good day I try to make light of it—not only because it helps me feel better, but I also think people listen more to humor than ranting.

Why did you choose Vine? I'm not super-familiar with new media in general, perhaps a result of having [a] lovely slide phone, so almost all of the possibilities were new territory for me. But I like the idea of Vines because you have to get to the point, and also because they are a great way to make people laugh. Also, I think about a lot of things in small moments anyways, so having six seconds actually felt like a lot of time to tell the story.

What do you love about being nonbinary? I feel like it sometimes allows me to be more outgoing with people. More people are willing to accept me or talk to me because I can be part of [their] group, I can blend in. Which is cool, because it allows me to get to know more people more broadly.

I love that I don’t have to be anything at all. I do often subscribe to these things because there’s pressure to fit into groups, but really, I don’t have to—I can do whatever the heck I want. There’s no gender role for that.

Z (he/him/his) grew up in Sioux Falls, SD, & has since lived in St. Paul, MN, Washington, DC, and Brooklyn, NY.

What aspect(s) of yourself drew you to this project? I was really intrigued by the phrase “dismantling definition.” I’ve kind of shifted towards being a process-type of person, thinking about how things evolve day-to-day and week-to-week; this potential to keep changing. For me, class identity and educational background in particular can be fluid, because your identity when you’re growing up isn’t always your identity for the rest of your life. It’s been interesting for me to lean into that idea of not having to have a set definition or label.

Can you give a brief timeline of your relationship with class identity? I was raised by a single, working parent—union background, working-class neighborhood. Class was the first thing where I started seeing the spectrum of privilege and thinking about where I fit into it. But I didn’t really start thinking about that, claiming the working-class identity, until I got to college and took a class that opened up [my] mind, really thinking about “What does it mean to be working-class?” For me, as somebody who’s first-gen college student and now college graduate, that’s something that’s really salient that I can latch onto. But going to Macalester, getting this very elite education, there’s a different expectation that comes with a bachelor’s degree. Thinking about how the types of opportunities I have are different from my sister, who dropped out of high school. There are moments where my working-class identity is very salient, and there are other points where I have to process the fact I have a college degree [as I’m] trying to articulate certain things to my family when they haven’t set foot on a college campus.

Where do you feel like those different expectations are coming from? I think a really good example is, a few years back, there was an article about the head cheesemonger at the St. Paul Cheese Shop. He was basically saying how, [when] people visit their family members who are graduating, they see people who are college-aged or a few years out [working at the shop] and say “What do you really want to do?” And he was like, I’m happy with what I’m doing. We pay a living wage. But going to a highly selective liberal arts school, you’re expected to have certain outcomes. We have this luxury of aspiring for [certain things]. I think that’s more of what I mean by the expectations.

I know it’s all fronts; my family will be proud of me whatever I do. But there is this kind of sense for me that’s a little internal, thinking about what are my expectations for myself. I got to this point, didn’t really have a blueprint of how you get to college, how you get through college. And now that I’ve graduated, what do I do? There’s not an example for me, at least from my own family.

But I think part of it is society as well. While I think it’s healthy in some cases, it can also be detrimental—the ways in which we talk about accessing education, and what you do with it afterwards, what’s a “useful” career. But that’s a whole other conversation.

What are some of the ways this has manifested for you as you’ve moved into the professional world? In the same way there are barriers for people to get to college—you don’t have family members who know what the SAT is, or the FAFSA—for me, the most tangible aspect is not knowing the lingo all the time, or the tacit understandings that people operate in. This unwritten rule of networking, or how you’re supposed to talk to supervisors. I had a position last year where someone was like “if they offer you the position, you have to negotiate your salary.” The salary I was told to negotiate—and thankfully, I didn’t have to—would have been almost shameful to be like, “this isn’t good enough for me,” when thinking of people back home, and how much they’re making for what they’re doing. But I have to put things in perspective and advocate for myself, and say “this seems a little unreasonable.”

But then, on the flip side, on a hierarchy of needs, these are certain levels up for me to be able to go home and worry about over dinner, as opposed to not having the opportunity to...I don’t know how to put it.

Being privileged enough to have these concerns? Yeah, exactly.

Has that affected your relationship with your family? I feel like I have a sense of obligation, a sense of the love and the commitment that they made to get me here, that I owe it to them and to myself to say that I have work to do to make sure that, when I go home, I’m not just that brother who bailed.  How do I make sure that when I go home for Christmas, that I’m engaged and present, and not as if I’m playing catchup for a year’s worth of time—trying to fit back into the fabric and not assert my own ideas of “Oh, I’ve been living in New York for x number of years, this is who I am now.” It’s “this is who I’ve always been.” It’s wanting to follow my dreams, but also make sure that I stay authentic.

My sister, for example, she’ll say “You’re really smart, but you have no common sense.” It’s in a very loving way, but it’s one of those things that for me of putting myself in a mindset of “How is the person I’m talking to about whatever petty issue I’m dealing with, will they actually care?” And of course, as family members, they’ll say they care, but is there a burden of me trying to put petty, removed issues on them? Taking a step back.

What are you doing now, and how does that fit into all of this? I’m part of the New York City Urban Fellows Program, which is a nine-month program that connects recent college graduates with placements at different city agencies in New York. I currently work at the New York City Economic Development Corporation, and I do planning, development, transportation—the neighborhood-development side of things.

I was Bonner Scholar at Macalester. Most people who do Bonner are first-gen, a lot of students of color—students who have work-study but also want to do community engagement. They give us a chance to do our work-study at a nonprofit, or do something that we’re passionate about in the community. The Bonner Scholars’ national model is “access to education, opportunity to serve.” That, for me, has been a really important framework when I think about not only my own commitment to public service, but also the general theme of navigating working-class identity and being a first-gen graduate: You get the keys to the gate, and so how are you going to open the gate a bit wider for the people who come after you?

