Picking a Car: Andre Lackner on Race, Prison, and Refusing to Choose

Andre Lackner asked Shawna if she was sure she wanted to talk to him. That should tell you something about how this conversation goes.

In this episode, Shawna and Andre get into what he calls anti-mixed violence and how it gets folded into other categories. They talk about conditional acceptance, the pressure to perform blackness, and the difference between being a guest at the cookout and holding the umbrella. Andre describes what race looked like inside a racially segregated prison yard, where he ran raffles with Scrabble tiles and sold cheesecake made from mozzarella and coffee creamer, and where a kid got badly hurt for accepting a slice from someone of another race. They also work through where they disagree, including whether proximity to whiteness is a useful frame or a projection. Andre closes with an argument about resilience and what he calls injustice collecting: the more things you find to be broken by, the more breakable you become.

Content note: this episode includes candid discussion of violence, including childhood bullying and violence inside prison, and includes strong language.

About Andre

Andre Lackner grew up in Inglewood, California, where being mixed meant getting jumped on the way home from school. After three years in prison, he came home and began speaking publicly about the mixed race experience, particularly the pressure to choose sides, conform to fixed labels, or suppress parts of yourself to fit what other people expect. What started as a personal defense of his own identity became a broader mission: creating spaces where layered identities can exist without explanation or fractions, and advocating for mixed race people to be unapologetically mixed.

Today he is president of the mixed student union at Cal State Northridge, where he is completing his final semester, and he builds community online while taking a critical look at how current perspectives on race can harm multiracial people. He encourages mixed people to stand on business, refuse to bend the knee to monoracial groups, and push for nuance, self-definition, and belonging at a time when conversations about race are often reactive and binary. Through campus organizing, digital dialogue, and public discussion, he explores what it means to move beyond racial extremes and toward a more integrated understanding of identity. He is also a former professional dancer and is at work on a book about internet addiction and what three years without a phone did to his thinking.

Where to find Andre
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@itsoktobemixed
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsoktobemixed/

Book news
Mixed Signals: A Multiracial Window into Civility and Belonging at Work arrives in September. Follow Our True Colors on Instagram for updates and behind the scenes tidbits.

If this is your first time with OTC, check out  EPISODE 1: START HERE for more background on the show. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram!

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Consider joining the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association!

Transcript

Intro  0:06  
Welcome to our True Colors, hosted by Shawna Gann. Join her as she explores the challenges of being a racial riddle, an ethnic enigma, and a cultural conundrum. Let's dive in.

Shawna  0:22  
Hey, all. Glad to have you back at Our True Colors. I am flying solo today. Marcel couldn't join us for this one, so it's just me and my guest. And honestly, we covered so much ground that I don't think you'll mind. Before we get into it, a quick bit of news. I'm super excited to tell you that my book, Mixed Signals: A Multiracial Window into Civility and Belonging at Work, is coming out this September. I'll be sharing updates here on the show as we get closer. Plus, there'll be behind-the-scenes bits and pieces over on Instagram. If you're not already following our True Colors, there, come and find us. Okay, on to today's guest, Andre Lackner spent three years in prison, and when he came home, he started speaking publicly about the mixed race experience, particularly the pressure to choose sides, to conform to fixed labels, or to suppress parts of yourself just to fit what other people expect. What started as a personal defense of his own identity turned into something bigger, creating spaces where layered identities can just exist without explanation and without fractions. He advocates for mixed race people around the world and encourages them to be unapologetically mixed. At the time of this recording, Andre was a student at Cal State Northridge, where he founded and leads the Mixed Student Union, and he's focused on building community and taking a hard look at how current conversations about race can actually harm multiracial people. He encourages mixed folks to stand on business, to refuse to bend the knee to monoracial groups at a time when race talks tend to be reactive and binary. Through campus organizing, digital dialog, and public discussion, he's exploring what it means to move past racial extremes and towards something more integrated. When I first talked to Andre, he asked me if I was sure I wanted to interview him, and I assured him that I did. I'd seen his work on social media, and yeah, it's not easy work, and it's not for the faint of heart because there are a lot of folks that challenge what he says. I actually wonder if you'll feel challenged. In this episode, we get into conditional acceptance and what he calls anti-mixed violence, what he learned about race inside a racially segregated prison yard, and why he thinks collecting injustices makes us more breakable, not stronger. There are places where we see things differently, and I push back a little, which you know that's what makes a conversation good. Also, heads up, Andre speaks candidly about violence, including violence he experienced as a kid and when he was inside. And now, if you're ready, settle in, keep an open mind, and let's get into it. Andre, it is so good to have you. I know that we've talked about getting together for a little bit. So, finally, to have this opportunity to talk with you on the show is great. I appreciate you coming. Thank you.

Andre Lackner  3:27  
Thank you for having me.

Shawna  3:29  
Why don't we just start by having you tell a little bit about yourself? What are you doing that's your everyday? That's not necessarily in your bio.

Andre Lackner  3:36  
You know, I have so much to get caught up on since I've been in prison. It's like I got out of prison. I had to hurry up to find a job. Then school started full time. Then out of nowhere, I decided to start a mixed race club. Well, not really out of nowhere, but it was never something I planned. It just something that kind of happened because I saw some of the negative commentary happening on social media and people getting attacked. And one day I was like, "You know what? I'm tired of this shit. I'm gonna do something about it, and I started talking about it. And as I talked about it, I got support, and I started this club and right see how I can test in a safe, academically safe environment. But right now, I'm just trying to get caught up in my finances because I was really doing things before I got arrested. I was a business owner. I was an entrepreneur. No, running a retail company, now I'm kind of starting from scratch. And I'll be real: after being around so many frustrating personalities in prison, I'm like, okay, I gotta stay in academia because if I gotta deal with these knuckleheads again, I'm not gonna be able to take it. So it's really nice to be in like environments with different kinds of people, and yeah, I'm trying to keep bodybuilding, keep working out, trying to drop some pounds. Like I gained a lot of weight when I got out of prison because all this food was everywhere, man. It was like I could go to the store and buy any food I want. Oh, I'm gonna get donuts. I'm gonna get fried. I'm gonna get chocolate milk. I'm gonna get this little pack. I never heard of it, but I'm gonna eat it. I'm gonna hit the buffet, bro. I'm about to give me some food. So, you know, after being like malnourished and starved and deprived of the food and prison, it was like the most amazing thing, and then I could cook. So now I'm kind of trying to you know do the the normal people thing and know be moderate, you know. Exercise, go out, have my routine, and also, you know, if I'm like one of the mixed male faces, you know, I gotta look the part a little bit. You know, they're trying to put who's that other prison mixed guy that saw that pretty boy, Jeremy Meeks. They all like putting me next to him. I'm like, all right, man, I can't be Jeremy Meeks, but you know, I could try to get a little close. You know, I'm in LA. You know, LA, we're a little more shallow. We're trying to sell the image, so you know, I'm trying to play with that a little bit. But other than that, things are good, and my last semester is going to be this fall, and I look forward to doing stuff after that.

