What You Are

You can decide for yourself, even if it isn't a popular answer.

Once when I was living in Harlem a police officer pointed his loaded gun at my face and believe me when I tell you that beyond the barrel I could see commitment to my death in his eyes. You know how this ends, because I’m writing it now. And to be honest, I don’t think about it much. In fact, the only reason I’m saying any of this is because America calls me Black, and yet on those rare occasions when do I think of that day, I wonder if my skin color is what saved my life.

But let’s rewind just slightly, to how it happened. I was twenty-seven and dressed in a cheap blue suit and came home from a graduate student job fair to find the gray metal door of my apartment wide open to darkness. When I stepped inside the apartment and turned to look back down the long, narrow, flaking hallway, there was my roommate’s bedroom, the door ajar, its slice of light interrupted only by the rhythmic chop of shadow from her ceiling fan. Everything else was off. There was no noise coming from anywhere inside, although the horns and the buses and the hollers churned in the street below. After I called out hello and the names of my roommates several times and received no answer, I came in further and took in each room (all our drawers yanked and clothing and papers ejected, bathroom vanity listlessly displaying toothpaste and pills, and on my roommate’s bed, a single muddy boot print, the fire escape door drifting open behind her open window). We’d been robbed, although none of the expensive electronics had been taken, and I got on my phone to call my roommates and tell them to come home, and somewhere in the second call (there were three of us), I walked back out of my roommate’s bedroom to see the police officer, another behind him, with his gun drawn and pointed at my head.

I believe they told me to put my hands up. I believe they told me not to move. I believe they otherwise warned me but I don’t really remember because all I did was drop my phone and place my hands on the wall (where did I learn to do this, how did I know this was the best way to save my own life?) and quietly asked them not to shoot. This was the year two thousand and eight. None of the names you know had happened yet. They dragged me into my bedroom and someone put their knee in my back to pin me on my bed and cuffed my wrists, all of which I let them do; when I thought they were safe so that they might not shoot me, I began to explain calmly that I lived here, that this was my home, but if they didn’t actively tell me to shut up (I don’t remember), they certainly didn’t listen. It wasn’t until they’d dragged me down three of the four flights of stairs from my apartment that my Mexican roommate showed up, looked at who they were holding, and said, “No, not him, he lives here.”

That was it; that was end of the cuffs, and there were apologies. My roommate was the one that had called the cops. He’d entered the apartment as it was being robbed, the robbery having started from a window that I’d left slightly ajar in my room for a little sweet breeze in the New York summer. When he’d confronted the robber the dude had threatened to pull a gun, my roommate left, the robber left, the cops arrived, all of them hilariously exiting or entering on either side of me coming home, so that no one was there when I arrived, but everyone stumbled in to find me. A bad comedy. When I told friends later, most of them seemed more pissed about it than me. I was just—Grateful? Shook? Tired?—with the whole thing. I don’t know. Maybe those were my feelings then, maybe those feelings are only here now. I don’t trust memory.

I say my skin color saved me that day because while America calls me Black, if our family tree with all its wrecked baggage¹ is correct, my father is descended from all the Western European colonist teams and a small slice of the Osage nation, while my mother is descended from enslaved West Africans (probably the area we now call Nigeria) and all the awful things that were done to them, leaving me with a light brown skin tone, something the colorists and racists might call “high yellow”. Was it that color that saved me, in front of the gun?

Maybe it was the cheap suit I was wearing.

Once on a hike to the border between Zimbabwe and Namibia a grouchy Swiss backpacker confided in me (apparently as a fellow White person) that all Black people were lazy and it was the reason countries like Zimbabwe were falling apart. Another time, in the back of a pickup truck in Colombia, a dark-skinned local park ranger confided in me (we were both speaking fluent Spanish) about how tiring it was working with the bevy of White tourists descending on the park, a group with which he didn’t include me. In South Africa when they didn’t know me they called me Brother, while in Zambia I could only ever be White. Last week at the Minnesota State Fair, while doing the security line bag inspection dance, the dude I was sent to was a Black man, who chuckled and told me I was good, Brother, to enjoy my day, and we gave each other The Good Look, that visual dap². Two decades ago in a comedy club in Manhattan, a White comic with whiskey on his breath came up to me after his set, gripped my arm, and told me I was a dead ringer for Mariano Rivera. I’ve taken a least one picture with someone because they thought I was a Barack Obama impersonator.

Maybe it was because I had my hair in a Caesar.

I’m telling you all this because in Hawaiʻi, the land where I was born and raised, things like this never happened. I had only ever experienced myself as another anybody of mixed race and ethnicity and heritage—in the small rural town where I grew up, more of my classmates and teachers and police officers and politicians and librarians were a litany of combined races than not—all of us with ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi and Portuguese and Filipino and Japanese chopped up in the pidgin we spoke. I was taught Hula by more than one Kānaka Maoli teacher and took part multiple times in May Day pageants that re-enacted the legacy of the Hawaiian monarchy. Did our races matter? Sort of. Even in Hawaiʻi we couldn’t escape the centuries of stupidity. But race was never oppressive, it was never the point, it was never the thing from which everything else flows, the way race is so often in America.³

Growing up that way and then traveling to the continental United States was a shock. It was (and remains) an ongoing learning experience, as I’ve moved from the shelter of my college friends (all of whom, in the end, were from Hawaiʻi) to another relative shelter of my graduate school friends (it was an international school in Manhattan, we were from all over), to cities that were still not completely segregated (Washington, D.C.) to places where it started getting real (like the Bay Area of California, and—even worse—Minneapolis). As it’s gone on, my race has become, somehow, more important, more remarkable. And there have been less and less people around me that understand.