Have you met other people who have also been juggling this dynamic? Yeah, it’s great. When you hear certain buzzwords or certain phrases, you know “I’m going to like this person, because they get it.” So for me, [that happens] if somebody says something about working-class or first-gen labels, or having single parents. I feel it’s a very transformative experience for friendships, especially. People—at least people I’ve met, and have now become friends with—tend to open up a lot easier once they realize that. It’s like, you don’t have the same experience as me, but you get it. It’s almost like you’re in on this little secret. It creates a greater sense of trust; you don’t have to explain certain parts of yourself.

Is there anything that’s come up in these conversations that surprised you? It’s been surprising for me that, meeting people who have this shared working-class/first-gen identity, [there] is this sense of pride. I’ve never met a group of people that hustles more than people who are the first in their family to go to college. There’s this sense of obligation, that you are setting the tone for future generations, that you’re working towards something. That’s something I didn’t really think about when I was first claiming that identity, and it took a while for me to get to that point; I always approached it from this sense of unease and uncertainty. And there are still those constant daily challenges, but in thinking about the amount of hope, and this sense of “I’m doing stuff, we’re gonna make a change”—it’s been really awesome to be a part of that community.

How did you choose Spotify for your new media piece? I definitely have the pipe dream of hosting my own NPR music show. But also, a lot of the playlist [is] punk-heavy; growing up, punk rock was the first thing that really opened my mind, and my entire framework to all these different justice movements: social, economic, racial, environmental. It really activated me into consciousness. You have your pop-punk bands from the suburbs, so many broken hearts and all that kind of stuff, but for me my favorite songs are the ones that have been charged, focusing on the macro-trends of class politics [and] ones that are thinking of the person as political.

I’ve also been thinking lately [about] how welcoming a space punk rock is supposed to be, and how in reality, it’s not a super welcoming space. You have a lot of cis white dudes who are angry and moshing—and I’d put myself in that category. But I think it’s an important lesson for me to think about: how do you navigate honesty and authenticity in a music community that claims to be about one thing, but the environment it creates does not hold up to that ideal? The tension in that community, and in myself.

What was the song-selection process like? There were some artists or songs I felt an odd obligation towards, such as Rise Against or Propagandhi—bands that accelerated my class consciousness way back when. I included classics like Bob Dylan and the Dropkick Murphys, and I was this close to throwing Bruce [Springsteen] on, [but] I began to wonder about the types of perspectives that are typically portrayed in the working-man anthem. Reflecting on this helped me create a more expansive playlist that explores both personal and societal aspects of class identity.

It was also interesting to see the final breakdown between punk versus other genres: I've never really identified with country, or even folk, but a number of the songs I included fall into those categories. It may be where I'm from, or the people I care about, but I think these songs capture a certain aesthetic and are grounded in working-class culture.

How did you decide to arrange the songs? I found myself concerned with balance as I put the playlist together.  I wanted the playlist to follow an arc that follows a bit of my own narrative: one that began benignly, then indulged in defiance and shifted toward introspection before embracing a more nuanced and self-loving perspective.

Is there anything I haven’t asked about that you want to add? Having a single parent, having a sister who dropped out of high school, or having family members who didn’t go to college—that’s [been] a very foundational experience for me, shaping my politics and my identity. But I’ve been struggling with, as I get older, how much of that story can I actually own, and how much of it is theirs? It’s always shaping me, but also, how long can I say I’m working-class? Especially if I get an advanced degree, if I’m a professor or at some white-collar job at a government agency.

I was talking to one of my friends about this, and she was like, “Just don’t become Ben Carson.” Or, don’t become one of those people who use their upbringings to be like “I turned out fine! Screw everyone else!” This sense of being entrusted with this, an obligation I have to that story outside of me, especially considering the privilege that I’ve gained in graduating from college. Not wanting to claim a narrative that is no longer mine. How do you stay true to your roots, but also stay authentic? That’s a recurrent theme that I’ve been wrestling with: how to embrace that side of me, but not embrace it in a dishonest way. They’re not easy answers, and it’s always a process, always shifting.

Noel Quiñones (he/him/his) grew up in the Bronx, NY, attended college in Swarthmore, PA, and recently moved back to Queens after graduating this past spring.

The word Latino, rather than Latinx, Latin@ or other variations, is specifically used in this article at Noel’s request.

What communities do you consider yourself a part of? I’m Afro-Latino, Puerto Rican. I’m a part of the artistic community, the slam poetry and spoken word community. I’m a New Yorker, a Swattie—that’s what we call people who went to Swarthmore—and a 90s kid. I’m definitely a 90s kid.

What aspect(s) of yourself drew you to this project? About eight months ago, halfway through my last semester of senior year, I started identifying as Afro-Latino. That has been really hard for other people, but it’s been great for me! [laughs] It’s been great for me to identify myself, but it’s been interesting, the responses I’ve gotten. So when I read the description for Just Right, and this idea of being “enough” and everything, I was like “whoa, that’s what’s happening to me right now.”

What sparked the change? I didn’t really hear anyone use the word Afro-Latino until my second year at Swarthmore. I was like “What’s that? That’s really interesting,” and then started doing a lot of research about Puerto Rico and Afro-Latino movements. I realized I [was] one of the only Latinos spending a ridiculous amount of time at the Black Cultural Center. I reflected on where I grew up in the Bronx, who I grew up with, and how Afro-Latino was the best way to describe my upbringing as well as how I wanted to identify. I finally had a word for it.

You said it was great for you, but hard for other people? Anti-blackness in the Latino community is ridiculous. It was a lot for my family, who were just like “Yeah, but you know, don’t forget about Spain.” [Someone] said to me “I just don’t understand where all this black stuff is coming from. It’s so sudden; why are you so into that?” Or like, “Aww, that’s great, look at you knowing your history, good job.” But not taking it as something they should also understand; the person who told me that is also Afro-Latino.

And there’s also just some straight-up racism: the common phrase in Latino culture is “Tiene pelo malo,” so “You have bad hair,” or “Don’t date someone with bad hair.” And “bad hair” means like, natural, nappy hair. Things like that. When I started growing out my own hair, that was interesting.

Noel performing with Julian Randall as Piel Café, their two-man Afro-Latino Spoken Word Poetry Collective, at Emerson College during their tour this past fall.