Shawna  5:54  
That is amazing. When I met you, actually, I I found you on TikTok. I was seeing your videos, and I reached out to talk to you. You are like, are you sure you try to talk to me? Because my stuff is controversial, and I was like, well, to me, it's all part of the conversation. But there are some things that really stood out to me about the stuff you talk about online. One of the things that I picked up on is you very much talk about what it is to be a person with mixed race identity that faces challenge or rejection or whatever from the black community. If you're a black mixed race person, that is something that I've talked about too, but very carefully, very very carefully, because this country has had such a focus on Black Americans and persecution and oppression, and rightfully so because it's pretty messed up, like what what we've been through. But like what you say, and and I think this is so true. Is there isn't enough discussion on when you straddle lines, and when you are part of two different worlds, and one of those worlds has been oppressed, so they don't see you as a person that could possibly have challenges too. And being told you're you're not really this, or you are this, or you think you're that. So that's really what stood out to me. And I would love if you would talk a little bit about that, like how you decided that was what you were going to focus on, and what the reaction has been?

Andre Lackner  7:25  
Oh man, the reaction has been very, very mixed, but for good reason. It's like I feel like a lot of what I would call anti-mixed violence gets swept under the rug as black-on-black violence, and then our experience gets talked over by monoracial people. There's this assumption that if we're mixed with black, then we identify. There's different sides of it, right? There's the ones who say, "Hey, I'm mixed with black, but I identify as black, and therefore I have a black experience. So that complexity of being biracial in those spaces doesn't really get hurt because it gets swept under the rug as the black experience or anti-mixed violence in black spaces also get swept under the rug as just black-on-black violence. And I'm not from like a middle-class neighborhood. I'm not. I didn't grow up around middle-class or educated black people or like integrated places. I'm from Inglewood, so I grew up scrapping every week with people. I grew up like getting called white boy every day and curly fries, and it wasn't just like teasing and picking on me like a lot of people think. I mean, it was real violence. It was like brutality, and it got bad to the point where, like, you know, I was begging my mom, "Hey, put me in an integrated school. I don't want to just be around all black people. Because it by like five years old, it became clear to me I was different, and you know, there was also this dynamic that my mom talked white. My mom's a black woman herself, and my dad's actually mixed, but he just looks a little whiter. First, you get hated for talking white. Then automatically, they think, "Oh, you think you're better than us? Like you, they almost think that you're projecting superiority for speaking what's called proper English. Like, what do you mean talk white? You mean like speaking proper English, even though the whole time I was told I'm black? So there's this whole like line I'm trying to walk. Eventually, as I got older, you know, I realized, hey, I can make friends of all races. I don't have to just only make black friends. You know, I didn't see music as black or white music. I just saw this music. I didn't see dance styles or movies as black movies, and and it was interesting how some people self segregated, which is understandable. I mean, when you face racial trauma, you're going to want to run to the people who you feel will accept you. The thing is, I never really had a corner to run to like that. I feel like a lot of times, from my experiences, being accepted in black spaces as a mixed person was conditional, right? So I'm told by the one drop rule that if I'm a drop of black blood, I'm black. But I have to walk a line. I I can't think I'm above the program. I can't try to deviate from what the black norm is. But whatever that is,

Shawna  9:51  
by the way, whatever

Andre Lackner  9:52  
that is. But a black person can deviate all they want, and they don't have to worry about getting scrutinized or removed from the tribe, right? So it's this matter of picking and choosing when a mixed person is accepted, and I think that goes into this pressure to perform blackness. If you are a mixed race person, you're not accepted by white people. You can't be, or at least that's what they say. So you have to go with the blacks. But then you're still an other. You know, you're you're a guest at the cookout. It's not your cookout. You're. Oh God,

Shawna  10:23  
Andre, I got so much to tell you. Yes, keep going, preach.

Andre Lackner  10:27  
You uh, you get to ride in the car, but you can't drive, right? There's a saying that mixed people are under the black umbrella, right? But do we ever get to hold that umbrella? Do we really get to have the defining say in black affairs if I'm supposedly under the black umbrella, or am I still just a guest?

Shawna  10:44  
Like I didn't even identify as being mixed until like three years ago, right? Like I didn't because of like what you said. You were taught that you were black because of the one drop rule. Same, same with me. I am just who I am, and my my ancestry is Creole, which is in itself a mix of things and has its own culture. But I didn't grow up with a Creole culture either. So you know, I'm like you said, what corner I go to? That's how I've always felt, and I usually go with people who are ambiguously brown. Now, one of the stories I talk about is when I was in like fifth grade. So I'm from Anchorage, Alaska, but I moved to Pennsylvania for like we were there for like five years. Yeah, we were there. We were like in Pittsburgh for like five years, and it included my middle school years. Oh, my

Andre Lackner  11:24  
mom's from Pittsburgh. Okay,

Shawna  11:25  
is that right? Okay, yeah. Well, that's where I lived, and I remember this day that this girl, like, we were at the bus stop. She gave me her like little Debbie apple pie, and there was this other girl there, and the other girl was kind of mad because she thought she gave it to me because I thought I was cute or I thought I was whatever. This middle school I went to was huge, and it had like we would change classes, and you'd have to kind of go through these stairwells to get to the next, you know, to the class downstairs like really fast. I have memory of walking through that stairwell, and the kids be like, "There she goes, she thinks she does, or they were like calling me names and all this stuff, and I'm like, oh my god, I don't even know these people. I don't even know you. Like, I'm just trying to go to math class, man, right? So then after school, I'm on the bus, and the bus stop usually like four kids would get off. Okay, this day everybody got off the bus because they had circulated a rumor that they were gonna jump me, and they started to come after me. My house, like I had to cross the street from the bus and then go down sort of this like walkway because we lived in row houses, and my house was the last row house. And by the time I got like maybe three, four houses away, I'm like screaming from my mom. I'm like 10, screaming. They're grabbing my backpack, my coat, like everything, and my mom heard me by some miracle, and we had all we had this brick walkway, and I'll never forget this. And those bricks, those stupid bricks, were always loose. Thank God they were loose that day. She picked one up and was like going to throw it at these kids, and they ran away. Like they were about to kick my ass for what? For a pie, like for nothing, I did nothing. I was just me, but I was me in this place that was predominantly black, and they didn't see me that way. You know, like I was gonna get jumped just for being me, for being light skinned, for being too whatever.

Andre Lackner  13:15  
So, what you experience is something I had to do with like every every month at least. No, in middle school, to the point I just stopped taking the bus home. I would. I asked my mom

Shawna  13:24  
to switch schools too, and I did. I ended up going to a Catholic school. We're not Catholic, but it was like the safest place for me to be.

