Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Leslie Kim
Speaker 2: And hello, my name is Ty Sloan,
Speaker 1: And this is season two of the youth elders podcast, creating space for identities, histories, and perspectives across generations.
Speaker 2: This season takes a look at personal stories of coming out, navigating identity and finding home
Speaker 1: While also discussing the impact of institutional spaces and activist movements on the very places we find community.
Speaker 1: So
Speaker 2: This seasons episodes are curated and recorded by myself, Thai Sloan, Leslie Lee cam, Naomi bane, bear Bergman and Roma Spencer.
Speaker 2: Most of our recordings were made in Toronto on the traditional territories of the Anishinaabi.
Speaker 2: The Holden have shown a and the wind deck and treaty territory of the Mississaugas of the credit.
Speaker 1: This episode is hosted by us, Ty and Leslie and conversation with aria Evans and Kumari about living at the intersection of and mixed race.
Speaker 1: Think
Speaker 2: From struggling to find belonging, to creating our own spaces where we can be our full selves.
Speaker 1: So welcome to our two guests kamori and aria.
Speaker 1: And I'd like to ask you to introduce yourselves.
Speaker 1: So start with Kamari.
Speaker 3: Hi, thanks for having me on this podcast.
Speaker 3: It's nice to see all of your faces.
Speaker 3: I'm Kamari.
Speaker 3: I use they them pronouns and I am a human that does many things.
Speaker 3: I make food, I dance a little bit.
Speaker 3: I share dance, knowledge, theater, knowledge, um, and really kind of center my ways of being in the world around supporting primarily and trans BiPAP folks in, uh, living in their wholeness and healing and transforming themselves and each other, and really trying to open up possibilities for folks.
Speaker 3: My mother is a Sri Lankan she's Sinhala, um, born in Colombo, but moved, uh, through the Caribbean as a child.
Speaker 3: And my father is a Scottish English and Irish.
Speaker 3: And so that is the mix that I am moving in the world with.
Speaker 3: So that's, that's who I am.
Speaker 1: Great.
Speaker 1: Thanks Kamari and aria.
Speaker 4: My name is aria.
Speaker 4: You can use any pronoun for me.
Speaker 4: They, she, he, you can interchange pronouns.
Speaker 4: That's something that I love in space with me.
Speaker 4: I feel like I have many identities.
Speaker 4: I I'm a mover and a maker.
Speaker 4: I think that my identity has been the center of what drives me to make work in the, that I do.
Speaker 4: I have a company called political movement that makes dance theater from a social and political lens.
Speaker 4: And it's really been about creating space and giving space to those of us who have been underrepresented.
Speaker 4: I always say that I'm a lover.
Speaker 4: I think that love is at the center of all of the things that I do.
Speaker 4: And it's part of my values.
Speaker 4: And I love this idea of intergenerational conversations because somebody once told me, if you don't have a mentor, that's younger than you, you're doing something wrong.
Speaker 4: And I also think that you need mentors who are older than you and intergenerational knowledge sharing is something that means a lot to me.
Speaker 4: And just to preface, I am express, which makes sense as to why I'm here.
Speaker 4: My father is Afro indigenous meek, ma and black from Nova Scotia.
Speaker 4: And my mom is British.
Speaker 1: Thank you, aria.
Speaker 1: That was lovely.
Speaker 1: Thanks Kumari.
Speaker 1: And now I'd like tide to introduce themselves.
Speaker 2: Hello,[inaudible] my name is Ty, Ty Sloan.
Speaker 2: Some folks know me as tiger Lily.
Speaker 2: I'm an Anishinaabe.
Speaker 2: Tiny's Irish Greek, a multidisciplinary artist, mixed gender.
Speaker 2: Non-binary two-spirit hot mess, trying to bridge everyone that I can together, who is willing and consenting, who needs to prioritize more arrest.
Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
Speaker 1: You covered a lot there.
Speaker 2: And I'm, I'm turning 28 this year.
Speaker 2: I'm 27
Speaker 4: About like the, the different stages of our lives when we have different amounts of energy.