Was that a choice related to this, or was it incidental? It was incidental, actually. I just started growing it two years ago, and then I started realizing the comments I was getting were connected to anti-Blackness. Something my mom said was “Well, you’re growing out your hair, but don’t ever get cornrows, because if you get cornrows you’ll look like the kids from the Bronx, and we left the Bronx. And we’re not trying to go back, we’re not trying to make you look like a hoodrat.” And I was like “That’s great, thank you.”

When did your family leave the Bronx? We moved when I was in eighth grade, so that was in 2007. To Queens.

What was that like for you? Do you feel like that’s played into this at all? Damn, yeah, maybe it did. I never even thought of that. The neighborhood I grew up in in the Bronx was more diverse than where I live now [in Queens]. I felt kind of hurt that we moved, and disconnected. I moved out here, and at the same time I started at this new elite private high school that was very, very different from anything I had ever seen. Those experiences made me want to be more Latino—to like, prove that I was Latino. But it made me work harder to learn about my culture. That’s the other side of why I wanted to do this [interview]: this idea of not feeling Latino enough.

Was that more of a feeling you got from the Latino community or the White spaces you were in? Definitely came more from the Latino community. I’m not fluent in Spanish. I can get by and understand, I know slang. But that constant nervousness. There’s all these different cultural things you have to barter with. That’s one of the reasons I started learning how to dance salsa: I was like, “if I know that, then people will accept me.” I ended up loving [it], so it became a thing for me, instead of a thing I had to do for other people. But it definitely started from the Latinos who were like “Oh, you don’t have rhythm. You’re white.” Or “you speak Spanish without an accent; you’re not Latino.”

It’s interesting that you were told you were told you were white, but you were also experiencing this anti-blackness at the same time. Do you feel like that’s relevant? I feel like that’s actually at the core of me wanting to do Just Right. There’s all these cultural things that I’m trying to push aside so I can be Latino enough, and at the same time, I’m asserting my blackness. I’m constantly balancing those. And the backlash is different, but also similar: this idea that you want to preserve whatever that community is, or what you think that community is.

Members of the Latino community who I’ve encountered want to preserve it so it’s not considered black and it’s not considered white. The discussion is always black and white, and Latinos feel left out very often. [There’s] this fear that we will be forgotten. But there’s this other side, that Latino as a word is stupid. It was engineered by the U.S. government because it was “too confusing” to count all our countries. I only say Afro-Latino because people wouldn’t understand if I use the term that I actually identify as, which is Afro-Boricua.

“I realized I can’t use a religion metaphor that’s not Christian or Catholic to show how deeply spiritual I am, because no one would understand it. That was one of the most upsetting moments I’ve had with my writing. The boundaries that just exist for me because of colonial replacement of language.” Photo from Piel Café performance at Emerson College.

What’s it like for you to have to that do that? It is a little frustrating. I always need to feel out whether someone wants to hear about it, because it takes a few minutes for me to explain. Spain came up with the name “Puerto Rico,” but it’s so ingrained into the culture that if I questioned it, Latinos would be like “Why do you feel some type of way about ‘Puerto Rico’?” Because it was imposed by a colonial power! I cringe a little, but I try to explain it whenever I can.

I had this moment with my dad where I was like “I’m looking into the indigenous language of Puerto Rico.” And he was like “Why the hell do you want to learn that? We speak Spanish now. That’s all that matters.” You can’t tell Latinos “Yo, Spanish is also a colonial language that was imposed upon us.” But I think it’s all about reclaiming language itself. I drop it in some of my poems, like Boricua or Yocahú, which means G-d in Boriken.  It just really frustrates me, struggling to name myself in spaces where doing so requires you to add in a three-minute explanation that people may or may not be responsive to.

I haven’t even talked about the backlash from the black community.

I was going to ask you about that. How has that been? Thankfully, I haven’t gotten a lot of backlash; a lot of it has been perceived things in my head that I’m wary about because I’m trying to not create tension. Especially now, with everything that’s happening with police brutality and Black Lives Matter. I think it’s also so important to clarify Afro-Latinidad; [it’s] not equatable, I don’t think, to the African-American experience in American society. That’s where a lot of the backlash comes from, that I’ve heard for Afro-Latinidad: “You’re not experiencing what it actually means to walk around as black in the U.S.” And it’s like yes, that’s true.  And the fact that, because I’m lighter-skinned, I get certain privileges with that.

There are really interesting moments, though. I had a friend of mine say “All right, you have my permission, you can say the n-word.” And I was like…oh man, what does that mean for my place, and how I interact with the black community? Again, I saw that as a cultural bartering thing. You have the n-word, you have salsa dancing, you have speaking Spanish—all these things. Where did you grow up? Who did you grow up with? How do you speak? That was just a different type of cultural boundary, a place where you have to barter to “get in,” or not, or whatever that means.

How has this connected into your work in slam poetry? There’s not a lot of very prominent Latino slam poets right now. And so being someone in the circuit who identifies as Latino has been interesting, because of the backlash I get because there’s Spanish in my poems. It’s not a lot, and I translate most of it, but some people feel some type of way about it. [Those poems are] perceived in a way that puts me in a place of representing Latinidad, when at other times I don’t feel Latino enough, because I’m not fluent and all these other reasons. I’m on tour right now with my Afro-Latino spoken word collective, Piel Café, and I’m being booked at all these Latino open mics and Latino venues, and I’m still trying to understand what is my place within that community.

What’s it been like to be a part of that representation that hasn’t been there? It’s been amazing. It’s been from people of all ages, which is really important to me. I had a show two weeks ago at a high school, and this kid came up to me and he said “I didn’t understand my identity until I heard your poems, and heard you speak about it.” He emailed me later, this long message about how his family—he’s from Colombia—had ridiculed him for being too American. This idea of trying to piece together all these different cultures and keep yourself intact. And he sent me this poem that he wrote...it was crazy.

Two days ago at this show I had, this guy came up to me and was like “Yo, man, are you psychic? I was just talking about Afro-Latinidad in the car as we were driving over! It’s crazy, there’s no acceptance of this idea, but it’s true: there’s Afro-Latinos everywhere. It’s a movement, and it needs to be stated.”