Andre Lackner  13:30  
There is a normalization that I've experienced of violence in hood culture. I try to explain it. Like I get people in my comments saying, "Oh, you won't say that in my face. Oh, you look like you got bullied. If I pull up on you, I'll let you know why. I get violent comments on my stuff all the time from black people. I delete like some of it or a lot of it gets blocked. But I want to say, hey, you know that you know this isn't normal in all other cultures in America. That you know you wonder why I don't want to identify with you, but you call me a coon to say you're going to whoop my ass if you could see me in person. They say that to you. Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting. TikTok started suggesting all my content to Black people at first. Then I guess after I had to block like 100 people, it started just realizing, okay, maybe we'll push it to other people. So now because they're the ones who engage a lot, no, they're the most likely to comment. A lot of and also they're like, there's this whole there's a lot of content of Black people talking about mixed people on TikTok now-that's like big. It's like they're calling it the the biracial conspiracy. Is kind of a term that's getting passed around that biracial people are trying to get all the mixed people to separate and ascend towards whiteness and make more whiter kids and all this stuff and the biracial agenda. That's literally like the trending topic of some of my videos, I'm like, wait, don't put that on me. I don't have no agenda. But I, I fought on

Shawna  14:48  
like some replacement theory shit. That's weird. Like, but like from another side, like that's weird. Yeah, but

Andre Lackner  14:55  
that's what they're trying to project onto us, right? Like there's this recent waste and event. There's an Asian meetup where a lot of people who are white and Asian at a big gathering, and immediately I see all these influencers talking about, oh, see, they're gathering to center their whiteness. They're only gathering because they're part white, and like they're white adjacent. Their proximity to whiteness is what they're celebrating. I'm like, okay, what? So if a bunch of people like me meet up, we're celebrating our proximity to whiteness, but you're just going to ignore the fact that we're also all have black. And I think these are kind of like woke terms people throw around the virtue signal, but it's really in a way reflecting how people use mixed people as a proxy to punch on white people. It's in the ghetto. I was the closest thing to white, so if you were mad at white people, I'm the thing that reminds you of whiteness. If I talk white, I look kind of white, I dance like a white boy, as they say. I'm the closest thing to white you can take your aggression out on. But at the same time, since I'm part of your community, I'm expected not to snitch. I'm expected to engage and throw down with you and squat with you. I don't get the same kind of institutional protection that a white person might get if I call the cops, you know. If I call the cops and say, "Hey, a white girl's getting beat up by a bunch of black dudes, they're there right away. Yeah, they're there. No, but if another mixed or mulatto is getting beat up by some black people, oh, okay, well, you know, that's that's your guys's problem, sort of. That's changing though. That I feel like that's changing. More people are used to seeing mixed people and are able to differentiate a little better. Like even other races will one drop. You know, sometimes you have these performative white people I see who will try to pander to black people and sort of one drop us as well. But back on the the whoa whoa whoa

Shawna  16:35  
whoa whoa wait wait wait wait wait. I want to know about that. What? What do you? Well, I just

Andre Lackner  16:39  
been seeing more and more like white people say, "Oh, well, you know, you're a drop of black blood, so you're black. But I'm like, or they'll say stuff like, "Oh, you probably got a white mom, and I'm like, "Wait, who told you? Oh yeah,

Shawna  16:49  
what's with the white? Okay, I haven't seen biracial agenda, but this white, this is what's on my feed, and I'm like, I I do not have a white mother, so I don't know why it is, but this white mother thing, like, okay, for all of you, if you have a white mom, stay here. Everybody else, scroll. And I'm like, what is with the white mother thing? I

Andre Lackner  17:06  
used to be like super pro black, you know, going to the open mics and talking about the experience. But I was like, wait, before I got up on the mic, you just kind of saw me as another face in the bus. But now I got up there and spit some bars and was like, yeah, Black Power, you know. Now I'm part of the now I'm part of the group, and I think that you know it's weird because yeah, mixed people aren't colonizers. Mixed people don't benefit from white supremacy. Mixed there's mixed privilege, but it's not so much mixed privilege. There's just benefits to being racially ambiguous. No, when people talk about mixed privilege, it assumes that all mixed people are racially ambiguous and can pass for whiter or lighter skin, but a lot of mixed people aren't necessarily racially racially ambiguous. There's a lot of a lot of

Shawna  17:49  
mixed people aren't even don't even have whiteness. Like imagine a black person and a Japanese person, not the Asians, but the Blazians. You know? Yeah,

Andre Lackner  17:55  
yeah. And then I try to tell people, look, being racially ambiguous isn't anything exclusive to mixed race people, but mixed race people don't have protected class status. No, we aren't a recognized dominant racial group. People talk about systemic representation and institutional power, but monoracial groups do have institutional representation. We don't, and so I find it very unfair that we're kind of told that we're white adjacent, or that we have proximity to whiteness, because it's a projection of other people's idealization of whiteness, and they put it on us as if we idealize whiteness and we're somehow close to white. Even though they won't, they won't ever stop reminding us that white people will never accept us. Too, they'll tell me, "Oh, you're not really black, or like, "You ain't like us, but also white people will never accept you, and so now I'm breaking the binary. I say, cool, you don't have to be black or white. I don't think I'm black or white. I could be something different. I'm the middle path. I'm not going right. I'm not going left. I'm going up, and I say, let the pressure from both sides either bog you down or push you to the top. And I try to empower all other mixed race people and say, look, we are the future of this world. Once you mix a family, there's no turning back, and more and more kids are going to be mixed. I think we're the fastest growing population, and eventually, you know, if people can't accept us and start recognizing the complexities and nuance in mixed identity, they're going to get left behind. I made a video about the unfair application of monoracial tropes being applied to mixed race people lately, and I think that a lot of these, no, especially in liberal spaces, these ideas of white supremacy and white hierarchies, when they get applied to mixed race people, it doesn't really represent us properly. There's a whole scrutiny to our experience. There's this assumption that because we're mixed white, that we somehow can pass ranks within the white supremacist hierarchy. But I see us mixed race people as completely outside of that hierarchy. We actually break the hierarchy. I think we're more the exception to that, and so there's so much complexity to it that you know we racial studies have spent so much time categorized. And creating these doctrines around racial racial relations, that when you bring it to a mixed race person, that whole idea gets shattered. And I'm not being specific enough, but such terms like centering whiteness, proximity to whiteness, white adjacent really need to be reevaluated because this is sort of something monoracial people project on mixed people and doesn't really represent what makes people feel like they are living in their lives.

Shawna  20:24  
I agree, and and I think that's why you know I like to talk to folks who study monoracism. You know the idea of trying to apply these monoracial things to the mixed race or multiracial experience. It just doesn't work. There's this author, Tanya Kateri Hernandez, and her book is called "Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed Race Stories of Discrimination. And it's so interesting because she talks about like actual court cases where people are discriminated against because they're mixed. I think that mono racism is so real where people do just sort of try to blanket us monoracially in one place or another. It just does not work. There is one thing I wanted to push back on that you said, though.