Speaker 4: And like, along that journey of like taking on and like needing rest you're on your Saturn return, you can wrestle, you need,
Speaker 1: I'm glad aria that you said that because at the beginning, before we started the conversation, I said, I took today off just to rest because it's been so hectic.
Speaker 1: So my name is Leslie Lee cam.
Speaker 1: And as you can tell from my lovely accent, I'm from Trinidad and I am mixed race.
Speaker 1: I am starting to see I'm multi-racial so I'm brown and I am Caribbean.
Speaker 1: So the Caribs and the arrow acts.
Speaker 1: So the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, I am a Chinese, I am Indo.
Speaker 1: And because of my racial mixture in Trinidad and like callaloo, which is one of our national food dishes, and it's made up of many ingredients, I am also part white, but I don't usually say that because you can't see it.
Speaker 1: So what's the point.
Speaker 1: And I am a, and I am a connector, a storyteller, and a, I love them some doubles and dancing, and I'm finding more and more since COVID started, I need my rest in between numerous zoom meetings.
Speaker 1: And I'm really looking forward to this conversation about being mixed race.
Speaker 1: The conversation is not happening in Toronto.
Speaker 1: For many of us, we fit in everywhere, but we belong nowhere.
Speaker 1: So we were really tired.
Speaker 1: And I excited about having this particular conversation.
Speaker 1: Thanks again to Ren Kumari for being here.
Speaker 2: Leslie and I have been talking about being mixed race since we met in 2016.
Speaker 2: So this is I think the first formal time that a live in some level of permanence where we get to talk about it.
Speaker 2: And I also know that through my various relationships with Kumari and aria, we've also shared and talked about it.
Speaker 2: And so to bring kind of these private conversations, especially as the four of us being leaders and organizers in our respectful communities that we intersect and navigate it, that it's, I'm excited to finally share my voice and to hear all of your perspectives on something that I think is always so constant, but as often invisibilized by everyone else.
Speaker 1: Hmm.
Speaker 1: I remember when I came to Toronto and I was on the subway for the first time by myself and I was looking around and everybody was white and I'd come from a country that's very, very racially diverse.
Speaker 1: Trinidad is not to beagle.
Speaker 1: And I remember this white woman looking at me and smiling, and then she came and she sat next to me.
Speaker 1: And the first thing she said to me was, are you from Burma?
Speaker 1: And luckily I knew where I was and I said, no.
Speaker 1: And she says, oh, you must be from Jamaica.
Speaker 1: I can tell from your accent, because back then people didn't know the Trinidad existed.
Speaker 1: They only knew about Jamaica and I've been through so many different ways of being identified racially, like the whole spectrum of brown and now going into black.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I always lead with my mixture cause that's what people see.
Speaker 4: I just want to say that I love, but you, well, maybe not left is the right term, but I was really intrigued by what you said about like your whiteness and you not talking about it because you can't see it.
Speaker 4: And this idea of like when we're white passing and we're not passing the four of us speaking, none of us are white passing.
Speaker 4: Some of us may be, have that heritage.
Speaker 4: And some of us don't have never thought about not saying part of my identity because you don't see it anyways.
Speaker 4: I'm sure we'll talk about that.
Speaker 4: But it just like sparked a little bit of me and so interesting because it was what people were seeing that caused me to start naming what I was when I was introducing myself or making an application, be assumptions that people were making about my history, whether they were right or wrong, uh, never felt like it was how I wanted to be perceived saying what I am.
Speaker 4: It felt like a way to avoid all of those people being like, are you this?
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 1: I agree.
Speaker 1: Aria.
Speaker 2: I think it's interesting that you mentioned that because I've only been in Toronto for five years.
Speaker 2: I named that because before I was in Toronto, I didn't really talk about being strays.
Speaker 2: I grew up in Alberta though in my like late teens and early twenties, I saw, I saw a mass migration of both like newcomer folks and other folks from bigger metropolis is figuring out their relationship with the oil field and wanting to make an income in that way in Alberta.
Speaker 2: But the thing that I always navigated is the second or the third question that people often would ask me is what's your background?
Speaker 2: And immediately it made me feel other heads.