And then, I taught a poetry workshop to third through fifth graders. I was like okay, we’re not gonna get deep. But then we did! It was like thirty [kids], and there were five really strong-minded Latina girls who were the light of my existence. I had this third-grade Dominican girl go up [at the showcase afterward] and be like “Noel inspired me to write about the Dominican Republic.” I was like, I have succeeded in life. I did it. And the parents were coming up to me and being like “Your voice is so important, this story is so important. My kid got so much out of it.” It’s just like...I can’t handle this. It’s amazing.

Noel teaching a poetry workshop on diaspora at Riverdale Country Elementary School in the Bronx.

Regarding the idea of “piecing together different cultures while keeping yourself together,” how do you try to do that? Just being like “I am Afro-Boricua. I am Afro-Boricua.” This process of naming yourself—making sure you name yourself when other people are trying to do it for you, and not letting them.

Why did you choose Twitter to create your new media piece? I chose Twitter because it resembles the challenges of editing a poem. When I edit, I always want to be concise while still staying true to my message and my audience. When given only 140 characters, I am forced to be a better writer. Twitter offers me that connection, making me feel comfortable putting my poetry there, even if they are only one-liners.

What do you love about being Afro-Boricua? Puerto Ricans are the proudest freaking people to be from Puerto Rico. I love it. In a way, I feel like that’s a form of resistance that no one acknowledges. I’ve been [asked] by friends from other cultures, “Why are you people always yelling, and demanding everyone knows that you’re Puerto Rican?” And it’s like, maybe it’s because of all of the horrible stuff that’s happened to us, the fact that we’re not a real country right now, that it’s a colony.

That pride is what I love about being Afro-Boricua. That pride, and also the fact that it’s naming what has not been named before. Everybody wants to talk about how our blood comes from Spain, which means we could possibly be royalty, all this BS. No one’s ever like “Yo, we could possibly be from Africa! And that’s great!” Nobody’s saying that. But I’m saying that! That’s the power of white supremacy and colonialism and all that crap. And in the face of that, my people are just yelling that all the time. I can’t get enough of it. To be from a culture that, in its basic tenants when you’re growing up, is like “You better let everybody know!” is beautiful.

Noel's Tweet

Is this mouth enough to barter for an American tongue? I heard it can carve memory out of anything until your throat calls the knife father.

— Noel Quiñones (@NQNino322)

November 12, 2015

Learn more about Noel and his poetry at elninoquinones.com and on his YouTube channel.

Kathy Clarke (she/her/hers) was born in Dallas, TX and moved to Ashville, NC at age 8. She attended boarding school in Mercersberg, PA, spent a year at Culford School in Bury-St. Edmunds and now lives in St. Paul, MN.

All photos in this story are from Kathy’s Snapchat series. The full Snapstory can be viewed at the bottom of this page.

What communities do you consider yourself a part of? I’m a child of queer parents, child of divorced parents, graduate of the Rainbow Mountain Children’s school, a graduate of Mercersburg Academy. I’m a white, cisgender, straaaight? woman...emphasis on the question mark. I’m an older sibling. I’m a summer birthday. I’m a grown-up emo kid. That’s super important to me.

Which aspect(s) of yourself drew you to this project? The story of strange story that is all my freakin’ moms. I was born without a father; my mom had me and my sister through donor insemination. Everything you can assume, my story resists those assumptions. If I said I was raised with two moms, you would assume that those moms were romantically involved, but when I was born, they weren’t. And when I say “my parents got divorced” you can assume they were married, but they weren’t because it was the ‘90s in Texas. (But it was a divorce, let me tell you.) And then when you say “my mom remarried” you assume she actually got remarried, but she didn’t; she was just with another woman for 13 years. And you assume if I were to say “I have three mothers” that they would all identify as queer. But one of my moms, my birth mom’s first partner, Anne, didn’t come out [to my sister and me] until I was a senior in high school. We’d known, of course, but my sister took it really hard. Well, my sister took it initially hard and got over it quickly, and then I was super initially supportive and then had difficulty with it later on in the summer.

How did you have more difficulty with it later? The way she came out to us was super dramatic, actually. She came up to [our] boarding school and took us out for donuts at like 10 am on a Saturday morning, and she’d brought her friend Lois with her. We knew Lois: she was a mom of kids we were friends with at Rainbow Mountain, but she was also one of those moms who was always helping at school, and so was Anne. So we knew they were friends.  

So Anne says she has news for us, and Emma [my sister] goes “Oh, do you have a boyfriend?” because that’s the kind of jokes she makes. And Anne goes “No,” and takes our hands the way mothers do, and goes “I have a girlfriend.” And Emma’s face just falls. She was joking and she’s upset that she was right. She pouts for the rest of the day. Whereas I was initially super verbally supportive and happy, and very ready to take Lois into my life. But then later that summer…I wasn’t resistant to it until it changed my experience of my mother. Anne had always been a person who was very present in her house; she worked from home, she didn’t really go out. But when she started being with Lois, she wanted to go to bonfires every Saturday night, and Lois would be over cooking dinner, and there was this sort of disruption of what I could anticipate from a Saturday night at Anne’s house: not watching Law and Order with Anne as it had been since I could remember, but a bonfire at Lois’s with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Which, for someone with social anxiety like I have, was just really not on the agenda. But Emma was fine with all of that.  

Do you ever have any internal conflict with having three, and now four, moms? For me, I think the biggest conflict is the degree to which I feel like I belong in queer spaces. Especially [because] I don’t generally present queer, and don’t feel queer, but absolutely I feel like I belong in queer spaces more than not-queer spaces because I was raised in them. My step-mom Patrice, who was my mom’s second partner was one of those super political lesbians. She found this resource for the city of Asheville called The Lavender Pages, I think, with ads and classifieds for any sort of business person or contractor who was queer in any capacity, but particularly lesbian. And they were the only people who ever came to our house and did anything.

What was this like for you growing up? It was very easy for me to own this, having queer parents and growing up in a queer space, when it was a non-issue—so when I was at a super-hippie school in this super-hippie town. There were other kids with queer parents at my school.