Andre Lackner  21:11  
Sure,

Shawna  21:12  
a little bit, just a little bit. While I do believe that multiracial folks do sort of like mess up the calculation of what's supposed to be white supremacy and all of those things. I think it does play a part in white proximity if you're mixed white, but there can be a proximity to whiteness, and because whiteness is afforded so many things, just like you said, you know, you can be under the umbrella of blackness. You could also be kind of under the umbrella of whiteness if they want you to be. They could snatch that umbrella back in a second. But you know, a lot of times there's been people that say things like, "Well, but you're not that kind, or you're not like that. And so there's this exceptionalism made. And I will never say that I don't get privilege because of the way I look, that's beyond racial ambiguity. Because I'm have lighter skin, or depending on what my hair looks like, my hair is really, really, really curly. And if I wear it naturally, I get treated differently than when it's straight. I get treated differently when it's in locks. So I think that yeah, the straighter it is, the more proximity I have to those Euro Anglo features, and I think I am granted more grace in white spaces than I would be otherwise.

Andre Lackner  22:28  
And I guess I haven't spent enough time in white spaces to really say a lot about it, too. Right? I wasn't raised by a white mom. I didn't grow up in a white neighborhood. I'm not in a lot of white spaces like that. And even when I am in white spaces, I never felt like I benefited from my looks. I mean, I'm I'm a little darker than you, and also I haven't been in the sun lately, so I'm even lighter right now. But I

Shawna  22:49  
know, me too. And I got this white light is not healthy. But come on,

Andre Lackner  22:52  
yeah. But like, even when I did, you know, work at Yoga Studios in Santa Monica, I remember a girl leaving and clocking out for work, and she said, "Bye, Katie. Bye, Ashley. Yo, Andre. Peace out, dog. She didn't mean no harm by. I know,

Speaker 1  23:10  
but that's but

Andre Lackner  23:11  
but it's like you know, there's this assumption that we're embraced with open, loving arms and white spaces as well, and that's not the truth. But also, a lot of it, I and I stress this a lot depends on how you care with yourself, right?

Shawna  23:25  
That's true. I mean, if you're more palatable, I'm not trying to say embrace with open arms. That is not what I'm saying. But I do think that we often get a little bit more grace. That being said, I also think that there are advantages to being racially ambiguous that have nothing to do with the binary that you say, like this side or this side.

Andre Lackner  23:47  
Yeah. I like to talk about prison being in prison. Look, prison is racially segregated. You pick a car, you stick to that car, you don't associate with other races.

Shawna  24:18  
Yeah. Okay. Tell us. Tell us about this.

Andre Lackner  24:19  
Yeah, I was able to wiggle through different races. I mean, it started off with just me doing like raffles, right? I got to the yard. I was buffered through on the yard. I had to keep my protein in. So when in prison, you know, your protein source is like packets of mackerel and tuna, right? I remember when the tuna ran out. I was paying like $10 for a pack of tuna, but that's another story. And I was thinking, all right, how do I come up on tuna? Let me do a raffle, right? And eventually, I was going up to the other races and having them enter my raffles. In fact, because I was also I was the buffest dude in the yard. Like everyone was coming up to me asking me for workout advice of all races because people thought I was Hispanic at first. People thought I was. Dominican people thought it was Filipino or Pacific Islander, and some people thought it was black, and so that immediately gave me some advantage on the yard because people let their guard down around you a little bit when they can't figure out what race you are totally right.

Shawna  25:12  
That is so fascinating to me because in the academic world, it's usually what the findings have been is that it's the opposite. People don't trust you and they can't figure out, or then they say some shit that they think you are identifying one way, that they can get away with saying something messed up in another way. I call it identity conscriptions. They conscribed you to a certain identity, and that was to your benefit.

Andre Lackner  25:36  
Sure, but I also tell people you have the opportunity to override people's prejudices about you through your character. Once you immediately show traits that overcome race that people can connect to you on, they start looking at your race less and looking at your personality. So people didn't see me as a race so much as they saw me as the buff guy that could help everyone else in the yard look good, as the guy who could do raffles. And after I was done with raffles, I would bring all the races together and doing these raffles.

Shawna  26:03  
So you doing like tuna and mackerel? I would say, look, you had to give me a

Andre Lackner  26:07  
pack of mackerel. I would get like a bag of candy, and I would get stuff from the kitchen. I would smuggle stuff from the kitchen because I was also a kitchen worker. And I would say, look, here's this goodie bag. You have to give me a pack of tuna or a pack of mackerel, and then you'll be entered in a raffle, and we like at nighttime. It would be usually Wednesdays at at 6o'clock. We would get like Scrabble chips and shake them up, and then we assign them to each. Now there's a letter, right? So A through Z was each square, and and everyone pick the pick the little Scrabble letter out of the bag, and eventually the last letter was the one that won, and all the races would get involved. Then I was making cheesecakes. the It's funny thing is the the Asians taught me how to make the cakes, right? Because they were the ones who saw me doing yoga and Pilates, and they used like, "Oh, that shit is gay, man. I'm never gonna do yoga in jail, man. You been in over front of other men. Then a month later, you got people coming up to me like, "Hey, man, Keith, teaching me some yoga mat, got shoulder injury, made my backs messed up. Wooty woothi woot. And this is why I try to really push charisma and social skills because I'm gonna be real. The ones who gave me problems really the black people. No other race really gave me problems like that. Sometimes the Southsiders did, which are like the Trello gangsters, but it was really the black people. And I think some black people didn't like the fact I was able to move around so much. So I was able to do business with everyone in the compound, and especially learning Spanish was like a power tool. Once I learned Spanish, the doors flew open, money was coming in. I can talk to everyone. I didn't do anything illegal, but I was selling cheesecakes, I was selling burritos, I was doing raffles, I was a scribe, I was like writing because people couldn't type in there. So I'm like typing for people, and then once I could speak Spanish, I was typing letters to Spanish for people. Like it was like it was like something like that really made me realize, hey, like there's this advantage to being racially ambiguous, but also to having a multicultural personality. And I think that's another strong thing I want to emphasize: is mixed race people are not just multiracial; we're multicultural as well. When you grow up exposed to different cultures and different kinds of people, you end up having a personality that's able to connect and co-switch to different cultures. And I think code switching is an essential skill because you don't talk to an old person the same way you talk to a child. Yeah,

Shawna  28:16  
exactly. That's what I was saying. I think we all do it in some way, like because context changes, right?

Andre Lackner  28:21  
Yes.

Shawna  28:22  
Yeah.

Andre Lackner  28:23  
And I had like white supremacist skinheads with Aryan soldier tattooed on their head and swastikas on their chest, trying to like you know work out with me and buy my cheesecakes. I remember just this one guy who was super institutionalized. And by the way, I'm talking about real cheesecakes now. I know some of the people thinking about Prism. I think cake means something else. No, guys, it means actual cheesecakes. You taste the mozzarella.

