Essentialist views of identity are responsible for a great deal of the cultural marginalization that third culture kids can encounter. The ‘push’ to be one nationality or another, once race or another, whatever stark choices we are asked to make – stems fundamentally from the idea that we have some sort of magic ‘essence’ inside us, bestowed by some unclear combination of genetics and birth place, that determines who we are. Perhaps one of the strongest resistances third culture kids as well as multiracial people in race-salient environments face comes from the emotional discomfort and lack of closure we create for people with essentialist views of identity.

When your parents don’t give birth to you anywhere remotely close to where your genes evolved, it becomes hard to argue that there is magic essence in your birth place that can make you completely different from your parents. (Of course, unless you abandon essentialism and acknowledge the role that society plays in shaping us.) On the other hand, when you repatriate and act like you’re a foreigner, it is hard to argue that genes and ethnicity holds magical essence powerful enough to eradicate cultural divides. (I myself am an example of that.) Multiracial people challenge essentialism, even when they’ve only lived in one country. Third culture kids challenge essentialism in both ways mentioned above. And multiracial third culture kids just give people identity politics dyspepsia.

I’ve seen expats do some (to me) bizarre things that just seem maladaptive for themselves, things that don’t hurt or annoy the locals but cause significant inconvenience for the expats. I’ve gotten the feeling before that expats do impractical things in host countries (like after 4+ years in China, wearing diamond and gold earrings to markets) because they think that if they integrate, they will disappear somehow. As if not wearing expensive jewelry that serves as an identity marker in their home country but means something else in their host country will make their identity erode day by day. It sounds and seems so ridiculous to me that I figured that there must be some fantastically compelling emotional reward for doing these sorts of things that I’m unaware of. After some more observation, thinking about what I do instead and why I do that, I started to zoom in on identity issues.

Perhaps it is fair to assume that expats who are integrating poorly are simply afraid, then. Identity is a very potent thing, as third culture kids that identify as such know, and maybe pre-move training for expats ought to include an explicit discussion that challenges essentialist views of identity in a constructive way, by showing how you will not disappear if you adjust to a new culture. In fact, if you expatriate for the first time as an adult, you are virtually guaranteed that you will never cease to be what you started out as culturally. The odds that you are so good at cultural adjustment that you forget all about your life so far are so small, they can be dismissed. You are far more likely to not integrate enough, and have daily frustrations and problems as a result. Out of the two, the latter is clearly the case to worry about.

It is very sad, what has been happening in Tibet. Like in Burma, it takes quite a lot to abuse monks. I’m not sure whether the Party leadership really thinks anyone outside China will believe that those Tibetans are just making trouble for no good reason. There wouldn’t even be any 汉族 / Hàn people in Tibet if the Party hadn’t made it so profitable for Chinese to move there. The Hànification of Tibet is very similar to the Russianification of Estonia. It is being done to dilute one ethnic group with another, to get pesky demands of independence to cease, to make it seem futile to lay claim to your country. Perhaps China also has to learn the lesson that in a even moderately globalized world, outsiders tend to poke around in what you might have thought of as your internal affairs earlier. No one particularly said anything about colonization when it started or about the subjugation of minorities in China before China opened up, mostly because there was nowhere to say it so that it was widely heard. However, colonialization pointed out the need to say something, not just about European takeover escapades, and now the Dalai Lama has a social space to make his message heard. What brought you the WTO now brings you nosy foreign journalists. C’est la vie.

