Kristen Rosa

by writer/storyboard artist Steve Wolfhard

from Steve:

Toughest mean looking lady in town.

Contributed by Xandra Clark, January 2017

Illustration by Kristen Rosa for the Theo Westenberger Estate.

“But you’re fundamentally white,” my father said. Maybe he thought he was reassuring me. I don’t think he realized he was negating his own identity in the process. Regardless, I wasn’t reassured; I felt unseen in my complexity.

What does it mean to be “unseen” for what you really are? Many of my friends of color say they feel too seen as their particular race, that it’s the first thing people notice about them, often the only thing. They are judged, belittled, feared, abused because of their darker skin color. But I rarely am recognized for what I am. I escape notice. I blend. And I benefit from it every day.

The closest I come to being noticed is when people express curiosity: “What are you?” And that of course can be quite an aggressive question to receive, even violent: it expresses an entitlement on the asker’s part to know one of the most personal things about you, so that they can satisfy themselves by categorizing you. As if you are duplicitously hiding who you are simply by looking ambiguous. As if you owe the world an explanation for your indefinability.

And then there’s the acting industry, of which I am a part. The check boxes that I am encouraged to select on online profiles: American Indian, Caucasian, East Indian, Eastern European, Hispanic, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, Mixed. It’s my ethnic appearance, not my identity. I fall under the singularly expansive category of “ethnically ambiguous,” which entitles me to check off all those boxes of identities to which I do not belong. It’s an odd, uncomfortable claim: I pass; I can belong in any number of groups; I am whatever you imagine me to be.

After I balked at my father’s comment about my whiteness, he asked me, “How do you see yourself?”

I replied readily. “As biracial: half Indian, half white. That’s what I am.”

He agreed, but his emphasis was on my Americanness as whiteness. Yes, I’m half white. Yes, I’ve been raised in this country my whole life. But I was raised by a father who isn’t, and wasn’t. It struck me, though, that my father thinks of himself as more American than Indian now. Maybe he even feels closer to being “white” than a “person of color.” He has assimilated. He rarely experiences even remotely the degree of racism for his brownness that other people in this country experience every day for their blackness. He also comes from an upper-class family in the highly segregated Indian caste system, so his lived experience in India was far closer to that of a white person in America than a “person of color.” That privilege, and the admiring way our country views South Asian intellectuals, is enough for him to feel he belongs. Enough to make him feel justified labeling me as “un-American” when I express grief at the magnitude of the problems in our country, the widespread poverty and racism and the emphasis on profits over humanity.

“America is the best country in the world,” he tells me.

I’ve been thinking about all the ways we hide in order to belong. All the ways we pass as something other than what we are in service of a comfortable life.

A few years ago, I realized something startling about myself. In technical terms, I am a “queer woman of color,” yet I pass every day as a straight white woman. I am in a loving heterosexual relationship with a white man, and I only look “ethnic” to the discerning eye. I don’t have to try in order to pass. I get the comfortable white life without any effort.

Is my decision to have a white male partner an attempt to fully belong in the “mainstream,” the “normal,” even if I don’t realize it consciously? Is that my own internalized drive to assimilate? To disappear my non-whiteness and my non-straightness? To vanish? To dissolve? To fully capitalize upon my privilege of living in a body composed of in-betweens?

Or is he just the person with whom I happened to fall in love?

Maybe I, like my father, am aligning myself unconsciously with the white, heteronormative world, where I know I’ll have a more comfortable life than as a visible queer woman of color. My ethnic ambiguity allows me that choice.