Then I get to this reasonably-conservative high school, and I have to own this part of my upbringing a lot more forcefully. And also have to contextualize it for some people; there was a girl freshman year who asked me “if your parents are gay, does that mean you’re gay?” She absolutely could not understand that the answer was “no.” What I actually did was look her dead in the eye and said “Because straight people always have straight kids, right?” And she went “Yeah.”

So what that translated to was a lot of involvement in what we then called the Gay/Straight Alliance, and a lot of just telling people about this. Junior year at a community gathering, which is like a [biweekly] assembly, I told my story, and told my parents’ story. Showing people that families like mine are present and visible, but not because we are queer families. We’re visible because we’re here.

How do you feel like you’ve grown from having four moms, and the questions it brings up? It’s been very formative in my concept of my identity, especially in the way that I separate my identity from that of my sister, because the way we treat this is very different. She spent more time at various conservative prep schools and is thereby a lot more conservative about revealing this part of herself. Whereas I’ve always felt it’s my duty to bear this flag for my parents and to fight for equal treatment.

For me, being “the activist kid” about queer issues was very formative for my identity in high school. Especially when I went to boarding school in Britain. If Mercersburg was middle-of-the-road leaning toward conservatism, Culford was an upstanding British Christian school. To a degree, I weaponized my upbringing. Kids would be saying derogatory comments about queer people of any variety—usually gay men and lesbian women—and I would snap at them: “You know this is offensive to someone who was raised by gay parents, right?” And they would look at me. It absolutely felt like a grenade, shutting people down when they were assuming normativity, and it was a way I could check them, and make them check themselves and realize they were making assumptions…you know, without hitting them over the head with a bat.

For some reason, I felt like those were my issues too, that I had inherited them from my mother—from all my mothers. Especially because [they] are all very passive about queer issues. I’m their only source of information other than very normative Gay And Lesbian Equality-type stuff, because they were all second-wave feminists, and they feel like they’ve fought their fight.

This feeling of needing to fight for my parents and for my peers didn’t really translate into college. I had a feeling that fighting that fight wasn’t staying in my lane anymore. Even though I might be queer? I don’t know.

Have you ever met other people who share this part of you? [laughs] I met another girl in fourth grade who also had three moms, which was my situation at the time. It wasn’t just that she had gay parents, it was that she had more than two of them, and that she was also a donor insemination kid. And I was like “NO, THAT WAS MY THING. YOU CAN’T HAVE THAT. IT’S TOO WEIRD FOR MORE THAN JUST ME AND MY SISTER TO HAVE YOU CAN’T HAVE IT.” I found myself being super critical; there was very much a degree to which I was policing who could have my experience and who couldn’t.  But also, I was in fourth grade. That time was about drawing lines and making boundaries and figuring out how I was different from others.

But other than that girl, I’ve never met someone with more than a set of queer parents—no one else has had so close to my exact upbringing. But other kids with queer parents in high school…I was always super upset that I didn’t find out they had queer parents immediately. I was upset they didn’t seek me out and want to talk about it.

I’m not sure if it was a personal thing, like “How could you keep me feeling isolated for so long?” But also “How could you keep yourself separated from me when there’s this obvious bond here?” I think that upset me because it was such a big part of how I formed my identity, that I wanted other people to form their identities around that as well, and reach out to me because of that.

There was absolutely a desire to not feel alone in my experience. Especially because my sister had spent so much time separating herself from it and rejecting it in a lot of ways, finding others was important to me. But at the same time, I almost wasn’t fussed. I knew my family’s experience was singular, and I wasn’t really ever expecting to find other people with experiences like mine.

Have you sought out any online communities? I haven’t, strangely enough. Upon doing this interview, I’m actually reflecting about why I haven’t. I think that, especially with online communities, I’m afraid it’s going to be more of a place for airing one’s grievances. And I’m all for a good stitch-and-bitch, but the reasons I have to complain about my parents aren’t connected to their queerness.

What would you want from a community about this, whether online or elsewhere? Honestly, a recognition of the fact that the kids are all right. I think that’s a thing I have felt that I could fight for, that I was absolutely staying in my lane: when I was getting in Republicans’ faces and being like “Yo, I  have queer parents and all the shit I’ve achieved. All of those things you said about kids being messed up—I am not that.”

There’s this kid from Iowa who made this speech that went viral. I think he had two moms. We watched it in English class. My asshole of an English teacher made us watch it four times in one day—for the sake of rhetoric, because the rhetoric was brilliant—but I was sobbing. Because this kid was explaining my experience. That was kind of the only time I saw it outside of any immediate experience I had with other kids, the only time I ever really saw it on the internet or presented.

What do you love about having four moms? I love having all these parents. I love having all these people in my life who play a mother role. I love their nuances, and I love the ways in which they are flawed. Especially as a person who identifies as a woman, having all of these parents who are women – having their experiences as women to access and to have the legacy of their experiences is really important to me.

[It’s] important to note that I only have sisters as well. My family is just cisgender women. It’s been so central to my relationship with men particularly, and the way I had to learn to navigate that with nothing, being a pubescent girl realizing I was, in fact, interested in boys.

But I wouldn’t be me. I am so much a product of this feminine experience, and this total total feminine upbringing. I wouldn’t want to lose any part of myself, but especially this part of myself.

Can you talk a bit about the Snapchats you made? I was thinking about how it’s useful to use captioned photos to talk about the visible nature identities. I also like to use Snapchat to talk to people because it’s able to supplement facial expressions for tonal shifts that are often left out of text exchanges. Also, I'm a bit vain and I like my face.

Kathy’s Snapstory (picture changes every 7 seconds; loops back to start)

Lillian (she/her/hers) was born in Seoul, South Korea. She was adopted at four months old and grew up in Boston, MA. She now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has studied and worked in Seoul and Cuzco, Peru.

All photos in this story are from Lillian’s Just Right Instagram.

What communities do you consider yourself a part of? Korean adoptees, Korean American, Asian American, people of color, women of color, middle/upper-middle class. I identify really strongly as being a twin, I identify really strongly as being from Boston. Cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied. I think that about covers it, haha.