On the other hand, I’ve felt for a long time like my understanding of how racism works in the US is rather poor. I feel like the foreigner who sees a system of symbols going on, but isn’t sure what all the symbols are nor what they mean. I can follow some of the most common ones, but my ability to imagine what the world looks like for either w/White or b/Black (Why do Americans capitalize the colors when they refer to skin colors? Anyone know?) Americans is rather poor. In contrast, I can imagine very well what regular Europeans feel as well as the exasperation immigrants feel when Europeans see them as Other and do various irrational, unproductive and unpleasant things. I can understand why Europeans feel threatened and why some might feel as if their countries are dissolving into Euromush or Global mush. I think they’re wrong, but I can empathize and I have an idea of what to say to someone who feels this way to build a bridge. I also know what it feels like to be rejected by a society because of something superficial and what it feels like when people assume your life started the day you set foot in their country. I can amplify that with my professional pride today, to imagine what it would feel like to first be successful and then assumed to be a lazy welfare bum who simultaneously steals people’s jobs. But I can’t say I can imagine why white Americans might be threatened by black Americans. I can understand why black Americans would resent white Americans, but often there is so much emotion expressed about that that I don’t know what specifically it’s referring to. I feel like I’m on the other side of the looking-glass, in the position of the men who are so blind to sexism that they have no idea why I’m so mad at something “trivial”. I’ve also often found it easier to get to know black Africans or second-generation black immigrants from Africa than black Americans. Part of it might have to do with that it’s clear that we are working with a culture divide that must first be crossed in those situations. But part of it is also that I do not get scooped up as an actor in a race dynamic I do not understand.

It seems that the race dynamic between blacks and whites in the US is very, very inflamed. There seems to be very deep, systematic mistrust of each other that is taught in the family. Racialicious has a very brave post by Latoya Peterson about how difficult it can be for black Americans to be relaxed around white Americans. Assuming this isn’t an uncommon experience, the black-white racial divide in the States is deep indeed. Ms. Peterson’s post has helped me to understand the dynamic a little better. However, I still don’t know what white Americans think of the situation. I know from history classes what white Americans used to say about black Americans, but frankly it seems a little absurd that they could still believe that. (It wasn’t exactly logical the first time around.) But if it isn’t that, then what is it? Is it that all black Americans are street thugs? I’m hoping to find out more at Racialicious. Some of the people posting have a lot of experience and have clearly given the issue a lot of careful thought. I can’t follow all of the lines of thought, but with time, I hope to become better.

Every time we go to visit my grandfather, we go to the graveyard. He shows us the family graves – there’s two – and the graves of more distant relatives, even though we know where they are. And then we go to the war memorial section to look at our relatives who are buried there. The Winter War (Talvisota) and the Continuation War (Jatkosota) killed some of my relatives and hurt others. My great-grandfather was one who died. Afterwards, my great-grandmother couldn’t afford to feed her six children. My grandmother and her siblings had to become huutolapsia, children who were auctioned off to the family who promised to take best care of them. Huutolapset often had to work hard for their food and most of the time didn’t get a lot of love. They were at the bottom of society. My great-aunt Anni, the youngest, was lucky and ended up in a good family who treated her well. I don’t know what exactly happened to the rest, because still is very shameful and painful for my family to talk about. Even my mother didn’t know until for about five years ago, after my grandmother’s death. Finland lost Karelia and had to take care of thousands of refugees. The Finns had to seek help from Hitler Germany to keep Stalin away; they had to seek help from a regime almost as feared as the one they knew they would have to fight. But Finland is independent. Estland, almost like Finland’s sister country, was occupied first by Hitler and then by Stalin. Both did basically the same thing – got rid of anyone who might in any far-fetched way sometime in the future maybe possibly be part of the resistance movement. Killed or deported to Siberia or concentration camps.

The Finns were the primary means of smuggling information past the Soviet censure, because of the close ties between Finland and Estland. I heard stories as a kid about the efforts and the danger involved. My grandfather was asked to mail something by an Estonian stranger, someone who approached him in a very scared and secretive way in Helsinki. He did. Someone must have been told some very sensitive information thanks to him. The Estonian must have smuggled the letter – very dangerous – with her on an official sanctioned trip. I heard the stories of the watching and the eavesdropping and the poor Finns who crossed the border to join the Revolution. Most of them ended up in Siberia or killed. When the wall fell, everyone’s first though wasn’t political – it was happiness for the people on the other side. In the happy naivete that followed the tearing down of the wall, we all thought that now they could have what we had, that torn families could re-unite, that we could all be free and prosperous together like we should have been.

