Thoughts on race from a tourist - Chris Brady

Race is an issue that deeply interests me, but not because I feel like I have a huge personal stake in it. I think of myself as more of an ethnic tourist. It’s not that I don’t feel a distinct connection with an ethnic heritage: I never felt it more than when I left home and realized how special my experiences were. It’s just that in Hawaii, where I’m from, my multicultural background is the norm, not the exception and in a way that had always made it seem like a non-issue. Despite what some skeptics might say, I come from a place where the issue of race is handled very, very differently than it is in Middlebury — and by extension, New England and much of the Mainland, I would venture to say.

In Hawaii, no one race constitutes majority, making it a unique case in America. Caucasians are one of the smaller ethnic groups and perhaps even more extraordinary is the fact that the two largest minority groups on the mainland (African Americans and Latinos) are almost non-existent there, and yet for the most part Hawaii isn’t a fractured place. On the contrary, it has acculturated to an “American” way of life in a big way since it became a state half a century ago. My little brother and I played Pokémon in elementary school like everyone else, and watched Static Shock when we got home in the afternoon. We grew up with Jon Stewart and Bernie Mac, and even if we didn’t understand the specifics of the song “White Christmas” in Hawaii, we listened to our dad sing it around the house just as much as any snow-covered family in Vermont, I’m sure. Hawaii is an exception among exceptions. And I always find myself thinking back to home when I hear discussions about race here at Middlebury, how different things are and how intriguing those differences are: the sensitivity, the baggage, the self-selection and especially the power of experience and language.

At Middlebury I learned what it meant to be multiracial — to appear one way to some and another to others, and maybe to feel entirely different from how I looked. Although in Hawaii I would most definitely be considered “white,” that label really doesn’t do much work in Vermont, where my Japanese grandmother, my local grandpa and my culturally Asian upbringing are all dramatic departures from my Mainland white friends’ experiences. Coming to a place like Middlebury where identity (how and what one identifies himself as) is so important to social behavior, it’s been strange, unsettling and liberating to live in a sort of interstitial world, detached from the considerations that bog down others: I’ve listened to Julia Alvarez talk to a rousing crowd at Cafécito hour, I took my blond-haired girlfriend to the Black Pearl ball last year and I was one of the several dozen people who dined at Alianza’s Valentine’s Day banquet, which had set tables for at least twice that number (I even — awkwardly but earnestly — danced with the Mariachi band they hired), and yet my last name (Brady) doesn’t reflect those particular aspects of my life.

I’m intrigued by the things we think divide us and the many ways in which we find reflections of our own humanity in the lives of others. And far from being black and white, if one can excuse such trite turns of phrase, race is complicated, even in Hawaii where longstanding colonial attitudes converge with the stereotypes of military residents, and the curious demographic effects of Asian and American tourism. Racial dynamics at Middlebury can foster a sense of inclusion just as often as it engenders anxiety and isolation. After all, what other East Coast school sponsors an Asian cooking house, let alone one that can fill to capacity in the first fifteen minutes of opening its doors on Ramen Night? What Middlebury may lack in racial diversity it almost certainly makes up for in cultural curiosity, as anyone who’s been to a Katsuhama feast day or a Cafécito salon or a Distinguished Men of Color event can attest to. I can’t help but wonder if that’s because we’re given a unique opportunity here to step outside limiting labels, to cross boundaries, to transcend self-made taboos and be ethnic tourists.