Speaker 2: I remember the first conversation I kind of had with you, Leslie, and with Laila in the first iteration of the youth elders project, when it was a conversation.
Speaker 2: I remember you both being like, well, you can identify all of them.
Speaker 2: Are you sure that there are people watching me?
Speaker 2: There's like surveilled community members from my perspective backgrounds who are, I've done a quite me on them, but I remember having both you and Lila, who's a magma x-rays precedent be like, identify all of them, all parts of you.
Speaker 2: I'm so curious to know, like the reaction that you folks hold when you do bring in all parts of your, when you get to name it or when it gets confronted with you.
Speaker 4: I think for me, it's just the constant, trying to overcome the imposter syndrome of being enough, that if I'm in a place that is only looking at one part of my identity, I instantly feel like I don't belong there.
Speaker 4: And I think about like, how do we create spaces where we can be multi-racial multi-cultural that we can celebrate all of the parts of ourselves and to not have it feel like a fractured identity.
Speaker 4: I remember when I landed on the term Afro indigenous, and I was like, this describes both of the identities of my father in one word and how just like having one word to be able to talk about me felt easier, but why is that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think about, I think about that a lot and this like wholeness or separation, various communities that I've been involved with and a part of in the city are very identity based.
Speaker 3: And that is, I think, a part of this culture shift of, of shifting out of solely identity based spaces, because I think they are tricky to navigate or can be tricky to navigate belonging in.
Speaker 3: And for me, I struggle a lot with language and naming myself, most of the identities that I would say that I am, uh, beyond my mixed race identities and my mixed race identities, all feel like they're not actually in alignment with how I feel.
Speaker 3: They feel like they're reaching to name something so that I can attempt to find connection.
Speaker 3: And so for me, I know that there are way more complexities within that naming.
Speaker 3: So sometimes I'll say all the things I could give you a giant book of identities that I hold, but I'm a human in front of you.
Speaker 3: And so how are you seeing me in all of those things?
Speaker 3: How are you giving space for all of those things to exist?
Speaker 3: And so for me, in terms of belonging, that means that I mostly just try to belong to myself and try to find belonging in energetic connections with other humans and live more in terms of that when I segment myself off, that's when I start to feel like I don't belong,
Speaker 1: Good point, uh, Kumari and aria.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because when I'm in Trinidad, I'm a callaloo, but here in Canada, you're constantly being asked, you know, what is your identity?
Speaker 1: When you look a certain way, are you from here?
Speaker 1: Are you from there?
Speaker 1: So I really liked my callaloo identity and just a quick story about belonging.
Speaker 1: I started a mixed race, lesbian, uh, chat group back in the eighties because I couldn't find anybody else who was mixed race like me and the irony of the whole thing.
Speaker 1: There were about eight of us.
Speaker 1: And the irony was that of the eight, seven had one white parent and one parent of color.
Speaker 1: And they ended up telling me that I didn't belong to the group because both my parents were mixed race.
Speaker 1: So even in terms of belonging and rejection, you know, we do it to ourselves when we are mixed race, how, how do we treat each other?
Speaker 1: And how do we take care of each other when we are mixed race?
Speaker 1: That's something that I have been looking for and so forth.
Speaker 1: Ty,
Speaker 2: I think when you say, how do we take care of each other?
Speaker 2: I'm going to say a bold generalization and acknowledge that I'm doing.
Speaker 2: So I don't believe anyone that I've encountered, whether they're white or black or indigenous or a person of color or a mixed race of those, I don't believe any of them consider care and asking what my background is.
Speaker 2: I don't think their thought processes is like, I wonder if this person has a complex being, can I hold everything that they're about to offer?
Speaker 2: And I say that because I'm beginning to lean into not identifying racially and identifying my queerness, mostly because most of my work and art really centers around it and the community in this kind of broad way that I've experienced all of the beautiful links that I've met.
Speaker 2: Um, I can bring my identity and they can go cool.
Speaker 2: But then when it comes to specific ethnic groups or racial communities, marginalized communities, it's almost like it almost becomes like an interrogation that kind of starts off with, well, how can you be all of it that leads into me having to explain my whole life story and trauma experience.