Shawna  28:44  
I didn't bake. I was thinking cheesecake like Philadelphia or New York cheesecake. Like

Andre Lackner  28:49  
yeah, but I mean we made it out of like mozzarella cheese and coffee creamer. No, that's that was basically how we made the battery. We crushed up some cookies and mashed it with water and banana to make the crust. Then we add a little Kool Aid to like add some flavor to it, and I'm not giving y'all the recipes, man. Y'all gonna y'all gonna mess up my hustle, all right? Like you understand, like like recipes are like you could get stabbed for giving away good recipes in jail. Like now, maybe not that serious, not that serious, but that's disrespect, you know. Like if someone has a good recipe, don't try to stoop into their business because that's their hustle, but I remember I gave this kid a slice, let him try it, and he got beat up. He got beat up for taking a gift from another race, right? And he ended up getting smashed out. We call smashed out. That means that means like they basically beat you up to the point where they have to put you in solitary or take you to the hospital.

Speaker 2  29:37  
Wow! Why

Intro  29:38  
the guy

Shawna  29:39  
for having some cheesecake

Andre Lackner  29:40  
for having some of my cheesecake, yeah. But these were like more. I'll call them Koviks, right? These weren't inmates. These were Koviks. These were dudes who've been to the high security yards where they politic harder. Politicing means they observe these racial divisions harder. And because remember, depending on who's in the room, the whole dynamic can change in prison, depending on who you're around. And then why, like a two months later, the guy. Who smash this other kid out ends up buying cheesecakes from me? You know, it's like, all right, all right. So what this kind of told me, you know, this was a lesson in instead of trying to change people's opinion of you, make the alternative more appealing. What I mean by that, instead of trying to make people not be racist anymore or change their views, because a lot of racial views are a mix of bad experience and survival, right? Like part of why I have the views I do on black spaces because of trauma and violence I face around black people and the constant rejection and mistreatment. So I'm not going to suddenly act like these experiences didn't happen. You know, I'm I'm going to always kind of have this caution around me. Now I can reject these thoughts I have and still act against them. But what I try to do for people in terms of challenging racism is making the alternative more appealing. Hey, if you're racist, you can't. None of my cheesecakes or my burritos are participating in my raffles. So you could be racist, you know, go back to eating your cornbread and wear chili Mondays on a tray, or you can kind of give some of that up and talk to me, and then through me, actually, you know, other people were able to get connected. I was at multiple prisons, but the more multicultural experience I had was at Metropolitan Detention Center, Los Angeles, and you know, L.A. is very diverse, but we were in one of the few units. Units mean like there's different sections of the prison that really wasn't like politicking like that, and I think I was a big part of that, and a couple other people, because hey, we're all doing time, we're all messed up here. Like, if we're gonna politic, that just makes people's time harder, and it kind of just showed me that like if I try to be a person of character and charisma and have utility, something that proves my usefulness and my contribution to society and to others, people are gonna be more willing to overlook my race and more look at me as who I am as a person, and that's why I try to tell people, you know, don't just identify yourself as a skin color or a race. Try let people see who you are as your character. That's your opportunity to override this prejudice and kind of transcend the whole racial division stuff itself. It's finding points of connection. I actually used to be a professional dancer. Tell me more. Okay, I did break dancing, ballet, jazz, modern, hip hop, popping, crump, and I did it all. I mean, look, that was actually like my first true multiracial experience. This was like a space where all races were, and this is one of the few places where I did feel like I belonged. It wasn't about what race are you, is no, what kind of moves you got, you know, are you dancing? We're all coming here together to dance. Now there was racial division in the dance world, and it became very heartbreaking. Like you know, you had like some of your your Asians from Orange County that kind of just did break dancing and looked down on Crumpers and other dancers. But then you went up to Hollywood, right? You saw all races and all all all walks of people. And even then, you still had some separation. But I was always with groups that were more integrated.

Andre Lackner  33:17  
Like the person who taught me break dancing was a Chinese lady, and her crew was called Outer Circle, which was kind of like her name is Peppa, B Girl Peppa, Pepe Yuan, and her crew was all like the kind of different weird like breakdancer kids, and then you had another crew called Misfits, where they dressed like punk rockers, and they were like black and white and Hispanic people, and so when you went to these b-boy things, the big message was promoting unity and coming together under a culture, not under a race. And I think having these interests can really break down the cultural barriers. And like the common interest that all races had in prison was food. Common interest was eventually I started also running poker tables. I learned poker in prison, and like, and I start reading books, and I got too good, and my and like, they're like, hey, like, we don't want you playing poker because you know, because riots happen over poker. There's people get who get killed over poker in prison.

Shawna  34:09  
Oh my god,

Andre Lackner  34:10  
you know, if I if there's an argument over poker, somebody has to pay up, that could turn into a bad situation. So I said, okay, they don't want me playing poker. How about I just run my own tables? No, and I also read the autobiography of Malcolm X Wells in there, and there's a chapter when he was like, "I noticed that the ones running the rackets made more money than the suckers actually playing. And I'm like, "Okay, I'll do that. Yeah, that's a good idea. And my tables were multiracial. Like you would have like Southsider tables, you would add like Mexican tables. My table was all racist. Now, granted, you had mostly blacks, but like my style, my personality, I was able just to tune in with different races, and and I and I understand you know not everyone has an extroverted charismatic personality where they can naturally gravitate towards races. Some people are coming into these experiences with their own traumas with other races. But look, I've dealt with racism from all sides too. To me, it's sort of like I have to always. Try to attune to the individual personality, no matter how hurtful it is, and that's where I feel like mixed race people do have a little more. I guess if they're racially ambiguous too, right? But that's why I also want to come back to not necessarily proximity to whiteness, but just multiculturality to being able to connect to different cultures, to speak to different cultures and appeal to different ranges of people. I think, if anything, that's the more privileged part of being mixed.

Shawna  35:27  
I mean, I don't disagree. That's what mixed signals is about. It's the lived experiences, right? And like, I've been fortunate to live all around the world. I lived outside of the United States for 15 years. I grew up as an outsider living in Alaska. Like, that's not like the rest of the United States. And then pull in these military communities that I've lived in. I've served as a diplomat. I think that a lot of people with mixed heritage, especially if they bring the multicultural lens, because just because you're biracial doesn't mean you're multicultural, right? Not everybody grew up with all of the different facets of the heritage they carry, but if you do, if you have, and if you have moved between these spaces, hell yeah, it's a benefit. You become a natural diplomat because you're like, I know how this works. I know how this works. I've seen this work.

