16656: Elizabeth Chin: I'm a talking head! (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Elizabeth J. Chin <ejc@oxy.edu>

Hi fellow Corbetters,

In my new incarnation as an NPR occasional commentator for the Tavis Smiley show, I have been trying to insert Haiti whenever possible.

Below is the text of a commentary I recorded yesterday -- don't know when it will be aired.


Being White in Haiti
Elizabeth Chin
Occidental College

"There's Michelle Kwan," I say to my daughter, as the Chinese-American skater glides across the television screen.  "She's Chinese like us!"  My four-year-old daughter still likes me enough to repeat what I say sometimes. "Yeah," she says, "She's Chinese like us!"  The truth is, I don't think my daughter will be thinking Michelle Kwan is "Chinese like us" for much longer.  Even though my child looks Chinese, most people see her as African American, like her father.  Anytime someone compares her curly black ringlets with my stick-straight ponytail and asks me, "Is she yours?"  I am
reminded how fundamentally public race is in our lives.   In the face of this everyday reality, California's Proposition 54, the "racial privacy initiative" --which has national implications-- strikes me as, well, silly.

Travelling is one way to escape the dreary pressures of U.S. racial dynamics. The three weeks that my daughter and I recently spent in Haiti at once relieved us of our American racial identities, and thrust us into the Haitian race/color hierarchy. In Haiti suddenly we were white.

Whiteness in Haiti is more a social category than a color. By definition in Haiti, all foreigners are "blan," which translates literally as "white." Most blan in Haiti are missionaries, aid workers, and foreign government functionaries.  As my daughter and I travelled around the country with 13 students who came with us to study Haitian folkloric dance, we were often asked if we were on a mission.  Like African Americans in the U.S., blan in
Haiti tend to stand out.

Because Haiti is not a racially diverse place, race is often treated with a lightness and even crudity that might be more offensive here.  Listening to the radio during one road trip, we heard the singer announce midway through his song,  "Now I'll sing it in Chinese!"  The Chinese version of his song literally went "Ching-chong, ching ching chong."  We had to laugh.  But had I heard this at home, I doubt I would have found it amusing.

The most memorable encounter was one where my students and I were the butt of a pretty good joke. It happened as we passed an outdoor marketplace in the town of St. Yves. As we neared one man's booth, he whipped out a pair of binoculars, saying to his neighbors, "M'ap gade blan yo!"   This announcement that "I'm looking at the white people" kept him and his friends giggling the whole time we filed past. He made a great show of training the binoculars on us, and slowly, slowly swivelling around to follow the image in his sights.  "Hey, we're only one foot in front of you," I said to him, laughing.  Clearly taking pleasure in this act of observation, he trained the binoculars on each of us as we passed, near enough to feel his breath upon our cheeks.

Now back home and contemplating California's "racial privacy initiative," I cannot get the picture of the chuckling Haitian peasant out of my head.  Race, for the most part, is hardly private.  We are all being observed and observing,
magnifying race through the social lens we keep eternally held to our eyes,like that man's binoculars, bringing the strange up close and closer in a way that somehow manages to magnify our differences.  As much as we might wish, that ongoing process of observation is not something legislation can effectively address.  Rather than denying race, maybe we, like that joking Haitian man, should boldly observe race as it passes us by, naming it for what it is in all its guises.  And if sometimes we can laugh about it, all the better.

Elizabeth Chin
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Occidental College
1600 Campus Road
Los Angeles, CA 90041
(323)349-0632
(323)349-0635 (fax)