What aspects of yourself made you interested in being a part of this project? The idea of “not being enough” is kind of a lifelong journey for me. Actually, reading your first interview with a mixed-race person, I feel like there are a lot of similarities between people who are adopted and people who are mixed-race. People never feeling like they’re *enough* of either. I am fully Korean, but because I grew up in a white family I feel this pull. I never feel Korean enough, but obviously white people don’t see me as white. And I don’t want to be seen as white either.

Lots of people growing up were like “Oh, you’re just basically white, you talk white.” So I got a lot of “you’re adopted, so we basically just see you as white” stuff too.

K94-258 이명선

A photo posted by Lillian Hexter (@justrightproject.lillian) on Oct 18, 2015 at 2:55pm PDT

What are some other comments you got from peers? I remember my Asian American friend introduced me to his Asian American friend, and the first thing his friend said was “I’m just throwing this out there, but you talk like a white person.” And I was just like….wow, that’s just rude to say to someone you just met. But that’s just kind of my life in a nutshell. I’ve been thinking a lot over the past several years about how offended I was when people said that when I was growing up—whether it’s “you’re so whitewashed” or the whole banana/Twinkie thing.

But then I took this adoption class my first year at Macalester, and that illuminated a lot; I realized how much privilege there is in being able to navigate white spaces effectively, and the social capital that comes with being able to “talk white.” Even though it’s personally very offensive when people say that.

Do you feel like you get that comment more from Asian people or white people? Kind of equally, but it hurts more coming from Asian American people. Because of the desire to be accepted as one of them, but feeling like I never will be.

What was it like growing up with these parts of yourself? When I was younger I didn’t think about it as much. My parents were always really good at instilling a sense of identity in us—in me and my twin sister. I talk a lot in the plural because everything was with her. We went to Korean school, we went to Korea. Our parents read us books about being adopted or being Asian, so it was always just a normal part of my identity: I was Korean, my parents were white, just oh-so normal.

Going through high school was kind of hard. My school was thirty percent Asian and I was really excited about that, but then I immediately realized that I wasn’t actually accepted by Asian students. My sister had an experience—with someone who actually ended up being a good friend later on—where she asked if he could hang out with him and his friends after school and he went “Sorry, you’re not Asian enough for that.”

There was kind of a divide between the experiences of the Asian students at my high school [and ours], because a lot of them were first-generation American or recent immigrants; so [their] bond was more based in that experience.

And then, I don’t think anyone there ever saw Nora [my sister] and me as individual people. I don’t think anyone could tell you “Lillian did this, and Nora did this.” They just saw us as a unit. I remember I was at some social gathering right before I left for college, and as I was leaving I heard someone say “oh, I think that’s one of the twins!” That just summarized my whole high school experience: no one will remember us individually, we’re just “the twins.”

Family Day 2k14

A photo posted by Lillian Hexter (@justrightproject.lillian) on Oct 18, 2015 at 3:29pm PDT

Lillian (right) with her parents and twin sister Nora.

Do you feel like the “not Asian enough” sentiment has followed you out of high school? I think, in some ways, I identify more as being a person of color than being Asian American. Being Asian American has so many assumptions about immigrant experience. And technically, adoptees are 1.5 generation immigrants, so it is part of our story, but it’s very, very different. But identifying as a person of color…there aren’t the same kinds of set expectations. I feel like I have more power to shape my own identity or experience.

I’ve still definitely had “Asian-as-forever-foreigner” types of experiences, though. For example, one time I was looking at apartments with a friend who’s Asian American, and [the landlord] asked us [patronizingly] “Oh, when did you two arrive in this country?” Comments like that are more shocking to me, especially in contrast to all the “whitewashed” comments. I feel like it’s so obvious that I’m so Americanized, so it’s weird when people think I’m “fresh off the boat” or whatever. It’s like, have you ever talked to an Asian American person before?

What has it been like being able to be with your identical twin sister? Being adopted with a biological sibling makes a really big difference. Especially with an identical twin sister. Because transracial adoptees such as myself grow up in families that don’t look like them, so there’s this kind of ongoing narrative of “I just want to see my own face reflected back at me”—wanting to see someone who’s biologically related to them, who looks like them. A lot of people cite that as reasons they search for birth families and things like that. But I never really felt that because I had another person whose face literally reflected my face.

Do these parts of yourself create any kind of internal conflict? In terms of telling people “what I am” or claiming my ethnicity, I always make a point to say I’m a Korean adoptee; I feel like I can never just say “Korean American.” Because in saying that, people assume that you speak Korean, you understand Korean culture and traditions and know what it’s like to have Korean family. I always feel the need to say “I’m Korean, but I also grew up with white people.” I don’t want people to make assumptions because then I’m forced to reveal I’m adopted in an uncomfortable way, so I just chose to be up-front.

Have you gotten to meet other Korean adoptees? Other than your sister, of course. I was pretty fortunate that I grew up knowing a lot of adoptees, but I think meeting adoptees in adulthood has been really different. When I took that class, five of us and our professor who were adoptees. We ended up starting a transracial/transnational identity collective and pulled in all these other adoptees from all over campus. I’ve also gotten involved in an organization called Boston Korean Adoptees.

I’ve joked about how being adopted is kind of this “great equalizer,” where people can be totally different ages, come from totally different places, have totally different life experiences, but the fact that we’re adopted creates this really intense, intimate bond. Of course, I’m not going to be best friends with every Korean adoptee I meet, but it does create this base level understanding of who the other person is.

It’s also been really impactful for me to understand the politics of it all. I would love to move back to Korea because I think just the act of adoptees moving back to Korea is really political. Going back and being like “this is my home too.”

Reclaiming home

A photo posted by Lillian Hexter (@justrightproject.lillian) on Oct 18, 2015 at 3:18pm PDT

I was actually going to ask about that: people who were infants during the Korean war are in their fifties and sixties now. Is there an adoptee community in Korea? It’s a pretty prominent community in Korea, and I saw then when I went back. There’s a really good New York Times Magazine article that highlighted all these adoptees who have returned to Korea. Most of the people interviewed are really politically active in Seoul. That article impacted me so much; I had never really been interested in living in Korea, but I read it and went “I want to be a part of this." I think it’s really powerful for Korean adoptees to form this community in the country that gave them away, so to speak.