Although I know that such a fear is not warranted right now, there is a part of me that immediately thinks back to all this when I hear about things like holding prisoners without proof or trial. As a child, I often felt very grateful for having had such luck to have been born outside the Soviet Union when I heard the stories and felt the fear turned into action and later pride from my family. Both my mother and my father could have been inside the iron curtain if things had been different, my father more likely than my mother. I could have been born a Soviet citizen. My childhood could have been full of the fear and scarcity and corruption that my third cousin’s was. Even though it is – I hope – irrational and I try not to think about it, sometimes I can’t help but imagine a world where the US is like a rich Soviet Union, where not even being a model citizen and pledging your loyalty and belief in the System can save you, because that’s just what a good terrorist would do to hide. And that just gives me a lump of cold ice in my chest. It’s just too much. And it just can’t happen. There must be a law of physics preventing it from happening.

I don’t know what to think, what to really realistically think, when I hear things like that, that prisoners can be held indefinetly without accusation, prrof, or trial. I don’t know what to think when I hear the propaganda touting the glory of fighting terrorism at any cost for the safety of the people. We’ve heard that argument before. Many, many times before. As soon as the safety and well-being of the people at any cost is on the agenda, innocent people start disappearing and dying. Nothing scares me so much politically as a Strong Leader who Only Wants My Best. And that’s what I have. I just can’t reconcile that with history, not at all. My solution seems to be to not think about it too much, but in some moments I think, “I have a foreign passport. If it starts happening, I’m leaving everything behind and I’m driving to an airport and I’m flying to safety.” That’s what worked last time, leave before the borders close. But I also can’t bear the thought that this could happen in the US. It’s just so unimaginable that it could be happening again, it’s ridiculous, it’s ludicrous. But I can’t get rid of this irrational fear, as much as I would like, I can’t reason it away. It makes my feelings toward America very complicated right now. I can’t feel the solid foundation of being critical and patient and diplomatic like I do in Europe. I trust Europe. I trusted America, too. I don’t know what to do now – I want to have faith in the way the country is built, in the people, even more or less in the politicians and the arms of government. But… faith is exactly what propagandists want. If I just have faith in that it will work out, I could be putting the gun in the hand coming to shoot me. As the old saying goes, “When they came for the blacks, I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t black. When they came for the Jews, I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew. When they came for the Catholics, I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t Catholic. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak up.” Faith killed a lot of good people. I feel kind of like I might toward a loved parent that suddenly, unprovoked, hit me. How could it be? And what should I do?

I am re-reading Nichlas Fraser’s The Voice of Modern Hatred: Encounters with Europe’s New Right. I’ve read it before, but due to what’s been on my mind (Other than finals) certain aspects of the book are standing out to me in a new light. The idea that civilization and/or culture is or should be founded on differences between people can be found in many places, not only in the writings of anti-Semites. It can be found in Huntongton’s The Clash of Civilizations. And most alarmingly, it can be found in identity formation.

Celine’s ideas seem very familiar to me now. Fraser writes, “Celine was sufficiently well educated to understand that the race theories implied by German anti-Semitism were nonsense – indeed he found the seriousness of Germans ridiculous. But culture was important to him, and he believed that a culture could die as easily as any other organism. Looking around him, Celine announced that France was mortally threatened. The last vestiges of Frenchness would be extinguished in the next war. The ‘bagatelles’ of which he wrote were a form of consolation offered before the imminent prospect of Armageddon, and they consisted of telling fellow Frenchmen that it remained the obligation of every Frenchman to hate Jews. For Jews were the founder members of the international class of capitalists. (…) Jewishness found expression in the English language, which had been annexed and destroyed in much the same way as French shortly would be. Above all Jewishness could be identified in the mass, homogenized multiculturalism of America, which would sooner or later destroy France.” (Fraser, p. 26-27)

These opinions, with France substituted for some other country or sub-culture, can be heard a lot, sometimes with Jews substituted for the IMF or the WTO or something similar. In his book, Fraser mentions a study by Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno in the suburbs of southern California on Nazi and fascist sympathisers. Their conclusion was that there was, in fact, such a thing as an ‘authoritarian personality.’ People who has authoritarian personalities tended to be male, not very well educated, and had patriarchal attitudes to family authority. They found “Conservative embattled” to be their general motto. Most interestingly, they found that “those who felt threatened in their jobs, or who were worried about a world changing too rapidly for them, were particularly affected. The armed forces appeared to provide a testing ground for such types.” (Fraser, p. 30)

Again, we’ve heard this before, not just from fascist sympathisers. These cries of cultural extinction, this distaste for multiculturalism, for change can be heard all around the world. The intense dislike of globalization and mixing of people bordering on hate can be heard from left, right, and center, not to mention the strong feelings that the concept of Americanization evokes. The two are, of course, interwined and one and the same for many people.

