To the Editor:
According to Jahanara, former president of the mixed student organization “Fusion,” being mixed means “not culturally belonging,” or being in-between cultures. As a mixed person, I don’t feel in between anything: this doesn’t make me a traitor to “mixedness.”
There is no universal mixed experience. Some of us may feel we “don’t belong” to a specific group, while others feel at home in multiple cultures. These experiences are, of course, shaped by structures of power—anti-blackness, colorism, white supremacy—and often by colonial histories. Boiling all of this down to a general “mixed” identity, one that we must all rally around in a specific mixed cultural organization, is not only facile, but asks us to bond not over who we are, but who we are not.
The fact of the matter is that many mixed students belong to what Jahanara deems “monocultural” orgs (an inaccurate denomination given that most of these orgs are multi-cultural, and simply focus on a group of related cultures). She asserts, without evidence or detail, that such orgs “intensify racial or cultural stereotypes.” While a fair critique could be made, Jahanara instead pits “monocultural” orgs against the multicultural Fusion, a space presumably free of such stereotypes. Meanwhile, her entire basis for Fusion is a stereotype in itself: the stereotype of the insecure mixed person that belongs nowhere.
I attended a couple Fusion meetings my first year, but I didn’t stick around: I soon realized that beyond the imaginary of “not belonging,” I had little to talk about with other people there. I chose instead to join WAWA where, despite not being “fully” Arab (whatever the hell that means), I was welcomed with open arms.