Andre Lackner  36:14  
I think mixed race people could be some of the least racist people you ever been around because you're able to see it from all sides. They're able to understand how one side could be harmed by the action of another. How like sometimes you go in black spaces, don't just openly say. You walk around LA, you'll see black people just saying openly saying racist shit about other races, and no one calls them out in it. But I can also recognize that other races are hurt by these comments, and I think that I'm able to sort of have a non-biased, neutral view of things, and sometimes people will call my non-biased, critical view of things anti-black. That really means nothing to me anymore. And it's like, am I anti-black, or am I just not willing to ignore the problems in black spaces because I'm supposed to just be allied to one side and give it a pass? So I believe that a lot of mixed race people can have a more neutral and unbiased view of things if they choose to. It's not even mixed race, right? Like now we're looking at multicultural. That's what I

Shawna  37:10  
was trying to get at. Yeah, like you could be biracial, but you never grew up with that part of your family, so you don't have two cultures. But like you could be monoracial and be still multicultural. Yes,

Andre Lackner  37:20  
and that's why. And look, and I try to tell people that like I've had some moderation people that are following my content because we're like, look, I'm I'm fully black, but because I'm a nerd, I talk white. My people don't really mess with me like that that much, you know. Or like I don't want to just feel like I have to stay with one group of people because all my friends are every race. And like, look, I've had white supremacists back me up in jail because my own people were treating me bad. I had the leader of the Bible study. I was-I'm not a big religious person, but I was going to it because it was more a political move. All like the top dogs on the yard were going to Bible study, so I went there too to get cooled on the top dogs. And this is like shouldn't be allowed on any yard. But like you know, the guy had WP whatever it is tattooed on his leg, and you know he was a rep for the whites. He was like, "Hey Matt, I don't really like how your people are treating you. And he went and talked to my rep, and then even like the others, like the Asians, were like, "Yo, your people don't really message you. You know, if you want, you could just ask us. Well, interesting

Shawna  38:13  
though that they said your people they did the one drop rule as well, right?

Andre Lackner  38:16  
Yeah, but it's also it's also like, and that's where prison, I guess, damages this. You prison really reveals how how damaging segregation is to a mixed race person's psychology. You know, I was able to tune in with the other blacks there. This is prison, right? So these aren't the educated, well spoken blacks. These are like hood people. So I'm from the hood. So I was able to you know, get with the program and get down. But there was another mixed kid who was from Burbank, Glendale. This was like a nice upscale neighborhood. He had a much harder time than me because he couldn't code switch because he's never been around that culture. He couldn't really understand like the gang element, and he had a much harder time than I did. And he got treated like really bad as well, but of course, once he started working in the kitchen and he was bringing stuff back. Once same here. Once I started hustling and I could somehow benefit other black people, now all of a sudden I was black. But and I find that's a trope out here too. Is you know before I was just another mixed kid on the bus. I was just another face on the bus, but now that I come into some status or money, or I'm in a position to benefit other Black people, now all of a sudden I'm Black, and I'm criticized for not helping my people out. And this brings me to things that I feel like the main like factors of conditional acceptance for mixed race people in Black spaces. One, this is like the most unspoken one, is sexual access, right? A lot of black men want sexual access. People want sexual access to mixed people by getting mixed people to identify as black. They are more accessible, especially if you can keep them from mixing with other races and only dating their own. Two is to reduce competition. If I stay black. And only do the black thing where, and I and I can define the black thing. If you're black, you might know what I'm talking about. Listen to black music, dance like black people, go to black meetups, black student union, wherever. If I only stay within my black community and never really branch out, they don't have to worry about as much competition because anything I do somehow benefits black people. And to keep me in a position where any successes I do have could be claimed by black people and benefit black people. I think those are the three main reasons why there is this expectation for mixed people or a want for mixed people to just identify as black, or it's really to boost their numbers, right? So when I'm in spaces where there's only like three or four black people, now I'm black all of a sudden. Hey man, what's up? How you doing? Wooty wootoo woo. Welcome. If I go into a space that's all black people, is you black? No, you. Where you from? Where you from here? Oh, your model white, huh? No, this is ambiguity. And when people need the numbers, they're not going to question it so much. You brown, you black, you close enough. We're going to need to roll with us.

Shawna  41:19  
of the things that I think that I've been tripped up on is learning how to find my own people, but not defining what my people are because of racial categories or even culture. Like it could be interest, like music or whatever. Like I love karaoke. I don't. I don't care where you come from. I don't even care what language you speak. If you like music and you like to sing? Let's get out the karaoke machine. Like that's how I feel. But there are times where I do very much long for that space. Like recently, I was watching a different world. It's a throwback, I know. But

Andre Lackner  41:54  
I don't even know what that

Shawna  41:55  
is. Did you ever watch any Cosby Show episodes?

Andre Lackner  41:57  
I mean, I know the show existed.

Shawna  42:00  
Okay, so in the Cosby Show, the second oldest child was Denise Huxtable. She went away to college to an HBCU, and that became a spinoff called A Different World. And that was the closest I ever got to an HBCU because I didn't go to HBCU. And sometimes I'm envious, like Howard's up the street from me, right? And I'm like, oh, be so cool. But then I even think about like, could I even teach at Howard? Because am I black enough to teach at? Yeah, of course I am because I still have things to offer. You know, I'm a PhD. I should be able to feel comfortable to go teach at a university, even if it's ethnic studies, racial studies, or whatever in this mixed space that I'm at. But can I do that in HBCU? I don't know. And even in that show, they dealt with some of those sort of dynamics. Like there was one character in there; it was a white girl from Midwest somewhere that went to the HBCU, and you know. And so people talk about like who belongs in certain spaces. Like, do you ever feel like? But I do kind of wish I had this one experience that was more of a monoracial spear dance.

Andre Lackner  43:02  
No, the only time I did is like when it was in the arts, right? It was like when I was a dancer. I used to get so mad. People used to say, "You dance like a white boy. You understand? I'll get eat it. But I was a great dancer. Like I was really good. I think the fact I was able to combine these different break dance forms had I taken it further, I would have gotten a lot really successful. But I guess it was when I was trying to get into rapping, you know, like I was trying to like you know okay, like I think every hip hop artist has that desire. Like if I could just get the black stamp of approval, I'm good, right? Like even Drake still talked about how like he had to struggle with black acceptance, even as one of the top hip hop artists in the

Shawna  43:41  
world, and then, but also he's Canadian. Like, there's this other layer too, where he's like, "Oh my god, yeah,

Andre Lackner  43:46  
and and Jewish too. So it's like you're even more like put off. And it's so, you know, when I was a kid, I did wish I was one of the race just to stop the bullying, just to stop getting picked on. And I just wished I was just black. You know, at first it was like being hated for my. Now that I'm bald, actually, it's interesting. I mean, I I have even more movement, right? Like I I used to have long curly hair. Like I was kind of if I wore my hair out, I was undeniably like black. Now that I'm bald, no, I could be Dominicano, Cubano, Brasiliano, you know, or maybe I couldn't be from India. Like depending on how I dress and stuff, I can look completely different. But I did wish that at some points. But now, you know everything we're talking about, you know about like, hey, I should be black and like. So someone told me, man, if I saw you on the street, I would think you was just one of us, and I mess with you. I'm like, that's cool, but I want you to mess with me because you respect who I am as a man, not because you think I'm the same race as you, right? Don't roll with me and be my homie because you see me as a black man. Roll with me and be my friend because you like who I am as a person. That you respect my character and the quality of who I am. That to me is why I want to be wildfire. I don't want you to accept me because I'm part black or part white, whatever. Accept me because I'm a. Good person, and I and I'm doing something positive. That's all I ask for. Let the whole race stuff go.

