Another dear friend of mine Veronica Miranda, who started the organization “Coalition of Anthropology Students of Color” with me, once told me that it wasn’t until she left California for an anthropology graduate program in a staunchly conservative state when she became politicized. As she told me, “I never considered myself a person of color until I moved here and went to school here.” It was the moment when she came to the fuller sense of her identity as a Latina anthropologist. It was also the beginning of her advocacy for anthropology students of color.

My friends’ stories reminded me of an edited book I recently had read, “Unhooking from the Whiteness: The Key to Dismantling Racism in the United States.” Each of the contributing authors presents her/his auto-ethnographic accounts to highlight the awakening moment when she/he began to “unhook” or disengage from whiteness. For the white authors, their moments came with the realization of what white privileges are and what it means to lose or abandon the privileges. For the authors of color, their moments emerged from interrupting their own conformity to white privileges and directly challenging racist practices that had subjugated them over and over again. By “unhooking” from whiteness, all of the authors argue, they can become more active and effective in their anti-racism efforts.

So what’s the point of these stories about “that” moment?

As my guest blogger gig comes to an end here today, I thought how much I’ve shoved my opinion about racial issues in your eyes since the beginning of this month. So I decided to do an interactive post to close my gig – well, “interactive” only if anyone ever ended up leaving any comments here, and so there is a possibility that I will be talking to myself and playing the world’s tiniest violin. My question for those who are reading this now is this: What was that moment of clarity for you to become a voice for anti-racism, anti-sexism, and any other social justices, even if you were the minority in the room, even if most of the people you were speaking to in the room vehemently negated your stance, and even if you were labeled as unprofessional and uncivil??

I still vividly remember the time I finished reading “Different Racisms: On Jeremy Lin and How The Rules of Racism Are Different For Asian Americans” by Matthew Salesses (the 2^nd part of his essay is here). It was my that moment when I realized that I wasn’t alone, I wasn’t crazy, and I wasn’t overreacting to incidents where I thought people treated me differently because of my “flat” face and “foreign” accent. That was the moment I finally embraced myself as an Asian American female anthropologist, became hungrier for reading and writing about race and gender beyond anthropology (it wasn’t so easy to find anthropological literature on Asian Americans), and felt the visceral urge to speak up and confront racist behaviors. It was that defining moment for me.

So, what was your that moment of clarity?

I knew I wasn’t white, but I knew I was “Asian,” as society has plentifully reminded me all along. I have belonged to this category ever since I came to the U.S. 20 years ago. Besides all the name-calling targeting Asians, I have received absurd treatments in public places. I was called “that,” as in “where did you get that?” which a random white dude asked my white male friend while pointing his finger at me. Restaurant servers sometimes seem to have difficulty approaching me, as they lock their eyes onto my husband (who is white) while taking our orders or explaining their specials. And let me just verify that I don’t I look spectacularly eccentric or weird to drive people away. But such incidents happen, as if I were some mute and visible oddity, because, let’s be honest, I do look Asian.

It’s not that I was pretending to be white and trying to work my way from the ambiguous place to whiteness, while sitting through those graduate school conversations about race. I was already aware that describing myself as “non-white” itself is deeply problematic because it conforms with the idea that “white” is the standard bearer of our social world. But my silence in the discussions of race for me was, in part, a product of the positioning of Asian Americans as the “least” oppressed in the racial hierarchy according to dominant discourses of race. Ironically, my voiceless existence would put me right back in the stereotypes of Asian women: quiet and subservient.

But I also suspect that my silence had something to do with graduate training in anthropology.

We all are, as anthropologists, trained to remain objective. We are taught not to use “I” in our writings. Objectivity is critical for understanding and analyzing the social phenomena we study. Even when anthropologists themselves are personally entangled in anthropological topics of investigation, we have the tendency to insist on maintaining objectivity. But is the practice of objectivity always applicable to those who are part of groups with less power than, say, white straight male anthropologists are? Race is one of the most salient anthropological inquiries. And students of color, through their personal experiences, have much to offer not only in our theoretical conversations but also in our self-reflexivity as a discipline with the commitment for contributing to the greater society.

Of course, my claim here is much indebted to feminist critique of scientific objectivity. But I wasn’t entirely connecting the dots between this theoretical body of work and my personal experience as an anthropology graduate student at the time when I was scratching my head while reading feminist theorists like Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, and Alyson Wylie. I was simply too busy dissecting intricate and nuanced ways in which they differ from one another about what is science, what is knowledge in science, whose perspectives count as knowledge in science, and how to reconcile the power difference between the privileged and the marginalized within and beyond science. And yet, it was perhaps one of the pivotal moments when I began questioning my identity dissonance between inside and outside anthropology, and what to do with my silent visibility as an Asian woman in academic discussions about race.