All this suggests that there may be a closer link between the foundations of Nazi and fascist ideologies and resistance to globalization than we may care to think. Although it is very clear that only a minority of people who feel this anxiety become members of the far right, the basic premises of the resistance ought to be more strongly questioned. Some far right groups even call on these ideas to evoke sympathy from society and to make their ideas sound like self-defense – the Vlaams Blok is quoted in Fraser’s book to say just that: “They defended themselves against charges of bigotry with the assertion that it was the project of ‘multiculturalism’ – the world was never defined – and not the existence of individual Arabs, Turks, or Africans in Europe, which caused all the trouble.” (Fraser, p. 36)

This brings up some very important subtleties. When does cultural preservation stop and a racist, nazi, or fascist systematic erasure of anything ‘unauthentic’ start? How clear lines can one reasonably expect to draw around a culture to mark off Self and Other? How much cultural change can one expect people to put up with?

I see in all this something unique that the neonazis need to appeal to their volk, to appeal to others’ discontent and fears, to attempt to claim legitimacy for merely wanting to ‘preserve’ their culture – essentialist identity construction. If there is no essence of Europe to be infused with, then there is no volk bound together by bands of pure bloodlines. Then, you cannot kill their culture. If there is no essence of Europe that requires being white, then the Arabs and Turks can’t be a threat. You can’t threaten something that doesn’t exist.

I don’t flatter myself with thinking that I have discovered the solution to the problem of what to do with the far right, nor explained the far right. I do not pretend that changing identity construction is a practical solution to anything. However, I do think that this is yet another reason why it is extremely important that we (as in, everyone on Earth) abandon the idea that identities come from some inner “essence” that undeniably makes us who we are, passed down from our ancestors and culture. Reading The Voice of Modern Hatred again, I hear echoes of Amin Maalouf’s In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. The far right could have been another interesting chapter in his book.

I would feel more comfortable talking about race candidly than about cultural imperialism candidly, maybe because the basic facts of my race are clear, whereas the basic facts about what culture I am part of is not as clear. Therefore, I expect to be dismissed as inauthentic or ‘tainted’ or something, and therefore not worth listening to. Somehow, in those discussions, I get defensive about opposing ideas equally, and they get emotional and I get emotional and everyone demands that since I don’t like what the other ’side’ is saying, I ought to stop being wishy-washy and clearly agree with everything they’re saying, the whole thing breaks down. Or arguments surface along the lines of the recent ideas on what is ‘un-American.’

At least if I’m a racist bigot, I will only be accused of being an ass, not of both being an ass, stupid, disloyal, hysterical, unrealistic, and inauthentic at the same time. In reality, I most probably understand and have self-reflected on national power relations better than race power relations. That doesn’t mean I feel more comfortable talking about it really honestly. I’d rather be accused of being mean than having my very method of identity construction – betweening – derided. I can stop being mean, but I can’t stop others from mishandling my social identity. In terms of worst-case scenarios, I’d rather look deep into myself and see a mean, evil racist hidden under blankets of bullshit and denial than have my identity erased and denied and dissolved by others and being told that no one will claim me. Both would be very unpleasant, but only one would destroy me.

I noticed that I could identify on a personal level the most not with the white people in the story, but with the article on a biracial man. And that identification has nothing to do with race, it has to do with labels and identities and betweening. His just happen to be racial, mine are national and cultural. And like him, I find myself in a position where histories of other people collide head-on, and I am being asked to make an artificial choice on which ’side’ I want to be on. Maybe there is a more general pattern here, of which racial tensions and power politics as well as identity politics are only examples instead of unrelated issues.