Speaker 2: And then everyone goes, whoa.
Speaker 2: And I find that a lot of people don't feel settled with the explanation.
Speaker 2: I give them
Speaker 4: Certain circles have an understanding of gender inspect and sexuality to be this like beautiful spectrum and that you can choose to identify however you want.
Speaker 4: But because of the way that the history of this nation has been colonized, we have like a different set of expectations about the way that we look and talking about care.
Speaker 4: And how do we extend care inside of asking people what their cultural background is?
Speaker 4: It would be interesting to actually draw from like community welcoming practices.
Speaker 4: Maybe that's the answer
Speaker 1: We need to start that happening.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I appreciate you aria, naming this nation built on colonization because I think this piece about questioning racial identity and it also has to do with how much of like an aesthetic based society we are.
Speaker 3: We're not asking questions necessarily.
Speaker 3: We're making judgements based on face value.
Speaker 3: Part of that violent history is that we need to know who our people are.
Speaker 3: And I try and remind myself when I'm having conversations with folks, what is the connection here?
Speaker 3: How can we relate to each other?
Speaker 3: And that doesn't mean that it's any less microaggression or any less to experience that.
Speaker 3: But I find that that is my kind of like coping mechanism for those moments to be like, oh, I get it depending on my answer and who you are like that could be seen as threatening.
Speaker 3: And so then where is the opportunity for me to open up conversation so that we can see each other in a, in a different way, if that's even possible.
Speaker 1: That's so true.
Speaker 1: I like what both of you have said about the colonizing and we are the results of colonization racially.
Speaker 1: And that's one of the things I talk about when I do my workshops and presentations.
Speaker 1: The reason you see this in front of you is a result of colonization.
Speaker 1: So when I use myself as a result of colonization, people say, well, aren't we here to talk about how seniors are being impacted?
Speaker 1: And I say, yeah, well, I'm one of those seniors who has been impacted by called ization.
Speaker 1: And that's why I look this way when they start questioning, you know, and you said face value, no pun intended, but it's true.
Speaker 1: It is the face value.
Speaker 1: So we've covered a lot about belonging rejecting.
Speaker 1: What does it mean to be mixed race we wanted to touch on?
Speaker 1: What do you think are some of the barriers or access to being mixed race?
Speaker 2: This can look like in life, it's gonna look like finding work is, can look like political identities, institutions, activism, which I know are all areas that newly navigate our different toes into.
Speaker 3: I, I really struggled with this question and I'm just going to share a bit about like, why I struggled with this question and why I'm still struggling with this question.
Speaker 3: And it has a lot to do with what we were talking about earlier in terms of having whiteness as part of our mixes.
Speaker 3: For me, I would say growing up, particularly as a child, like a lot of my Sri Lankan connections and Sinhala connections were erased in my, uh, immediate familial household.
Speaker 3: And so for me, I actually feel like I was steeped in ending courage within whiteness.
Speaker 3: I feel like I experienced barriers based on what I look like.
Speaker 3: I read as a brown person.
Speaker 3: That means that people don't think that I'm white ever.
Speaker 3: So I have this like weird access to white modalities of thinking and moving through the world, but actually do that as a brown person.
Speaker 3: And that's really confusing.
Speaker 3: I struggle with this because I don't feel like there are barriers specifically linked to my mixed race identities that I've experienced.
Speaker 3: I feel like I, I grew up knowing some of the tools to navigate that.
Speaker 3: That is to me like an internal barrier, I guess, in, in navigating all of these different things that you've named Ty, because I I'm so conscious and aware of that in how I move.
Speaker 3: And so that's why I also see myself more as a, a supporter, like make things happen, person because I try and utilize that access and knowledge as opposed to take up physical space in that whether or not that's successful.
Speaker 3: That's up to humans that are in my life and humans that interact with me.
Speaker 3: I'd love to know about that more.
Speaker 3: I think those are, those are my immediate reactions.
Speaker 3: And I would love to hear also like what this question brings up for other folks and respond to that too.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Kamari.
Speaker 4: What you said really resonates with me because I'm in a similar position where I grew up with a white single mom and I am not white passing.