We can also never forget black feminist intellectual wisdom about marginalization of individuals at the intersection of gender, race, and class hierarchies. The intersectional approach adds an important layer to feminist critique of scientific objectivity, allowing us to ask, “What if the anthropologist herself was a part of the marginalized group?” Responses to this question can be found throughout an edited volume “Feminist Activist Ethnography: Counterpoints to Neoliberal in North America” (2013), but I find Iris López’s poignant account particularly close to home:

When I was a graduate student, there was a disconnect between myself, a woman of color with a working-class background, and some professors who embraced objectivity in anthropological research to justify their position of power and privilege as objective scientists. I did not agree with the idea that I could not be objective because I was working with my own community; I did not subscribe to that narrow definition of objectivity and I did what I felt was legitimate research. My goal was to do activist research that was relevant to poor communities. I wanted to use my research skills to provide data that would empower them and help them improve their lives (157).

The jarring reality is this: Despite the fact that feminist scholars have been voicing their critiques of scientific objectivity for decades, López’s sentiment remains not only relevant, but necessary today. In addition to all of this, if any anthropologists believe that the realm of anthropology is somehow immune to racism, that would be total romanticization of anthropology. After all, the legacy of anthropology’s role in the production of white supremacy is still firmly with us today –  as Karen Brodkin professes, anthropology continues to be a white space.

When anthropology students step over the threshold into their professional field, they bring a bag full of their own life experiences. White students have been crossing the threshold with unquestioned privileges. A part of the privileges is to be able to sit in a white filled room and have “white guilt” conversations. Such confessional conversations have hidden mechanisms beneficial to whites – comforting each other for their past racist behaviors and setting up the post-confession phase where they can feel relieved by assuring themselves that they aren’t racists.

But when anthropology students of color cross the threshold, their bags full of struggles for change somehow get rarely unpacked. At least, that’s how I felt when I went to graduate school, even though I kept the hope that anthropology would help me unpack my bag.

I hated to be silently visible in those conversations about racism. I should have had the strength to crawl out of the ambiguous place as an Asian woman and make myself audible in our didactic conversations about racism. And anthropology shouldn’t be silencing the voices of students of color in the names of scientific objectivity.

I’m by no means claiming that I can understand what other people of color experience on a daily basis. But I do see what white people can’t see. I notice what white people don’t notice. I know, too, that the business of “speaking up” about racial issues gets complicated for people of color, when there is only one person (or a few people) of color in the room. Some of them may feel reluctant to speak up because they don’t want to be the representatives for other people of color. And others may simply be giving up on speaking up because they are too weary of handling the dilemma between “not upsetting white colleagues in the room” and “being true to anti-racism efforts and speaking up despite potential repercussions from the white colleagues.” Can you do both? – you may ask. It’s easier said than done. When people of color take a risk of upsetting white colleagues by speaking up and it doesn’t go well, they often get accused of being unprofessional and uncongenial.

But here is what doesn’t make sense: while students of color experience the pain from racial microaggressions every day, they also have to carefully make sure not to upset white colleagues in those rare conversations about racism??

Regardless of all this, didactic discussions of race and daily departmental routines go on in anthropology graduate programs. If you’re a student of color, speak up, even if you happen to be the only one in the room. If you’re a white student/professor, listen to you colleagues of color, and more importantly, keep your white privileges in check by asking yourself these questions –  Are you taking the anti-racist “coat” on and off for your convenience? Are you expressing your anti-racist stance because of your true commitment to anti-racism or because of your secret desire to look like an enlightened person?

Thinking about my experience of teaching race, I feel that I fell short when it came to conveying to my students what “race” has meant historically, and how white America has produced various racial divides by weighing which group of color is better or worse than the others. I didn’t think about articulating the two seemingly conflicting facts about race – 1) the biological/genetic explanation of “racial” differences is unsound and thus should be rejected, at the same time; 2) we must not deny the social realities where people of color have lived with their “racial” categories/identities. Inevitably, when I say “we’re all Homo sapiens” to someone who doesn’t have a good grasp of racial history, what gets tossed out of the window are the differences among us humans, not to mention the long social processes through which powerful oppressors have assigned detrimental social meanings to these differences.

