Banana

I live in White America.

I am not white, but I live here and I have the White America stamp on my cultural passport to prove it. I have lived here all my life and know very little of the other America, even though I am aware it exists. I learned about it in college, and here in Minneapolis I see it sometimes as I walk down my street and see other nonwhite faces. This other America, this other side of the proverbial tracks, is real, I know, but I haven't really been there even though its citizens are my neighbors and I see them daily.

I am not one of them. Not really. Yet I am not wholly different either. I stand at the crossing between the two Americas, straddling the tracks.

I am an interracial adoptee. Along with this title came opportunities I would not have in my nation of origin because I am female and likely born to an unwed mother; educational support and an abundance of cultural capital inherited from my highly educated family; and the White America stamp on my passport.

The stamp kept me complacent for years. I was incredibly lucky – I grew up in a nonthreatening environment, devoid of any racial hostility, where I was treated just like any other kid. With such safety comes blissful ignorance, and I literally had no real concept of privilege resulting from race or class.

In college, I learned about the other America. I learned that White America, where I lived, was not the only America and that another world existed. A world of which I was a part simply by virtue of not being white, even though I had the requisite passport to get out and the stamp to go with it. The world with which I had identified throughout my entire life was not the only world anymore, and I resisted. I resisted my vulnerability as a partial citizen of two separate worlds, and I resisted the idea that I had been sheltered by class privilege rather than being truly a member of the club. I resisted the idea that anyone would think I didn't belong where I had grown up. I invoked my passport and my lifelong citizenship in White America as proof that this was my world.

In many ways it is. I carry myself like a typical Western woman. I stride fearlessly into any situation, expecting to be treated like the white girl I am inside. I identify with the white middle class and admit that I tend to see other people of color as very saliently nonwhite. English is my native language. I have a "white-sounding" name. Put a blond wig on me, and you'd have the all-American girl next door. One of my co-workers at the research office, who grew up in Hong Kong, described me this way: "She is a banana - yellow on the outside and white inside." Thanks to various forms of privilege, I have acculturated flawlessly. White people are "my" people, my in-group. White America is my world.

But I am not totally separated from the other. Even if I wanted to, I could not separate completely. Although I consider myself to be just "a white chick with different outside packaging" the fact remains that the outside packaging is different and is also the most salient thing when people meet me for the first time or see me on the street. To them I am Asian, but to myself I am a Norwegian-American. It is an odd position, this constant potential disconnect between how I am seen and how I see myself. I embrace it because of the unique perspective it lends me, but it is odd nonetheless.

I learned about positioning this fall in a course I am taking on research methodologies in education. Positioning, as defined by qualitative researchers, is an awareness and acknowledgement of one's own cultural biases going into a program evaluation, since these biases may have an impact on the effectiveness or conclusions of the study. Perhaps this positioning is inherently two-sided; not only must a researcher be aware of how he or she perceives others but also of how he or she is perceived. This, I realized, is something I have done since college, when I learned about the existence of a world outside of White America. Something I do in the background of every moment of every day of my life, that has become as natural as breathing. I simply had no name for it before.

For the most part, this process is invisible. I rarely feel oppressed – ironically I feel this way only when other nonwhite people tell me how I should view race, sometimes based largely on their experiences and not my own. In most day-to-day contexts, I think just like any other 24-year-old. I don't spend every moment acutely conscious of the phenomenon I embody. But I am constantly aware of the need to position myself, even if I don't process it until later. I am aware of that possible perceptual divide between myself and others.

I can't speak for every member of this particular collective, but I will conjecture that many interracial adoptees feel this dual citizenship that is in some ways profoundly incomplete. We may define ourselves by the stamp, by the passport. It is our identity as we know it. Yet White America may not know this. They may see only our "different outside packaging" and may not buy this idea that our passport, stamped "White America," is a legitimate ticket in. The other America may see only the passport and the stamp and dismiss us as citizens of White America. Or not. In any case, people may feel confused when we are not who they expected us to be.

But I know who I am, and I have learned to be comfortable with positioning myself referent to the chasm between two worlds. Perhaps I am too complacent, but for now I live in White America, and I balance by sitting on the fence and resting my feet on one side.