Speaker 4: I also look like a brown person walking through the world and have received the racism of what that means throughout my life and the microaggressions to not belonging, to the people that are raising you.
Speaker 4: And it's interesting.
Speaker 4: The idea of barriers I think are more internal than they are external because my morals conflict sometimes around knowing that I have whiteness in me.
Speaker 4: And if I'm in a situation where I'm only being seen as a person of color, I feel like somebody else should be speaking.
Speaker 4: That is something that I think holds me back a lot, the fear to not want to like grow and shine and take up a lot of space because I know that I have privilege inside of how I grow up and like the making of me, I think because there is that familiarity in that awareness of whiteness and the comfort around it, because it is a part of my family that institutions can like, look at you and say like, oh, you can be a bridge for us taking on that role is emotionally exhausting.
Speaker 4: It feels like I always get placed there.
Speaker 4: That is an interesting
Speaker 1: Barrier.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Both navigate barriers.
Speaker 1: Um, well one is, uh, the first things, uh, in retrospect, and this only happened to me a couple of years ago when we started talking about shadism colorism growing up in Trinidad, even though we were so, uh, racially diverse, it's still played out in terms of the color of your skin and your background.
Speaker 1: So what kind of money you came from?
Speaker 1: So I went to a private school because I got a scholarship and it was run by white Irish nuns.
Speaker 1: And they rarely wreak havoc on you when you are not white, but if you were Chinese, they will, they didn't treat you as badly.
Speaker 1: If you were brown, you still, you know, you were treated badly and you were in deep do do, if you were black, the worst treated with those students.
Speaker 1: And then when I came here, the same thing, so that playing out, but I didn't know what it was until I was much older.
Speaker 1: And I heard the terms when we talk about intersectionality, I check off so many boxes.
Speaker 1: Now that I'm retired.
Speaker 1: And even prior to being retired, they wanted me because I looked good for the organization.
Speaker 1: Cause I worked for many nonprofit organizations before I retired.
Speaker 1: And so funders are doing this and we are playing into that game of, oh yeah, you look a certain way.
Speaker 1: So you check off all these boxes, but I just wanted to bring us back briefly.
Speaker 1: When you talked about having this white part of your background in terms of your race.
Speaker 1: My struggle right now is one of my brothers is married to a white Irish woman.
Speaker 1: And I have three nephews who are all young adults, they're in their twenties and they're all white passing.
Speaker 1: And I'm constantly having to check them in terms of their privilege, how they are treating people of color.
Speaker 1: And I have to keep saying, have you seen your father recently?
Speaker 1: You need to look at where you're coming from.
Speaker 1: So in terms of being mixed race is always so important for me to look at my access versus where I face a barrier, because I have more access than barriers than black and indigenous people in my lives.
Speaker 1: And when I go out with my black and indigenous friends, I see how that privilege plays out.
Speaker 1: And I always have to make sure that I am letting people know you can't do this.
Speaker 1: I am.
Speaker 1: I'm calling people accountable.
Speaker 1: So sometimes it's like work being mixed rates.
Speaker 1: You're always having to hold people accountable.
Speaker 1: What about Ty?
Speaker 1: What about you
Speaker 2: Contentious opinion about this?
Speaker 2: [inaudible] Um, I'm going to acknowledge and name, item some privilege.
Speaker 2: I am an adoptee who was raised in white culture.
Speaker 2: I'm on a long reclamation journey with both my Chinese and my Adish non-paid background.
Speaker 2: And I always want to ensure that I can center folks who are more marginalized than me and who are, are, are skin than me.
Speaker 2: So I acknowledge all of that and I believe both can see that in the work and the community work that I do, that I'm constantly on that journey, but I am struggling all of the time to reconcile the violence that I experienced from racialized people.
Speaker 2: I experienced violence from white folks, but I want to speak into the violence that I feel that indigenous folks and east Asian cause those are my, those are my communities that come from, uh, they're immense and intentional ways of trying to erase my identity.
Speaker 2: That is not the one that they Harold from and the, the actions, which I believe to be a little neo-colonial in simultaneously wanting to blame my lack of knowledge or my lack of cultural understanding on me.
