Harris - Mixed-Race Superman

MIXED-RAGE SUPERMAN

A different version of this work was published in the UK in 2018 by Peninsula Press

Copyright Will Harris, 2018, 2019

All rights reserved

First Melville House Printing: July 2019

Melville House Publishing

46 John Street

Brooklyn, NY 11201

and

Suite 2000

16/18 Woodford Road

London E7 0HA

mhpbooks.com

@melvillehouse

ISBN:9781612197890

Ebook ISBN9781612197906

Ebook design adapted from printed book design by Jo Anne Metsch

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Harris, Will, author.

Title: Mixed-race Superman : Keanu, Obama, and multiracial experience / Will Harris.

Description: Brooklyn : Melville House, [2019] | A different version of this work was published in the UK in 2018 by Peninsula Press. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019018220 (print) | LCCN 2019020013 (ebook) | ISBN 9781612197906 (reflowable) | ISBN 9781612197890 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Racially mixed people. | Racially mixed peopleRace identity. | Racially mixed families. | Miscegenation.

Classification: LCC HT1523 (ebook) | LCC HT1523 .H38 2019 (print) | DDC 305.8dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018220

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This body will take some getting used toIt feels unreal to me. Alien.

KLAATU ( KEANU REEVES ),

The Day the Earth Stood Still

I used to say that, in the film of my life, Keanu Reeves would play the starring role. Most people dont realize hes mixed race.

Keanus father is Hawaiian-Chinesehence his name, Hawaiian for cool breeze over the mountainsbut since he passes as white thats how people think of him.

An old friend, Tirzah Lea Tward, is quoted in Sheila Johnstons biography of Keanu as saying that if you asked him where he came from or what his roots were, he was anything you wanted him to be. I like to think that, not quite white and not wanting to constantly explain his roots, he was trying to get his friends to see race differently: not as a fixed sign but as a fluid signifier. Like a cool breeze, he turned his shapelessness into a form of resistance.

When I was at school I wanted my roots to be mysterious too, but unlike Keanu I dont pass as white. As soon as a conversation turned toward the OrientChinese food in the cafeteria, a new Jet Li movie, the other Chinese kid in our year (who was actually Korean)Id get these sidelong glances. Asked where I was from, Id hide behind my mixedness.

Im one quarter Dutch; most of my family live in Indonesia; my great-great-grandma was from Hokkien; my granddad was a French teacher; Ive lived in London my whole life

Keanu could choose whether or not to wear the cape of whiteness: an accepted outsider, different and the same, he was capable of spanning the contradictions within himself. Though it now seems shameful to admit, his was the sinuous and racially unmarked version of the face that I wanted to present to the world.

Recently, an elderly woman in a caf asked where I was from, or where I was really from. Gosh, she said, those Chinese genes are powerful.

I dont think it works like that, I said, and started saying something about genetics and racehow they have almost nothing in commonbefore trailing off. She wasnt listening. Have you heard of Keanu Reeves? I asked.

A mixed-race superhero is a contradiction in terms. A superhero might start out like any other confused child, but that confusion soon gives way. The would-be superhero will be injured, taken prisoner, or exposed to cosmic radiation and, later, after a dark night of the soul, theyll emerge into the bright field of self-knowing.

Their voice will change in pitch and their punches will carry more heft, now having behind them the weight of conviction, of an assured identity. Even with his superpowers, Peter Parker couldnt save his uncle from being killed because he wasnt yet Spider-Man. He didnt know himself.

As a child, I was confused. I believed myself to be white. At the barbers, Id ask for hair like Michael Owen or Peter Parker and nobody said anything. Then one day people started asking me where I was from. How long had I been in the country? Could I speak Chinese? My Western name provoked raised eyebrows. My British accent came as a surprise. I could no longer look in the mirror and believe myself to be white, but what was I?

Had I been a superhero, my confusion might have given way to the discovery of some transcendent new identity. But I remained confused, unable to square my experience with the way the world saw me. If mixed-race superheroes do exist, maybe theyre people who have found a way to know themselves in spite of themselves. Theyve worked out how to make their confusion heroic, to embody contradiction.

Consider that game where you have to describe a thing without saying the word for it. The quickest way is by naming its oppositeblack if you want someone to think white, or man for woman. Though black isnt the opposite of white nor man the opposite of woman, the mind falls easily into the simplest of patterns: either/or.

In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway talks about the pervasiveness of certain dualisms in the West: mind/body, culture/nature, active/passive. Whether or not these concepts are opposed, theyve been hitched together for so long that theyve come to prop upand to depend onone anothers meaning.

The category of the Other, Simone de Beauvoir suggested, is as original as consciousness itself.

In other words, we have a habit of defining ourselves by what were not. For Haraway, the dualism between Self and Other is essential to how we as non-cyborgs think about ourselves: The Self dominates while the Other is dominated; the Self is active, while the Other is passive; the Self is associated with mind and culture, the Other with nature and the body; the Self is pure and white, the Other black, brown, yellow, or otherwise tainted.

Haraway concludes sadly that one is too few and two is too manyno single idea can make sense on its own, but no two ideas can be grasped simultaneously.

The mixed-race person embodies this. With too many heritages or too few, too white or not white enough, the mixed-race person grows up to see the self as something strange and shiftinga shadow on the roadsideshaped around a lack. Whereas most superheroes build their identity around a clearly established sense of Self (buttressed by its opposition to an evil Other), the mixed-race superhero must forge their identity in the confusing space between.

Growing up in West London in the mid-nineties and then through the long New Labour years, I rarely heard anyone talk about race beyond stock phrases to do with multiculturalism and the need for integration that sometimes made it onto the Nine OClock News. And though I may have guessed that it was people like me and my mum they were talking about, I pushed the thought aside out of embarrassment.

Then in 1993, a teenager named Stephen Lawrence was killed while waiting for a bus in Eltham, South London. He was with his friend Duwayne Brooks when a group of five white men ran toward them. What, what, nigger? shouted one, while another took out a blade. Duwayne saw a flash of metal and thought it was a steel bar. He started to run and called for his friend to follow, but Stephen was bleeding badly. He ran for just over one hundred yards before collapsing by the side of the road.