Have there been any other writings by Korean adoptees that have impacted you? I was telling my therapist—who’s Korean American—about this article I’d read recently by a Korean adoptee. He was talking about how he’d written this line “I just want to be old and sitting on a porch with my wife, knowing that the future is here.” And his editor was like “Wow, that’s a really weird sentiment.” But his Korean friend read it and said “Wow, that’s a really Korean thing to say.” So I told her this, and she said “as we’ve been having this whole conversation, I’ve been thinking that so much of what you’re saying is so Korean.” I love comments like that; they’re really validating. But I’m also always shocked to hear [them]. The author of this piece wrote that too: when his friend said that, he was like, “I wouldn’t know.” It’s powerful to me, like there’s something written in our blood.

Have you done other things to connect back to this part of yourself? I’m really into symbolic gestures, and, as an adult, it’s important for me to reclaim these parts of myself that have been lost through adoption. So when I was [in Korea] this summer, I applied for an F4 visa, which gives me permanent resident status. It’s for overseas Koreans, but in 2012, there was a whole movement to have it opened up to Korean adoptees—which makes sense, because we were Korean citizens when we were born, and that was stripped from us involuntarily. For me, this is really cool because it’s this reclaiming of Korean nationality. It’s really powerful for me to have this Korean ID.

Can you talk about the Instagram you put together? I chose Instagram because it's probably my most frequently used form of new media. I really enjoy photography and photo editing, and I like the challenge of just posting one photo at a time. Also, I think photos play a huge role in the process of adoption: adoptive parents receive photos of their children before meeting; photos are often all adopted people have of their birth families (though most international adoptions don't have photos at all); reunion with birth family usually includes sharing photos to fill the void of the previous decades of separation. To me, Instagram seemed like a natural choice with which to represent my complex identity as a transracial and transnational adoptee.

“Just Right” is about hearing people’s stories, about learning from those stories, about learning to find contentment in ambiguity. 

On this blog, I want to bring this beyond the interviews and into a larger scope: how do definitions manifest over time? What do look like in structural settings, like language or government? What are some everyday situations where this comes up in a way that’s subtle but significant? I might talk about something that happened to me a few days ago, a pattern I’ve noticed, a relevant current event or something from my own life.

For instance: Let’s talk about the word “opposite." 

Opposite is a word that gets used to describe all kinds of pairings: opposite direction, opposite sex, opposite viewpoint, opposite personality, opposite opinion. Describing things as opposites inherently says two things about them: there are only two options and they have little to nothing in common.

That’s a pretty limiting situation. 

The problem is perhaps more obvious when describing things like gender or sex, as there are far more than two genders and the idea of two biological sexes has caused a lot of harm. Or, more benignly, cats and dogs: despite both being four-legged, small-to medium-sized domestic animals that are adorable and often fluffy, the two are often pitted as opposites. But the issue can be less evident when talking about more abstract things like experiences, viewpoints or approaches to an issue. 

Here’s an example: When I still identified as a woman (please note that I no longer do), I was in an all-women’s space where we were talking about our experiences with clothing. One woman shared that she’d gotten flak for being “too much of a girly girl,” with most of her wardrobe being pink, sparkly and/or lacy. I shared that I’d been bothered for not dressing “femininely enough,” often wearing loose-fitting clothes in darker colors. In response, the facilitator pointed to both of us said “So you’ve opposite experiences." 

But were they?

In both situations, others were telling us how we did/did not represent our gender “properly” through our clothes. In both situations, our harassers were forming their arguments on similar notions of how color and clothing relate to gender. In both situations, people felt the need to assert their opinions on womanhood—and if that was desirable—on the way we both dressed ourselves (as if it were their business, but that’s another article). 

So yeah, maybe through the lens of a (false) feminine/masculine binary, our experiences were “opposite”: whether it was desirable or not to “look feminine.” But even that is still an argument based in misogyny. In reality, these situations were quite similar.  But as soon as the facilitator held them up as opposites, the similarities became exceptions to the rule, because “opposite” is a nearly impossible hurdle to jump over. Had our experiences been allowed to coexist, we may have been able to explore not only the obvious overlaps, but also how the differences, once unpacked, are actually quite similar.   

Kenji (he/him/his) was born in New Jersey, grew up in Madison, WI, and spend his summers up in Toronto and Montreal where his extended family lives.

What communities do you consider yourself a part of? If I had to name a couple: I’m Asian American, I am mixed race in that I am part Asian and part white, I’m a queer person of color, college-educated, a member of Macalester College’s campus, cis man, able-bodied.

Can you give a brief timeline of your relationship with being mixed-race? It’s something I didn’t think about all that much growing up because, I was a redhead when I was younger, so I had that whiteness to fall back on. Even though my name is Kenji, which is one of the most common Japanese names for guys. I started thinking about it more [around the] end of elementary school/early middle school. My hair started to get darker—like now, it’s a darker brown-black-ish.

It kind of hit me when I started to realize my mom and her family were treated very differently from my dad and his family. Then in high school, I met more mixed kids, and I was just like “Oh! This is interesting.”  And I really thought about more when I got to college; Macalester’s campus has a lot of mixed people. It was one of those things that’s like “huh, this is interesting. I finally feel like there are other people who look like me around,” which had never happened before. And it became apparent that that had never happened before, which made me realize even more that it was a thing to think about. It’s been playing into my life a lot more these days.

Can you talk more about that—how it’s been playing into your life more? People have pegged me as...it’s weird to hear, but people are like “yeah, you’re the Asian friend” sometimes. People have definitely said that more recently than ever. And I have to think for a second about but am I actually Asian? Or am I not? And I’m like yes, I totally am, but also…should I qualify as “the Asian friend” sort of thing?

