every summer, everything that happens happens at summer camp. tiny quaker summer camp in western maryland.

i argue with my white employer when my photo is used for promotional material. she asks how i dare to question that she is doing everything in her power to welcome people of color into the community of camp. i ask if she read her message over before sending it to me. 

all summer i fight with a black girl over a white boy. we pretend like we’re not fighting, but we’re still mean to each other. it feels a funny kind of dirty.

           A friend who I will refer to as “Murtle” and I are were walking past the campus center where a group of outwardly appearing black students and one white friend were sitting. Murtle is white and has dreads. The group of students saw Murtle and said, “Her hair is just one matted, moldy thing.” “Her entire existence is cultural appropriation.” Murtle felt really uncomfortable, guilty, fearful, and ashamed. We went inside a building and on our way out, we took a different path to avoid the group of mostly outwardly appearing black students.

         There was a problematic interaction with close friends this past weekend that I have explored with them and want to reflect on further. The incident occurred after dinner with two friends, and one of the friend’s (who I will refer to as King) boyfriend. King has a German mother and Indian father, but has somewhat light skin. We were walking to King’s boyfriend’s car with my other friend who I will refer to as Toots. Toots is white. Toots was talking about how there are a lot of cops near the train station and the frequency of racial-profiling that goes on around Bryn Mawr. I responded that police are corrupt and need to pull over a certain amount of people to meet monthly quotas.

Before actually going to the Village, I spoke on the phone with Lillian, my supervisor, mentor, hero, and secretly prayed that she'd be a woman of color. Just before landing the internship, I had switched my major from Computer Science to Religion/Africana Studies and decided to dedicate my academic journey and time to art and the various mediums of expression. As I mentioned in our Art History Class, I felt incredibly invisible, uncomfortable, and underrepresented in Computer Science, and found myself being in a zone of proximity when it came to art, religion, and humanities. Therefore, I needed to have some sort of comfort going into my summer experience. 

This summer, my family temporarily moved my grandfather into a senior living facility. While visiting him, I noticed that most of the staff, especially the CNAs and Med Techs, were black, while most of the residents (including my grandfather) were white. The overwhelming racial difference between those who served and those who were served made me uncomfortable in the way that it evoked the relationships between blacks and whites that have existed throughout the history of this country, from slavery to sharecropping to "the help" to our current prison system and even other services besides senior care. I (as a white person) was especially uncomfortable whenever I had to call or tell my grandfather to call for someone to come help him.

I spent this summer researching black liberation/power theory and creating a digital library of texts which theorize power. My research aims to show the deeply connected relationship between theory and self-making, and how theorizing about power and race works to inform and shape our experience of the self and others. My fellowship revealed the blurriness of existing in the text itself—reading is so self- reflexive, and it became difficult to distance myself from the work I was doing.

Toward the end of the summer, I went to see Anna Deavere Smith perform her latest piece "Notes From the Field: Doing Time in Education." Smith is an incredibly skilled performer with a unique style; she interviews hundreds of people who have some relationship to a certain conflict or situation, and performs their words as a series of monologues. This piece was a collection of monologues related to the school-to-prison pipeline, and those featured included leaders of the NAACP, Bree Newsome, teachers in the Philadelphia public school district, formerly incarcerated people, James Baldwin, and many more.

tw: domestic violence

i spent 10 weeks of my summer living in batten house, doing a program with 9 other students + my own internship. it often felt like a co-op - we were all students of color doing some kind of service-based internship. a lot of us were either international students or people who didn't come from the US. i interned at a domestic violence organization in bryn mawr that did hotline counselling and court advocacy work. the former required me to actively overcome my anxiety of talking to strangers on the phone and gather everything i had learned about emergency hotline counselling. the latter required me to forget my personal barriers and actively engage to survivors of domestic abuse. 

This summer I spent a lot of time thinking about being Asian-American and my proximity to whiteness. Being Asian-American in a town that’s 95% white means that sometimes your race is made invisible, and other times you are the most visible person in the room. And there’s a lot of tension between those two modes of being seen. This summer, people admitted to me that they “forget that I’m Asian.” But I was also called an “Oriental” and I was accused of eating dogs (ugh). So, it’s a confusing experience.  

Over the summer I waited tables at an expensive pizza place. The restaurant was in the "up and coming" U Street Corridor, where I could literally see the gentrification as I walked the few blocks down 14th Street from the bus stop every day. Corner stores were tucked in between brand new high rise apartment buildings; the area that was once referred to as "Black Broadway" boasted a soulcycle and several new age-y yoga studios. Middle class white people sipped Bloody Marys and ate brunch where the 1968 race riots had broken out. And I was serving $20 artisanal pizza with prosciutto and Maryland blue crab on top. (A large crab pie was just under $50 and served 2-4 people.)