As a writer, my first published short stories and first novel have dealt almost exclusively with Hawaiʻi, all of my main characters have been non-White and, largely, not the same race as me. Some people don’t understand this. They see it as theft, as another version of Blackface. In their eyes I’m a culture vulture. I haven’t ever bothered with an answer to those accusations, because it all seems so obvious to me, the fallibility of race, the terrible and incorrect prison that it is. I’ve always undertaken my art with a humanist perspective, the belief in an empathy of the species, that we really can project and imagine ourselves in other bodies and other situations. I’ve never hesitated to write characters of different ages or body types or abilities or genders or races—I’ve never done so lightly, or without deep thought and consideration, but never have I thought it a crime—yet for many people, that just isn’t the way you’re supposed to make art. I was relieved years ago when I discovered writers like Mia Cuoto and Leslie Marmon Silko, people for whom culture, community, language, and experience all broke apart that cage, with whom I could say yes.

When people ask me what I am, Cuoto, Silko, many others—those are the soul brothers and sisters that I go to. I go to Malcolm X’s expansion, on returning from the Hajj, when an American White man hollered out to him from an adjacent car at a stoplight, while extending his hand: “Do you mind shaking hands with a white man?” and Malcolm responded, “I don’t mind shaking hands with a human being. Are you one?”⁴ I go to Bruce Lee, who was asked whether he considered himself Chinese or American, and he replied that he thought of himself, first and foremost, as a human being. I even take refuge in Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House”, not because the essay spoke directly to anything I’ve said above, necessarily, but because the spirit I read in it, the necessary continuation of it, can only have that same idea—a common humanity—as its final conclusion, a perspective she supports in some of her other words: “It’s not our differences that divide us,” Lorde once wrote, “It is our ability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”⁵

Where, then, does that leave us, where does that leave me?

Early in Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, there’s a moment in which we see a cluster of Black families suffering through neglect and disinvestment, the roof over their heads more like a guillotine than a shelter, and the one holding the trigger of the blade is a Black landlord, making $10,000 a month hand over fist through the exploitation of her tenants. “The ‘hood is good,” she says. “There’s a lot of money there.”⁶ And you’ll find examples of this throughout history. It’s not just rent-seeking, that worst instinct encouraged by late-modern unregulated capitalism. It’s the decades of race-blind military coups aided by colonial powers. It’s Cherokee owning slaves⁷ at the time of American conquest. It’s Military veterans threatening each other across the lines at Presidential political rallies. It’s colorism. It’s caste. When those sorts of harms are inflicted within the same race, does race really mean everything we think it means?

It does not.

I could go on, with examples of racial groups building mutual aid in spite of (or maybe even because of) a legacy of imbalance and oppression, of people of entirely different racial categorizations building true community that was otherwise obstructed by race, of all the different places and ways in which race has been rendered as transparently false as we should all know it to be. Should our work, then, be to further limit ourselves to operate within smaller and smaller definitions of what we are, or else we are only acting to take things from one another? Do we start with the actor, their intentions, or the effects? Do all of those matter, or only one?

I don’t know the best answer to all of those questions. But I know that moving in the smaller direction, the ever-shrinking circles of what I am that people try to press upon me, goes against everything I’ve observed and experienced. It goes against that expansion I spoke of above, of the place where people like Malcolm X and Bruce Lee found themselves. The best answer I can give you, then, when you ask me what I am, is someone trying to muddle through all of that, to search for a common humanity beneath broken systems. That humanity, to me, has always felt like a river, receiving more and more confluences as I’ve lived in ever-widening circles, so that I cannot point to which part of me is this and not that or that and not this, about which part of me is truly “mine” and which is something that “belongs” to someone else. As I’ve said before⁸, my name in its original language, the language of the land I was born in, means The Water, and my full first name, The Water of Life. The longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve found that name to be a demand that I must live up to, a sort of destiny I cannot turn from: to be fluid, expanding with accumulated experience and perspective, flowing through false barriers. One way I express that state of being is through art, which I perceive as a humanist undertaking, rare in its power to leave behind the prison bars of race.

1. There’s a messy history in my family that includes, among other things, mental illness, alcoholism, homelessness, etc. that I will not reveal for litigation by strangers on the internet, no matter how hard you try.

2. If you know, you know.

3. Although that is changing as well (or maybe it was always as broken as the rest of America): A year ago I returned to Hawaiʻi to give a book talk. At the time, I was wearing my hair in cornrows; on multiple days while I was in Honolulu, walking along the street, people catcalled at me through car windows. The callers weren’t White, and they sure as hell seemed local.

4. Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley (Ballantine Books), 370.

5. Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection (Random House Publishing Group), 324 (ebook).

6. Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Broadway Books), 152.

7. See also https://time.com/4935802/cherokee-slavery-court-decision/

8. See the About section of this newsletter for more information.