Sometimes people will look at me and be like “ah, you are Asian, but you’re not really Asian. You don’t have all the struggles that a lot of people face.” That’s something I’ve heard from a lot of mixed people too—that people say “it’s weird to hear you identify this way because you don’t have to deal with some of the stuff that we, as people who are fully this race, have to deal with.” Which is true, in some sense:I don’t have to deal with some of the shit my mom went through, or some of the stereotypes that a lot Asian people face because I can pass. But being mixed does present another set of problems, one of which is people saying “well, you’re not really __ because you have some white in you.” Which is dumb. So dumb.

Kenji's mom (center, with beads) with her sisters and their friends in the mid-1950s.

What was it like to first meet people who look like you, or who don’t necessarily look like you but share that experience?  

It was kind of a shock. I guess if you grow up in a situation where nobody looks like you, you never really expect anyone to ever look like you. As far as people who looked like me or had the potential to look like me, so, mixed Asian and white, there were two other people at my high school. And then I got to Macalester and there were seven people on my floor first year. It was just like...what?

What kinds of conflict have you experienced in trying to assert this part of yourself? There is an aspect, at least in my case, of being mixed where I don’t fit in with either. Being mixed is like its own identity. I know a lot mixed people who don’t identify as percent[s] something—they identify as mixed. There is this feeling of “you’re not going to be ____ enough” because you have this other part of you “polluting” that identify. Which…[shudders].

The white side of my family kind of doesn’t care, which is interesting. My mom has never had issues with them. They’ve always just kind of accepted everything and they’re fine with it. My mom’s side...they’ll talk about how lucky I am. Things like “You’re so pale compared to me!”, “You have double eyelids! You don’t have to get surgery like I did!" or “You get to be six foot one!” And it’s just like “you’re just super super lucky!” and the word lucky keeps popping up all the time. It’s one of those things where…yes, in some sense, based on how society works I am very lucky. But also, to basically hear your grandmother tell you that “you’re lucky because society’s not going to treat you like they treat us”…that’s a heavy thing.

Coupled with that is the idea that, because I’m partly white, I’m not Asian enough to understand a lot of things—the language and customs and stuff like that. Like “don’t even try to teach him, because he’s not going to get it, because he can’t.” Looking back, I wish I knew some things and had been taught some family traditions and things like that. I’m slowly learning them as much as I can, but it’s some things that are taught to kids when they’re like, two. And I just never got that.

What do you like about this part of yourself? I think one of the nicest things is the sense of community that it builds. Kind of a stereotype is that the moment you find someone else who’s mixed, it’s like an instant connection—you can talk about that. It’s one of those things where I’ve had conversations that have lasted like, four hours, solely about this. That’s how I’ve become friends with people.

I also really enjoy the mixing of cultures. Because, in a way, mixed people kind of are the embodiment of different cultures mixing. On my dad’s side of the family I get a lot of traditional German and English and Irish things and like…I got my dad’s alcohol tolerance [laughs].

On my mom’s side of the family, I get first-hand experience of a lot of traditional Japanese culture and food. I went to Japan, and even though I was pegged as “the foreigner,” I knew how to do all the traditional things you do at temples and [in] religious practices. I knew some of the customs and I knew how to not make an ass out of myself in restaurants, other things like that.

An American store in Tokyo called Chicago.

I know Disney’s movie adaption of Big Hero 6 got a lot of positive media for having two main characters who were mixed white and Japanese. Can you speak to that a bit?  I still don’t know how I feel about that movie. In the comic books, the main two characters are fully Japanese, but in the movie they made them mixed [Japanese and white]. Which, on one hand was like, okay, you’re going to make these characters more “likable” in making them whitened. But on the other hand, it’s like holy shit, there’s a Disney movie with characters that look like me when I was a kid. Straight-up, if you hold up a picture of young me versus the main character, it’s almost identical.

It’s an issue of lack of representation for one group, but a representation of my group, which also doesn’t have representation. It brings up the question of "is it okay to erase some kind of representation for the sake of another?”, which came up with a lot of the other changes they made, too. And I could be wrong, but I don’t think they were going into the movie being like “We’re gonna have mixed-race representation in this movie!” I think the intention was to get more viewers. I could talk all kinds of stuff with this movie for hours.

How do you feel like this intersects with other parts of yourself? On top of being a white-appearing person, I’m also a white-appearing man. Being a man of color is very different from being a white man. I have to be very cognizant of who’s around me. As awful as it is, men of color are definitely seen as more dangerous in a lot of situations. So it’s one of those things where it’s like if I’m ever walking alone down a street and I pass someone, I definitely try to make myself look whiter, because I know people will be less afraid of me. Which is terrible. It’s so terrible that I feel the need to do that and I hate that so much.

The intersectionalities are all very situational. It’s not something I’m constantly thinking about, and that’s part of my privilege as an able-bodied, cis man: I do think about my gender and ability in relation to how they affect other people in situations, but I’m not constantly thinking about it all the time, as I know other people are.

I definitely have had to learn how to make sure I’m not speaking over people and that sort of stuff, just based on who society deems has the right to talk and who has the right to put their opinions forward. That’s something that I try really hard not to forget about.

The people that are surrounding me also influences a lot. I was in Japan for two weeks over the summer, and I was the whitest-looking person in most of the rooms. And by that definition, I was “the white guy” in the room. Or like, I’d be one of two white guys, the other being an even more white-appearing person, and then we’re put into the same category because even though I am Japanese, I didn’t look it in that situation.

That otherization dynamic. It’s true. To my white family I’m half-Asian, to my Asian family I’m the half-white dude.

Could you talk about the Tumblr you decided to make to go along with this? I am completely not a new-media person, in that I don’t actively create this kind of media on a daily basis. So, this was a relatively new experience for me. I chose Tumblr because it gave me a chance to put not just my own feelings, but the feelings of others on a page, which I think is important when you think of identities. As in, speak your own truth, but don't forget other's truths.

Upon searching the “mixed race” tag, I was immediately presented with pages of pornographic images—the reason for which is another thing that I could probably talk about for quite a bit of time—and had to turn to memories of some of the things that I've mentioned in this interview, and things that I've seen on other sources. The blog is a compilation of the majority of those things that lent themselves to a media-based platform...as well as a reblogs from a couple ranting blogs that I find humorous.

Kenji’s Tumblr can be found at justright-kenji.tumblr.com