Shawna  45:06  
Yeah, snaps. I mean, I agree. I think that's fantastic.

Andre Lackner  45:30  
I know I have a lot of controversial takes, but in my opinion, these things shouldn't be too controversial.

Shawna  45:35  
Agreed.

Andre Lackner  45:36  
I think people are too attached to their beliefs and ideologies around race, and that they're not really able to recognize complexities and nuances. And we've also just, as a society, became so much more fragile. And I say that because no white fragility originally meant to describe white people who couldn't tolerate conversations about race because it broke the illusion that we're in a post-racial society. What I mean by fragility now is when you have all these expectations of the way you want things to be, the more you are going to get upset and broken when things aren't that way. You want people to act and think a certain way, and then you get upset when you don't see it. And when we find more things to get offended about, when we collect injustices, when we spend so much time looking at historical inequalities and inequalities that we almost create a sampling bias to where we seek it out, we become insufferable and we create more breaking points in our character. And then when we find something that offends us or upsets us or challenges us, it breaks us. And I think moving forward, it's good to learn about race and racism, but it's also good to teach people how to deal with racism or unpopular viewpoints of opinions when you confront them. We teach kids, we raise these kids about race and how horrible things are and all these injustices that happen and how now we have to change. But then when you actually run into a person that hates you for the way that you're born, now what? No, how do you deal with it now? Do you go run in prison? I couldn't go run and tell the ADL that somebody says something offensive. I couldn't go, you know, write someone up that someone was being racist towards me. I had to learn how to confront it face to face. And there's times where people are ready to put a knife down my neck over this stuff, right? But I still stood my ground. And the thing is, you're probably not going to face situations like that in the real world as much. But I'll say in the hood, people are still dealing with stuff like that all the time. But okay, but can I give

Shawna  47:19  
a parallel though? In corporate America, you face that it may not be a knife at your throat, but it's your job, it's your promotion, it's you got this because of this, or you didn't get this because of that. And who are you going to go run tell? Because, like you said, the system is also monoracial. It's like there's monoracism in systems where that there is no protected class because you're mixed. That's why I wanted to bring up that author, right? Because she is highlighting that, and I don't think enough people know about that. That there's this loophole, and so yeah, who are you going to run to, right? Especially like imagine like if you are facing a discrimination case, and people are going to be like, "How can people discriminate against you if you have white phenotype or or whatever, or if you're black, but you're not that black, you know what I'm saying. Like I agree with you that these are important things. It may not be what you faced in real time in the prison system, but systems are systems.

Andre Lackner  48:12  
Yeah, there's parallels,

Andre Lackner  48:14  
definitely. But I also want to equip youth to be able to speak their truth, right? A lot of us kind of back down and hide our mixedness just to go with the flow and choose the path of least resistance. But not only are we going to face mono racism, but we're also going to just face real racism for whatever people assume that we are. And I I think that the more we find things to get offended by, the more breaking points we have. Like I hear xenophobic, racist, misogynistic stuff every day for years, and someone could come to my face and say stuff, and it really won't faze me. We should be trauma informed, but we also have to build grit and resilience, especially us as mixed people. Oh, you said,

Shawna  48:50  
oh, you said bad words. Somebody came at me once because I talked about resilience, and oh my god, I'm not saying that it's okay and that you should be like accepting it because you're strong. I'm saying we still have to be resilient. Like otherwise, what's going to happen? You're going to break. But people do not like when you say that.

Andre Lackner  49:08  
Part of that resilience too is having stress management skills. It's knowing when to walk away. It's understanding when situations don't serve you. Part of that resilience is saying, you know what, man, this back and forth isn't going to go anywhere. Let me go just go to the gym. All right, resilience. Sometimes you don't need a therapy. You don't need to start working, bro. You need to go work out. You have like tons of stress in your body, and no amount of you yapping in the comments is going to fix anything. Like sometimes there is physical regulation of our body, and that's part of it. There's a great quote I read in the book. I forgot the author, but she said, "Self preservation is the strongest form of rebellion against the system that is trying to annihilate you by taking care of yourself and building your own skills moving forward in life. That is going to allow you to face these challenges with so much more confidence. But the thing is, us as mixed people too, we're the. Frontier in civil rights. That's what I believe. I think that we are charting unpaved territory right now. And maybe I could get read up on more people, but we don't have our Dr. Martin Luther King. We don't have like our mixed race representatives. You know, we've kind of just been a subclass of a subclass, a marginalized group within a marginalized group, and so we're going to face a lot of resistance moving forward, but if it's raining, expect to get wet. If you already know you're going to get knocked down the fight, then plan to get back up. And that's what I really mean by resilience: is being aware that we live from reality, and that you're going to see shit you don't like, and you're going to hear shit you don't like, and you're going to keep moving on regardless. Does that mean you always stay in these spaces that hate you? No. Does that mean you maybe go take a yoga class and chill out, maybe take a break for social media for a month? Sure, but that's also part of your self regulation, your management, and self preservation. And I just I'm so against like the injustice collecting that's been so popular among like younger students that I see in Gen Z, where they find things to get offended about, where they police people's vocabulary, where they want to tell people how to think, talk, and act. I'm like, cool. Now, what are you really doing? No, you're finding more things to get offended about to make it more breakable, or are you really making a profound change that benefits all people? Because look, I if you hear how I talk to my friends, I would get canceled and banned from everything.

Shawna  51:25  
The same thing. The more things

Andre Lackner  51:27  
you could get offended by, now the more things that you could get broken by, right? And that's so

Shawna  51:31  
true.

Andre Lackner  51:32  
And words change meaning in different contexts, like like the term Milano, right?

Shawna  51:36  
I'm so glad you brought this up because this one has been blowing my mind. This is another one that's been in my feed. Go tell me what. I mean,

Andre Lackner  51:43  
look, the the history is disputed of the word, but a lot of people are rolling with the history that allows them to feel morally righteous by telling them people they can't use the word, which is the idea that the word comes from mule. But guess what? No one has ever used that word towards me in a racist way. I have never seen anyone ever in my life say all that effing mulatto. You're mulatto. No, that it's so you're making it offensive. You found something to get offended by. You've decided to bring up a certain definition or a certain history of the work, and the history is still disputed to get offended by, and it means mule. Well, guess what? When someone calls me mulatto, I don't mean mule. I mean a person who's black and white. So why should I not use the word if the way that word is being used is just meant to describe someone black and white? If you tell me the history of the word, cool. Guess what? I don't live in history. I live for right now. I live in reality. And guess how I'm using the word? I'm using the word to mean someone that's black and white. So anything else you're adding to it is you choosing to get definitive over it. And I don't play those kind of policed word games. All right, like look at the the look at the context, look at how it's being used right now, and I'm not here to talk about wealthy historical injustices that you didn't even experience. Stop identifying what historical trauma you didn't go through. This is part of the injustice collecting, and it creates a cognitive distortion. You spend so much time finding historical injustices that distorts your view with it now, and now that characterizes how you see things. But I don't bow down to the vocabulary of police. I'm even thinking of my meetup just being called the mulatto meetup just to piss them off, just to make them that much more controversial, and and then it will get publicity, right? That'll get more publicity. Then it makes me that. But then I'm like thinking, okay, maybe I should back up a little bit, you know, because this is not my space. This is for other people, so now I got to play the game of being, you know, a little semantic for others.