As late Sidney Mintz always asserted, the discipline of anthropology needs to be grounded in history. If anthropologists are to claim to be experts on race – and teach about it – I argue that they should also be able to teach larger histories of racism. After all, the collective experiences specific to different groups of color are different symptoms of the same problem. As Scot Nakagawa insists, for example, the liberation of African Americans is intimately tied with the liberation of all other people of color in the United States. Understanding larger racial histories can help us all see how these different symptoms have been created, not to mention how white supremacy has been produced within broader racial hierarchies. In this way, it can become unacceptable to be coy or disingenuous about the fact that white supremacy has been the law of the country, which also has shaped minds and perceptions about people of color. Understanding larger racial histories can help build solidarity among all people of color for anti-racism. We need more conversations, like “Building a Culture of Solidarity,” “Latino and Asian American Solidarity,” “How Multiracial Alliances Help End Discrimination,” and “How Black, Latino, and Muslim College Students Organized to Stop Trump’s Rally in Chicago.”

Critics of anti-racism efforts often portray people of color as “complainers” because things are, they claim, much better than the Jim Crow era or the period prior to the 1965 Immigration Act. They argue that diversity has been accomplished despite vehement disagreement coming from people of color. White sympathizers and allies for people of color jump in to advocate for more diversity, inclusion, and integration. But what do these words really mean? How often do in-depth conversations about these concepts occur in classrooms, faculty meetings, or on college campuses in general? Is “diversity” accomplished once there are more people of color? How would one respond to the sentiment that diversity is mere tokenism because it has become just numbers? Who needs to be included and integrated into whom? How are these terms and concepts really productive for anti-racism efforts? These questions are an integral part of didactic discourses of race. But without understanding the larger history of racism, such questions cannot be fully appreciated and digested.

But do students have to major in Latin American Studies to learn Latino/a history, African American Studies to learn African American history, or Asian American Studies to learn Asian American history? Or are there ways in which students can have the opportunity to learn these histories altogether? Can anthropology implement such interdisciplinary historical discourses into its introductory college courses? How can anthropology contribute more to didactic conversations about race in higher education? Or is it all too much to ask of anthropology?

It was more than 50 years ago when Malcolm X famously professed: “If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and put it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull the knife.” Much work on anti-racism has been done by many anthropologists, like George Armelagos, Lee Baker, Jonathan Marks, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and name a few. With its extensive project “Race: Are We So Different?,” The American Anthropological Association also has made a contribution to these efforts. But the knife hasn’t been even pulled all the way out. If there are critical tasks that anthropology can do for the real progress in larger anti-racism efforts, pedagogy of race in anthropology needs to be redesigned – perhaps, anthropologists need to take up the Anthropology Rebranding Project’s endeavor to bridge the gap between the general public and anthropology (see its recent work “Rebranding Anthropology Textbooks” or “Decolonizing Anthropology Textbook Covers”). And more concerted push toward rebranding the discipline in classrooms can help us rethink anthropology’s roles in the current US racial climate and its pedagogy of race.

Who in the world taught these people about race and the history of racism??

Anyone teaching “race” would agree that it’s one of the toughest topics to teach. Looking back on the days when I taught introductory anthropology courses several years ago, I can still vividly remember the sense of dread while putting my lecture together. The university was in a relatively liberal pocket in the middle of a staunchly conservative state. The fact that the majority of the classes were filled with in-state conservative students shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. Still, it felt like I was going to a Thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of white Republican relatives – except that I had no choice. I had to go in there and talk about the social construction of racial categories and its devastating consequences.

My lectures on race began with a quick look at humans at the genetic/biological level. I felt that it was a necessary start for challenging the faulty biological basis of race before ushering the students into the most critical point – the social construction of racial categories. Subsequently I emphasized that we all belong to a species called H. sapiens, which is a single, highly variable species inhabiting the entire globe but has no biological subspecies or races.

What ironically resonates with this academic/scientific discourse however is the current perpetual colorblind narrative – “We are all humans, and so I don’t see any color and I don’t see you as a person of color! We need to abandon all racial categories!” This utopian post-racial sentiment profoundly dismisses the multiple histories of people of color in the U.S., as well as the histories of their struggles, sufferings, and courageous battles against oppressive white supremacy.

It’s not that my lectures on race completely left out the history of racism, as I briefly went over how racial categories and their given meanings came from white European colonialism and how they continue to be the root of contemporary racist climate. But with the limited amount of time allowed for the particular lectures, I spent too little time on the racial history, and ultimately perpetuated the colorblind post-racial rhetoric.