Speaker 2: And then also wanting to hold me accountable.
Speaker 2: It's catch up where I have to give back financially.
Speaker 2: So I do and catch up in a way where I provide more space for other people.
Speaker 2: And I do, uh, and where I continue to unpack all of the equity and inclusion practices before I'm, before I feel validated to be in a room.
Speaker 2: I'm glad we're talking about intersectionality now, because the first time I experienced this in a, in a really direct way, I was hired by a mixed race person to BB indigenous program producer for paprika theater festival.
Speaker 2: And I did the job and my job was to cure rate like a cabaret and a panel series that fit around what the indigenous programs through that festival was already doing.
Speaker 2: So the festival had indigenous mentors who grew up on resonant culture and it had students learning and developing who grew up in resonant culture.
Speaker 2: They hired me because I bridged communities.
Speaker 2: I feel like that's actually what I'm Hey, that's one of my places that I can find rest in all aspects of my identities, but it is a lot of work.
Speaker 2: This person took note of that and was like, you can curate a new you're really thought provoking when it comes to asking people questions, can you facilitate this thing?
Speaker 2: And true, say it was like my first time curating.
Speaker 2: I don't know very much this, but I will connect as I do.
Speaker 2: And I connected a fantastic array of artists.
Speaker 2: I brought in Raven wings.
Speaker 2: I brought in Jay Northcott.
Speaker 2: I brought in Sophie dough and Brendan Chandler and a bunch of other brilliant indigenous folks.
Speaker 2: Most of those folks are mixed race in and of themselves.
Speaker 2: And then a couple months later, this indigenous artists reached out to me and was like, why are you producing this thing?
Speaker 2: What was wild to me is that it already had happened.
Speaker 2: Like it had already had existed, but they in their minds thought that it was in the midst of happened.
Speaker 2: And they were calling in to step down.
Speaker 2: There is a lot of conversations around folks right now in the indigenous communities that are talking about folks who are claiming space or authority or power or financial access and abusing it when they're not claimed by a nation.
Speaker 2: So I kind of preface my responses to them by being like, I have a feeling that this is where this is living.
Speaker 2: I'm going to let you know what I was doing.
Speaker 2: And, and they, they were very violent.
Speaker 2: They erased all of my identity and my two-spirit identity.
Speaker 2: And to name, I was named two-spirit by Laila pine, who was, who's an indigenous elder.
Speaker 2: So this one person whose nation I come from there also Anish, um, uh, refuted my whole identity and said I had more work to do before I was allowed to hold that kind of position.
Speaker 2: And, and I respect that part of my learning journey is to listen to those who have perhaps been more harmed than I have with being indigenous, um, or being marginalized and racialized.
Speaker 2: But I just, I felt so angry and I felt like their behavior was simultaneously a justifiable, Collin, that at the time I was really emotional about, but now, and retroactively I could respect, but I also believe that it's a little bit of a colonizer thing to gate keep people's identities.
Speaker 2: And the reason why I stayed this is because if we consider colonization and the foster care system and the way that the Canadian government has turned up, Paul apart, um, pull apart indigenous folks from their community.
Speaker 2: I am essentially a by-product of colonization.
Speaker 2: I'm a success to it because I was divorced from it.
Speaker 2: I struggled to find it.
Speaker 2: I navigate intense amount of violence harm and, and responsibility now to reclaim it and refined it.
Speaker 2: And in that moment, I experienced such a plethora of internal barriers already, but then to have someone who I also, at one point in time saw as a mentor erased me and, and me not having any of the resources to navigate that, that justified fragility, but fragility, I was just like, I don't even want to be indigenous.
Speaker 2: And I stayed to a lot of my indigenous kid.
Speaker 2: I'm very proud to be indigenous, but under no circumstances would I ever want to come from a marginalized identity that has existed and lived, and it's still actively healing from such intense trauma.
Speaker 2: And so I say that both as an east Asian and then as, as a digital person, because whenever I enter these spaces, I get confronted by community and by other artists with this kind of example, in various macro and micro doses.
