On racialisation as being and becoming

This text was written on commission for Zürich based magazine Republik where it appeared in translation (by Sarah Fuhrmann) on September 10, 2022, under the title “Vom Auslöschen der eigenen Geschichte”. The original text has been hung here with explicit permission from the magazine.

I am writing this at a specific conjuncture where challenges to neoliberal globalisation —of goods, of capital, of people— are on the rise. A conjuncture where a reckoning with our individual and collective past, which has taken us individually and collectively where were are right now, appears as an urgent need. I am also writing from a very specific locus of enunciation: as a global-South to global-North highly-educated female migrant that has benefited from neoliberal globalisation yet also questions it. Paradoxically, this questioning has arisen from my having become the gendered, sexed, raced, and classed academic woman that I am and whose sinuous mental, emotional, and political outlines have been constituted by my own particular geographical and disciplinary migratory journey. This journey, in turn, has made of me an adult that is constantly, on the one hand, living in the borderlines of cultures, languages, nation-states and, on the other, reflecting upon categories such as race and national (dis)belonging.

Born and raised in the Medellín (Colombia) of the seventies/eighties in a non-conventional family that had cultural capital but whose economic capital fluctuated sharply, I came of age at a time of neoliberal expansion in Latin America, so my choices were inflected by personal circumstances, time, and place. I studied something I profoundly disliked (computer systems engineering) because of the historical conjuncture of my coming of age but also because it could grant me the opportunity to escape a culture whose gendered rules, heterormativity, and dominant constructions of femininity I found far too oppressive. My first opportunity to leave Colombia presented itself in 1998 when, thanks to a scholarship, I moved to southern Spain to spend a year as part of my engineering studies. Up to then, I had been becoming a subject against a conservative mainstream culture that kept insisting on the fixity of gender and sexuality and variously punishing me because of the (at times) mismatch between my own gender presentation (frequently androgynous) and my sexual identification (heterosexual). Living in Spain revealed a new facet of identity that up to then had been occluded to me, race, although it was not until years later, after having been established for quite some time in French speaking Switzerland and having abandoned computer systems engineering for good to become a cultural studies critic that I could name it.

Having grown up in a country of mestizaje that is highly socially hierarchised and where the phenomenon of blanqueamiento is widely spread, I had always associated race with indigenous and black communities. From my self-perspective back then, race encapsulated something that was outside of myself and, therefore, did not concern me. Yet my experience in Spain —in the late nineties when images of Pablo Escobar and the Medellín cartel loomed large in the global imaginary as metonymy for Colombia— was bringing home that despite having (a variety of) Spanish as my native language, my Colombian accent intersected with my gender, non-white skin colour, and age could be —and in certain specific context were in fact— read as markers of my being of a different, apparently lesser, human kind: either a drug mule or a sexual worker. I processed this first personal experience of racial discrimination through the lens of nationality and colonial history; as a very concrete instance of the afterlives of Empire.

After Spain came other experiences of being racialised —i.e. assigned by others to an inferior position in the matrix of alterity— each of which took a different tinge according to the geographical, situational, and temporal context. In England (early 2000s, my mid-twenties), it meant unwillingly feeding the exotic erotic fantasies of upper-class middle-aged white British men probably nostalgic of the British Empire’s gender and sexual logics just by being me. By the time I became a mother — late 2005, aged 30, in Switzerland—, it meant having to confront the whimsical looks of passers-by trying to accommodate what they perceived was the incongruence of this young, rather brownish woman, speaking in Spanish and being so incredible kind and close with this white and blue-eyed baby: ‘are you the babysitter’, they would ask, politely, yet exposing their inherent friendly racism. Yet my experience as a racialised young, and now not so young, woman in Switzerland —where I became an adult and a mother— has been considerably different to the one in Spain and this regardless of the fact that Spanish, rather than French, is my native language. Apart from the fact that there is not direct colonial link between Switzerland and Colombia, my decent mastery of French, as well as my look (hairstyle, clothing, glasses) might help nuance my being placed in the matrix of alterity in Romandy (French speaking Switzerland). This, somewhat, has greatly contributed to my sense of belonging in exile: in Lausanne, I feel at home and the homesickness feeling emerges when I am away from Lausanne (including in my native city and country) for long periods of time.