I recently read two history books, “The Making of Asian America” (2015) and “The Intimacies of Four Continents” (2015). In the former, historian Erika Lee traces diverse histories of people who have come to the U.S. from East Asian, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. In the latter, the author Lisa Lowe lays out intersections of colonialism, slavery, imperial trades, and Western liberalism that emerged from intimate relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. What caught my attention in these books is how the histories of African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino/a, and Native Americans are intersected and tangled with one another. In other words, the shared experiences of each group of color under racism in the U.S. have never happened independent of the shared experiences of the other groups of color.

Think, for instance, about the stereotypical label of Asian Americans, “model minority,” which was first coined in a 1966 article in The New York Times Magazine by sociologist William Petersen. It is built upon the (sub)conscious idea that whites are intrinsically better than all racial others. By comparing different groups of color to one another, it allows the white privileges unquestioned and the white supremacy to flourish even more. Creating the hierarchy among the groups of color is effective not only for preservation of the white privileges but also for preventing all of the groups from forming a unified front to challenge the white supremacy, or even for instigating animosities between the different groups of color.

There is nothing new about the “divide and conquer” tactic to keep whites on the top of the racial pyramid.

Clearly, all of these historical entanglements never ended because it’s still happening, not only as a consequence of racist colonialism, but also because of the ongoing U.S. political and economic relations with other countries. The acrimonious rhetoric against immigrants from the Middle Eastern countries, particularly Muslim people, is a case in point. And the entanglements continuously shape how many white Americans juxtapose, compare, and arrange different groups of color into racial hierarchies. What a vicious cycle!

[Go to Part 2]

My patients sometimes present me with an opportunity to reflect on anthropological literature through our brief and yet candid conversations. By rule, we medical interpreters are not supposed to be friends with clients (both patients and providers), and thus we limit the amount of private time with them. Again, our fundamental responsibilities are to be a communication conduit, invisible and detached from the emotional exchanges between patients and medical professionals. It keeps us out of potential trouble, such as being asked for medical advice or personal assistance outside clinical settings (violation of HIPAA and Code of Ethics). Every time a patient asks me about her/his treatments, I have to tell her/him, “Let’s ask the doctor about it,” even if I know how I want to answer.

But when I accompany patients under long-term invasive treatments, we often end up with alone time. In such instances, I make sure that our conversation topics remain neutral and non-medical. And yet, we often develop a rapport, telling funny stories and laughing together. As I spend more time with them, some of the patients begin to confide in me about their struggles with their illnesses.

One of them, for instance, asked for my opinion on whether or not to wear a wig to cover up hair loss from chemotherapy. According to her, cancer patients in her home country typically prefer keeping their illnesses secret from people outside their families. Since her social network was mostly insulated within the community where the people speak only her native language, she was naturally inclined to follow the same trend. At the same time, crossing paths with her fellow cancer patients who were without wigs in the clinics led her to the realization that things were a bit different beyond her community. Still, she felt that going wigless would be like advertising her illness.

I found my patient’s concern quite intriguing, as she became apprehensive about the bodily manifestation of her suffering – and the public perception of it. I remember driving home with a barrage of questions in mind: What made her worry about the public perception of her visible hair loss? What would a wig accomplish for her? What would a wig mean for her pre/post-diagnosis identity? What does her body mean to her in this particular case? Does the illness represent her self through her body or vice versa? Is it a mere medium between the self and the illness or between the self and something beyond the illness? Or is the body actually the self, the illness, and whatever beyond the illness and the self altogether? After I got home, my fascination prompted me to dig out the classic piece, “A Critical-Interpretive Approach in Medical Anthropology: Rituals and Routines of Discipline and Dissent” (1996), by Margaret Lock and Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

Of course, it isn’t ethical for me as a medical interpreter to lay out my personal opinion to my patients. I did tell her though that cancer patients in the U.S. don’t wear a wig for various reasons, such as self-empowerment, financial circumstances, comfort, and so forth. Meanwhile, I kept thinking about Margaret Lock’s “Encounters with Aging” (1995). In it, Lock asserts that perspectives about illnesses vary even within a given cultural system, which illuminates the complexity (political economy, conflicts, history, etc) of the system itself. This work also warns us that the comparison of seemingly different systems can lead to gross overgeneralizations. With that in mind, I just hoped the patient would feel that it would be her own decision – to wear or not to wear the wig – as possible.

My final response to her question was: “Whether or not to keep it [her illness] secret is entirely your prerogative. These patients may not wear any wigs in the clinics but they may well be secretive in their social lives. There may also be some patients back home who are open about their diagnoses. So, it’s up to you, and you have to trust your decision.”