Speaker 2: But it makes me mad because the only thing I'm trying to do is make space for people and explain my list, experience and be supported because the fact of the matter is like all of us, I'm a brown person.
Speaker 2: I don't have the privileges of being white.
Speaker 2: And so I was never given the same level of support that other folks did.
Speaker 2: And so now that government and grants new bodies live in priority groups, I'm like, well, maybe as I'm learning, reclaiming and making space, I can also affirm my identity.
Speaker 2: And I'm being shown by a portion of the communities that I intersect that I'm not allowed to, or that I should not be.
Speaker 2: I'm
Speaker 1: Really sorry.
Speaker 1: That happened to your tie where there's such a struggle.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Thanks for sharing.
Speaker 3: I feel like that also is supporting me, reframing the question for myself because when I think about barriers and access, I think way more structurally than Intercommunity based.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I I've experienced similar questioning.
Speaker 3: And to me, I think there's a real piece in there around folks being able to be seen in their wholeness.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to recall who said this, but I, I cannot recall in this moment and actually now I'm like, maybe it was you, Leslie.
Speaker 3: We were talking about like percentages, I'm this percentage.
Speaker 3: And in the conversation, it was just like, no, you're not a percentage.
Speaker 3: You are that, that is work that we all need to do, like mixed race folks and non mixed race hosts because it has to do with so many portions of our identity.
Speaker 3: Like we have to be able to see people in multiplicity and complexity and the violence that you're experiencing tie around that it is a direct relationship to someone wanting to separate you out and wanting to not see the fullness of each of those things.
Speaker 3: And it's really frustrating if you're like constantly in this battle of thinking, am I enough of this thing?
Speaker 3: It completes so much
Speaker 1: Aria.
Speaker 1: Did you want to try me?
Speaker 4: I was just going to say that that experience loops back around to how our nation has been shaped and how the success of the colonial state is that we don't acknowledge who we are.
Speaker 4: So I think that in reclaiming all of the identities that make up who we are naming all of those ancestors and this idea of like percentages, somebody wants to talk to me about, if you take your genealogy of like grandparents, grandparents, grandparents, grandparents, in a room, if you actually visualize them as human beings like that, as a real person, they're beside you, they're standing there in their body, in their blood and they're flashed in their ancestry.
Speaker 4: But conversations around accepting mixed race identity are also tied to the hurt that has happened to this land.
Speaker 4: I can see why that person might be angry, but then I'm also like your anger is doing the thing that we're trying to stop allowing the colonial state to continue to exist.
Speaker 1: And it scares me a little bit when that kind of policing happens because we're already dealing with that.
Speaker 1: And then we start doing it to each other.
Speaker 1: And that's why for me, it always comes back to kindness and caring that we have to be so aware that, you know, it's, it's hard, enough being one, nobody is truly one race, but when you have all these other layers of mixtures, we really need to be mindful, especially now during COVID, this way of living is going to continue.
Speaker 1: It's not going to go away simply because we have vaccines.
Speaker 1: So how do we move forward in terms of our many, many identities and complexities and complex ways of living and being in the womb
Speaker 2: Existing in the whole world, the whole like 7 billion of us.
Speaker 1: One of the things we already talk about is what is it like being mixed race and?
Speaker 4: I mean, why it's interesting, cause it makes me think back to what you said about how naming yourself inside of a community feels like you're actually being accepted for the mossy, multifaceted human being that you are.
Speaker 4: And I try to look at myself as finding all of the ways that I can celebrate myself to me.
Speaker 4: Queerness is beautiful and I want to lean into the parts of myself that don't fit into a binary.
Speaker 4: My mixed race identity is not a binary.
Speaker 4: My gender is not a binary and my sexuality is not a binary.
Speaker 4: So being gender nonconforming and being and being mixed race to me all make sense and line up for me in a way that I want to celebrate, but I can look at the other side of it too.
Speaker 4: I just like right now, don't want to,
Speaker 3: I conceptualize it very similarly.
Speaker 3: And, um, I'm now so curious if all of us are kind of in this place for me, I was confronted with racial identity as a young age, I would say my like identity and non binary gender spectrum identity came later.
Speaker 3: They all feel like they live on a spectrum to me.