The Charlie Hebdo attacks of 2015 seriously troubled such a sense of belonging in my adopted homeland and this added yet another dimension to my being racialised —by external factors (people, circumstances, situations) imposing a heavily stereotyped non-white racial identity upon me— and my becoming racialised —my explicit claiming of a non-white racial identity on the basis of my own origin and experiences and my reading of/living them from within the critical perspective that makes me the academic that I am. At the time of the attacks, I was living in The Netherlands and writing on the FEMEN —their white, blonde, thin, Westernly attractive female nudity injunction in the public space that equated nudité with liberté and their more than jubilant reception in France— as a phenomenon that could be interpreted with respect to two interconnected critical aspects: first, as trading on the coloniality of gender and, second, as being welcome in contexts such as the French one because of their usefulness as a mediatic tool for restoring the hegemonic role of the West within the colonial matrix of power. The horrifying Charlie Hebdo attacks operated a deep identification of Romands with French Republicanism —and its inherent racialised universalism that insists on not seeing race while enacting racism on a daily basis— that suddenly revealed how clear-cut the borderlines between the white-European ‘We’ and the non-white/non-European ‘Other’ actually were. #JeSuisCharlie became an injunction to suspend critical thought of the West as a project of domination and made ‘passing’ and the very possibility of belonging in/and despite of exile concomitant with condoning the overtly racist and misogynist publications that had characterised the magazine since the early 2000s. In 2015, my homesickness for Lausanne transformed into a feeling of homelessness. If to be able to call Lausanne my home I had to embrace the #JeSuisCharlie rallying cry —which meant, regardless of one’s personal relationship with France, to endorse a blatant ethno-nationalist approach to Frenchness that excluded Muslim populations— then Lausanne was no longer my home. If for my adopted home to be my home proper —given my status as a global-South to global-North Swiss-nationalised migrant— I had to reject my emotional, intellectual, and political self, then my adopted home was the very antithesis of home. All this reveals the intricacies of race: it has not only to do with national origins, phenotypical and bodily signifiers, and culture —which includes class and (the Bourdieusian) habitus— but with ideas of home and belonging that are also inflected by intellectual layout and political affiliations. This, in turn, uncovers the extent to which both the highlighting and erasing of race —as a concept and a social category— are in fact caustic political acts.

And so I arrive to my last and most recent vignette. A colleague from the department where I was working in the autumn 2021 (who had also been one of my PhD supervisors so knows me and has read my work) tells me during a call we had this anecdote about a student of mine who mentioned to her this interesting course on Latinx literature by a teacher of colour (whose name she could not recall) she was taking. My colleague and ex-supervisor retorts with a ‘we don’t have any person of colour in our staff’, but the student is adamant: ‘Yes, you do!’. At some point the student remembers my name and my ex-supervisor —as she reported it to me— reacts with a ‘Oh, yes, you’re right. Isis is indeed a woman of colour’ and to me, light-heartedly, ‘Isis, I have always read you as white’. I was dumbstruck. If being assigned to an inferior position in the matrix of racial alterity somewhat suggests that you do not belong to the nation-state where you have become who you actually are, forcing you to pass as white performs a full erasure of your personal history. In my own case, this personal history has been constituted by several layers of underprivilege in which my racial heritage —my family’s, my own— has been fundamental. The concrete manifestations of those cumulative layers of underprivilege have been manifold and have outlived any degree of upwards social mobility I might have undergone.

Contemporary global debates on race have become ubiquitous so that the inherent complexities of both the concept and social category get at times diluted. Yet nothing is straightforward about race and processes of racialisation which rather involve a perpetual interplay between the claiming an identity for oneself and the imposing (by others) of a stereotyped identity upon yourself; between the respectful acknowledgement (by others) of your non-stereotyped racial identity —the one you have claimed for yourself and makes you who and where you are— and the erasure of your racial identity and heritage, and therefore your history; between the being and the becoming both a racialised self and a racialised other.