West vs. Midwest

This past weekend a middle-aged woman from the Bay Area asked where I was from. I told her, “I'm from Michigan.” Her response: “Oh I’m sorry.” Curiously, another gay man from Michigan was present at this gathering. His sentiments echoed hers – he was glad to be out. People view non-coastal states as provincial, backward, and ultimately boring.

I live with a constant tension. Why did I leave Michigan when I claim to love it so much and constantly defend it? What Californians think of Michigan isn’t entirely untrue. There is a larger and more visible socially conservative population. This is a fact. The State of Michigan is very effectively gerrymandered in favor of the GOP. The topography is relatively flat. There is a lot of agriculture. There is only one somewhat major city.

Until actually moving to another part of the county, I also thought that Michigan was devoid of culture. California is a beautiful state and I love it here. I love the diversity, the ostensibly progressive politics, the beautiful topography, and perhaps most of all the Pacific. Would I move back to Michigan? Despite how much I will “go to bat” for the state, I don’t see myself moving back at this time but the possibility is becoming increasingly more likely.

I have gotten too used to having easy access to cities known worldwide. I have gotten too used to the Sierras being only a couple of hours away. I have gotten too used to the thought of living in San Francisco near the sea. Maybe there is a reason that there are no songs about Detroit akin to Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart In San Francisco.”

All things being said, absence really does make the heart grow fonder. Truths and historical facts about Michigan that I have always known, but never really acknowledged, have become center-stage in my mind and the topic of my speech when people ask about my home.

Here is what you won’t hear about Michigan from California elites: Techno music was first popularized in America in my hometown; the Detroit area is home to a many thriving communities of color; Hamtramck (originally a Polish enclave) is the United State’s first and only Muslim majority city; Motown was invented here; Michigan borders the largest lake in the country; one of the largest labor unions in the country was founded there; Michigan became the first English-Speaking government in the world to abolish the death penalty.

All to say, I have given up on perpetuating negativity about an economically important and diverse region of the country for the sake of class-passing.

A new conceptualization of whiteness

Since I came to some sort of consciousness about race and the prevalence of it, whiteness has been a topic that consumed much of my teenage years and young adulthood. Having grown up in Chandler, Arizona surrounded by white peers and subjected to copious amounts of bullying for my very non-white appearance, I grew resentful of white people and the privileges that were afforded to them for simply being white. 

The white girls at my school always had the most friends, the best clothes, and an abundance of attention. My social capital paled (no pun intended!) in comparison and I was deemed a loser for all intents and purposes. I took every step a child could take to assimilate into white culture and have my appearance reflect that. 

I shaved my arms behind my mother's back and tried to clumsily tweeze my eyebrows. I asked my mom for Victoria Secret leggings and Uggs because it was what all the white girls that mocked me wore. I was so angered by the fact that no matter what I did to make myself look "prettier" I never got the attention that the white girls did. As Dagmar Myslinska wrote in Contemporary First-Generation European Americans: The Unbearable "Whiteness" of Being:

I consciously tried to 'Americanize' myself. I avoided or, at least, felt ambivalent about  having ties to other polish immigrants, and I prided myself on being more American than most of them. In fact, I took it to be a sign of my acculturation when I was able to  spot less assimilated immigrants by their hairstyles, modes of dress, and body language that set them apart as being fresh-off-the-boat.  

(Mylinska, 2014). 

Now you might be wondering why I referenced a white woman's words when speaking about assimilating into whiteness. The point I am trying to make is that the particular brand of whiteness I was aspiring to was unachievable, even for some white people. It was a unique brand of white suburban American whiteness that one could only be born into.

After many years of struggling with my identity, I chose to take college classes focused on critical race theory. They helped me to conceptualize whiteness––what it meant and, why it mattered, and how it related to why I was the target for relentless bullying throughout my childhood. While whiteness is a social construct, the meaning we gave to it as individuals is what allowed it to have detrimental effects on people of color, and at times, white people (take for example Myslinska's piece).

I went out in to the world uncomfortably aware of my non-white self. This was exacerbated by the fact that in the upper middle class suburb of Chandler, Arizona, where I lived, white people were everywhere. And they were not exactly friendly. 

So much of that changed, however, when I moved to Davis and started law school.

Here in Davis I immediately took note of the diversity. Maybe diversity isn't even the right word for it due to the small population of Black and Hispanic students here. Nevertheless, what I saw was an absence of overpowering whiteness. 

Whites make up about 60 percent of the Davis population. While white people remain a majority, what made it seem like the white population was so much smaller was the population of Asian people, accounting for 23 percent of this university town's population. I saw many more people that looked like me and shared my culture. I felt immensely comforted by that.

However, whiteness has a way of working its way into spaces. I recognized that there was a distinct pattern in who spoke up the most in class and whose group of friends felt the most exclusive. In Davis, while there was no outright displays of micro/macro aggressions like there were back home, in Chandler, I still saw how white people navigated their whiteness, albeit in a different way. It just took me a little bit longer to recognize that. 

It seemed like because the white people here were "leftists," that absolved them of any harm they could inflict with their identity, with their skin color. Maybe they thought the space they took up was inconsequential because they were self aware and were doing work to undo the effects of whiteness.

Unfortunately, resisting the toxicity of whiteness is never that simple. As much as I genuinely find the environment here preferable to what I experience in Arizona, there is much work to be done to prevent the isolation of people of color. As Camille Gear Rich writes in Marginal Whiteness, 

whites are generally aware that being white provides them with certain 'statistical advantages,' and potentially with cultural capital; yet they do not perceive how these advantages assist them on a day-to-day basis.

(Rich, 2010).

I have no answer for how to go about solving the issues that whiteness presents. In all honesty, I don't think there is one.