A week later, she showed up in a wig at her oncologist’s office. She was quite exasperated by its price tag even with the coupons provided by her social worker. But she seemed content, and looked good in the wig. She also ended up telling her close friends about her illness, since she needed their help to take care of her family. From there, she joked about the wig and her hairless head. She was a master of transforming difficult experiences into funny stories.

About a month after she moved back to her home country with her family, she sent me a message while sitting in her new doctor’s office: “I know you couldn’t medically help me, but your presence at every doctor’s appointment I had there truly got me through all the treatments. I’m sitting here alone and learning to adjust myself to this new way. I don’t like this because it’s making me feel I’m really a sick person.”

All I did was try to do my job as a medical interpreter; being that “communication conduit” they wanted us to be. But if there was anything that made me a reasonable companion for her, it was probably all the ethnographies I had read during my studies in medical anthropology. Those books helped me think about her emotional experiences through anthropological questions, which ultimately helped me respond in ways that helped her worry just a little less about what she was expected of by the U.S. society – or her own community. All of the ethnographies I have read – filled with personal stories that individuals tell researchers – helped me remember to be a good listener for my patients. I may not be an academic anthropologist, but I’m still practicing anthropology. Perhaps, that is the beauty of anthropological knowledge: its applicability to everyday lives.

“I’m an anthropologist.” When I tell this to people outside academia, all I get is the sound of crickets chirping. They awkwardly stare at me, looking puzzled, as if they just heard something in a foreign language. How is anthropology still perceived obscure and irrelevant? How can the institution of anthropology break out the shell of esotericism? I can’t offer any punchy line to answer these questions here. But perhaps, we can ask for insights from those applied/public and activist anthropologists who directly work with ordinary people on a daily basis. They may be undercover anthropologists, but they deserve more recognition.

To be honest, I wasn’t entirely thrilled about this job when the offer came to me at first. Having read numerous scholarly critiques of biomedical institutions during my studies in medical anthropology, I felt that I would be engulfed by biomedicine and end up working on the “wrong side” of the powerful (biomedicine)-powerless (patients) equation.

Anyone who has studied medical anthropology should be familiar with the canonical work in critical assessments of biomedicine (or Western medicine) by Arthur Kleinman, Byron Good, Margaret Lock, etc (for practical advice on working within biomedicine, see Kleiman’s essay “Anthropology in Clinic”). They warn us of the authoritative power of biomedical knowledge, which is so extensive that it permeates as legitimate cultural norms, values, and morals through our everyday lives. Specifically relating to my current job, some scholars caution about the negative consequences of medical interpreters in patients’ health outcomes: the interpreter as information gatekeeper and provider proxy (Hsieh and Kramer 2012), the interpreter as a covert co-diagnostician and institutional gatekeeper (Davidson 2001), and the interpreter as an ineffective mediator for meaningful clinical communications (Leanza, Bolvin, and Rosenberg 2010).

Despite my skepticism, the medical interpreter job hasn’t bulldozed over my principles as an anthropologist. And I credit this positive result to the medical interpreter certification program, as well as my training in anthropology. The interpreter training was carefully crafted to encourage prospective interpreters to learn how to focus strictly on being communication conduits between providers and patients, while also developing the ability to assess when to become a patient’s advocate. The instructor of this training program made us practice juggling these roles in various hypothetical scenarios over and over again.

Being detail-oriented, which I acquired from my ethnographic research as a part of the training in anthropology, helps me fulfill these medical interpreter roles as well. We interpreters are the eyes and ears of these complex medical situations, vigilantly attending to facial expressions of the provider and the patient and any words and sounds uttered by them. What our eyes and ears catch is instant data, so to speak, in order for us to identify miscommunications, distrusts, and disagreements between both sides of the equation. In this way, we can quickly step out of the communication conduit role and jump back in to help attenuate conflicts and tensions.

One unexpected benefit from my training in anthropology came to light through writing up mandatory post-appointment reports. My interpreter agency often commends me for my meticulous reports. Writing these reports certainly brings back some of the memories from my ethnographic research – Flashback: I’m sitting in my car at a gas station a couple of blocks away from one of my research sites and madly scribbling down every little detail I saw and heard during a long event where I just did participant-observation. I can later type this all up into a coherent story as a part of research data that will be coded and analyzed after the completion of the research.

Sure, writing post-appointment reports isn’t as complicated as typing up fieldnotes. But all of the words I jot down while interpreting my clients become something like the notes I took during my participant-observation, as I type them up into a post-appointment report – sometimes on my phone as soon as I get back to my car in the hospital parking lot. I honestly would have never thought that ethnographic research skills would be useful at a job outside anthropology.

To see Part 2, click here.