Speaker 3: Ooh.
Speaker 3: One of the barriers in myself and in communities that I've experienced a lot is living in dichotomies.
Speaker 3: And for me, I've always, as far as my memory can exceed back into my embodied lived experience, I always knew that there was more than two things.
Speaker 3: Like I always knew there was a spectrum.
Speaker 3: And so that really informs how I move in spaces and how I move in the world.
Speaker 3: There's always more, there's always more complexity.
Speaker 3: I celebrate that.
Speaker 3: I love that it, that framing also allows me to see the spectrums and magic and other people.
Speaker 3: And in my many communities, I think one of the things that I will name still lives in spaces is racism and colonization.
Speaker 3: And those aspects of being mixed race still come up in spaces.
Speaker 3: This questioning of like not enoughness around identity, they'll comes up in spaces.
Speaker 3: They're not void of that.
Speaker 3: I feel like there is, there is more space specifically within spaces and folks that have spectrum understandings of the world.
Speaker 3: And those are kind of where I lean because there are definitely spaces and folks that do not have spectrum identities of the world.
Speaker 3: And yeah, that, that doesn't jive great for me celebrating myself and spectrum identities.
Speaker 1: Thanks, Kumari.
Speaker 1: I like that.
Speaker 1: Spectrum understandings and identities.
Speaker 4: We just, philosophized a master's thesis this podcast.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 1: This has been a really, really rich conversation.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I could talk about this for a lifetime and I feel like I will be, so why not do it as part of a podcast and continue to find links between us and like a brighter future for ourselves and those coming up behind us and who are ahead of us as well.
Speaker 1: Great.
Speaker 1: And possibilities is another part costs that people can tune into in terms of the subject.
Speaker 1: And are there any other little nuggets that anybody would like to add before we wrap up?
Speaker 3: I would love to one say, thank you for holding this space and doing this podcast.
Speaker 3: I think this particular conversation, it feels really necessary and important in the world in this time, but also always as well as all the other episodes that I've heard little negative information about if we're continuing conversations.
Speaker 3: I think it's also really important.
Speaker 3: All of us have links with whiteness.
Speaker 3: And I think that my coming into naming myself as mixed feels like it's been very tied to a person of color or a BiPAP person and whiteness.
Speaker 3: And I just want to like shout out and say, I see you all, you magical mixed humans that maybe don't have that language that are not mixed with white and are still totally enough.
Speaker 3: And that I would also really love to have more folks with varied mixed identities in these conversations.
Speaker 3: There's so much that we often do miss.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Komori for pointing that out and aria.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I'm just gonna say that I share the sentiments and it's been a really incredible evening.
Speaker 2: I'm inviting other Nick's race, identify folks, but other folks who are not mixed x-rays to consider the impact of choosing.
Speaker 2: And I feel like we do because we live in a multicultural melting pot of what it means to be in solidarity with other cultures.
Speaker 2: And then what it means to create new life who will need to navigate many intersections.
Speaker 2: And it's also an invitation to mixed race folks because the more complicated someones mix is the feeling of more fragmentation kind of exists for an individual.
Speaker 2: And so if we think about wanting to bring everyone's wholeness to this conversation actively, but when I also think about action items, consider what this means for kids now who are experienced and moving through the world and wanting to reclaim, I know from hearing from different knowledge keepers of all kinds, that reclaiming identity has become a very critical mass popularity.
Speaker 2: And so how can we all, all of us in this room, but also those listening, how can we support affirming all of the identities that come into the room and how can we offer knowledge, culture, and stories to all of these people without conditions?
Speaker 2: How can you support it?
Speaker 2: Invite people into the beautiful, juicy, fantastic complexities of culture and history without conditions.
Speaker 2: Because I believe that offering that in a way that offers care and respect to both this mixed race kid and to your culture is by doing it without a condition unconditionally, unconditionally.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the youth elders podcast, a big Fang scores to our sound editing team, Denato Hepburn and M Lovells with support from Maddie bowtie stack
Speaker 2: Youth elders podcast is produced by buddies and bad times theater and it's funded in part by the theaters community and education partner, TD bank.