Shawna  53:31  
What about the folks that say you can't ignore the history, though? They would argue it's important for us to know where those things came from, even if we didn't live those same tragedies, what would you say?

Andre Lackner  53:47  
I say, yeah, it's very good to be informed of history, but also know that we are also living in history right now, and that time moves forward. That social relationships are dynamic and constantly changing, depending on the context, depending on the time period, and depending on the people you're talking to, we can look at history, but we can't always look at the future through the lens of history. There's a saying in dance where it's called spotting, right? When you're spinning around, yeah, yeah.

Shawna  54:14  
When you're turning, you have to always find that that center spot.

Andre Lackner  54:17  
But guess what? The body is always going to go towards what you're looking at, right? So why am I looking back if I'm trying to look forward? I know where I came from, but where I came from isn't where I'm going. Go where you're looking and look where you're going, and it's important to know where you came from, but also understand that times are dynamic and things are always changing. And the more you let yourself be bogged down into the past, the harder time you're going to have being successful and rising above and adapting to the new complexity of the future. No, the law of entropy states that the disorder of the universe is constantly increasing. Things are getting more and more and more and more complex by the day. And the more we try to look at things with a more simplified historical view, the more we're going to feel challenged by what's happening. Now, so it's important to be informed, but don't let it define how we look at things today.

Shawna  55:28  
Well, where can people find you? What are your projects like? What are you working on? So, what's up?

Andre Lackner  55:33  
Yeah, so I'm still I'm going to be doing my last semester at Cal State Northridge as president of the Mixed Student Union there. We're trying to know keep our numbers up, but it is a commuter school, so it's like pulling teeth to get people to stay on campus and hang out. But it's allowing me to build so many connections in the mixed race community. I definitely want to create a larger event, at least for people in LA that are mixed race, whether it be a mixed business owner gathering, whether it just be a a mixed mixer, but just some kind of place to meet other people. There is an ecstatic feeling when you're in a space with other mixed people, and you no longer have to justify your existence. You no longer have to explain yourself because everyone else understands. And I want to be able to give other people that experience and let them know that look, you don't have to prove your blackness, you don't have to be white enough, you don't have to prove anything, man. Just be yourself and move forward in this role, and maybe connect with other people that understand you, and they don't have to be mixed, but people who see you for who you are, and not just as a race, but an individual. And so, I really want to create those spaces for people, but also advocate for mixed people institutionally. No, let makes people have protected class status. Let mixed people have representation, true political systemic representation. Let our voices come forward and our stories come forward instead of just being swept under the rug while monoracial people or performative woke people speak over our experiences, and I'm actually working on a book, but it's not necessarily about being mixed race so much. It is about internet addiction and how being in prison changed my whole mind. Not having a phone for three years, not having internet for three years, transformed my mind, and and that's part of it too. Is you know would I be obsessed about history or upset about these things to be offended by if I didn't have the internet to tell me these things were offensive with like bonus

Shawna  57:28  
episode will you come back

Andre Lackner  57:30  
sure yeah oh my god I didn't watch the news for like two to three years and it was like bliss I'm like okay I don't have to know what Trump is doing every day I don't have to know like about this war that war sure I hear the people in the yard arguing about it, but to have my own thoughts to be able to dynamically think about things, then limit what I bring into my brain has been amazing for my mental health. And that's why I even said earlier, I don't really talk about politics no more because if it's outside of my scope of control, then I give it limited attention. Sometimes when we look at history too, we relive the experience in our inside of ourselves. Our body thinks that works. When we look at stories of racial trauma and brutality and violence, I believe that our body almost experiences it again, almost like we're going through it again. But we have to remember we didn't experience that. Now people are saying, "Oh, just remember, you would have been on the same slave ship as us. I'm like, hey, why am I using tropes of history that I didn't experience to define my reality? They were saying, oh well, won't you see how you're going to get treated if you were at a Klan rally? Sorry, man, I don't plan to go to a Klan rally anytime soon. I can't analyze my worldview based on things that never happened to me. We get on our phones, we look at historical articles, and we get outraged, and that changes how we see the world. For a long time, I didn't want to step out my house because I felt like the world hated me for the way I was born because of how much racism I was absorbing on the internet. I walked around as if the sun called me a nigger, and I couldn't handle reality. Every interpretation, every interaction I had was racialized. Oh, that person talked to me because I'm black. Oh, that person did this to me because I'm mixed. It defined my whole world, and that's part of what led to my case. Is this internet anger and this spiral chamber of just racism and and hatred and hate speech and demoralization online in these online spaces that turned me into this unhappy person that eventually led to my case, and so the book will talk about that eventually. I don't want to give the name out yet, but it's something I do need to work on. And if you do want to see my content, please check me out at It's Okay to Be Mixed on TikTok and Instagram.

Shawna  59:34  
Yes, y'all, please do go check them out. This was so good. Thank you so much, Andre. I am fired up. You talked about wanting to have like a space of empowerment, I think that you're going to be very successful in that. Oh my God! I could just keep talking to you. Your experience is unique, but the parallels are there, and we have so much to learn from you. I'm laughing because I know why you said, "Are you sure you want to talk to me? Trying to get me in trouble, but but it's true. Like there's a thing that you said. I want you to say it again. It was about that's how you get broken. Say it again.

Andre Lackner  1:00:20  
If you find more breaking points, you become more breakable. The more rigid and narrow points of view you have, the more you're going to be outraged by anything that doesn't fit them. This is

Shawna  1:00:32  
amazing! Thank you so much for sharing your stories with us and spending some time with me and talking about like the things that you have learned. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much.

Andre Lackner  1:00:43  
Thank you.

Shawna  1:00:44  
Yeah. Take care of yourself.

Intro  1:00:46  
You too. Bye bye.

Shawna  1:01:02  
So, what'd you think of that conversation? It was something, right? I told you. But Andre talked about when it came to the breaking points, meaning like the more things you find to get offended by, the more places you can be broken. That stood out to me so much that I've actually featured it in Mixed signals. I think it's something important for us to consider. I don't think it means that we have to stop naming the harm we experience or harm we witness. I think it means we get honest about what we're carrying around with us and where we're carrying it from. And I appreciate that he's willing to say the uncomfortable part out loud. That's exactly the kind of conversation that this show is for, you really should go check out Andre's work. You can find him at It's Okay to Be Mixed on TikTok and on Instagram. And mixed signals is coming, y'all. Follow our true colors on Instagram for updates, and you can find out a lot more if you go to culturecrucible.com. Until next time, stay curious, stay connected, and keep embracing your true colors. Spread the love, y'all! I'll talk to you soon.

Intro  1:02:17  
You've been listening to our true colors.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai