You may or may not be wondering why a mechanical engineer wants to tweet, update, vlog, or blog about social justice issues. One is that in addition torobotic swarm printing and adhesive circuits (both MIT Media Lab projects), I have, all my life, enjoyed writing. I like especially how in the modern age, narratives can happen in so many different mediums--not only novels, stories, and articles, but blog posts, podcasts, film, television, the entirety of the internet. At MIT, I also blog for MIT Admissions, a platform designed to help prospective students understand MIT culture and the admissions process, or sometimes just provide bits of advice and experience from current students. I find modern forms of writing and social media really powerful, with the ability to change whole communities and ideas.
The second, more important reason is that I’ve inherently had to deal with social justice and racial issues my whole life. My mother is Chinese and my father is Ethiopian, and I grew up in Colorado, USA. Furthermore, I’ve always felt that there are very few biracial or multiracial people who are deeply involved inboth or all of their cultures. I speak, read, and write Mandarin Chinese fluently and can communicate in Amharic. I’ve been to both of my parents’ nations multiple times throughout my life, and celebrate all the cultural holidays, eat all our different types of food, listen to African and Asian music chart-toppers. And I have tremendous amounts of state pride for Colorado, where I’ve lived all my life, hiking or camping up and down the Rocky Mountain range at least four times a year.
My parents both raised me to be proud of being different, and to take pride in all of the cultures I belonged to. In elementary and middle school, being mixed was awesome. I would bring Ethiopian art for “Show and Tell”; my mom would make dumplings for whatever school function we had, and generally I was just another carefree, happy-go-lucky kid. Nobody really asks little kids hard questions or makes them have serious conversations--they just let me run around and be myself. And little kids don’t always ask hard questions either, or initiate serious conversations. I just ran around, being myself, exploring anything and everything I could reach.
I think it was probably in middle school that I was exposed to the more sinister, insidious aspects of racial and cultural differences, and at that time, not noticing became a disadvantage rather than a blissful side effect of youth. I could never articulate why I felt uncomfortable in certain situations, or even understand my own emotions. I did not know why I received so many comments about my hair, or why some of those comments made me feel weird about it. I could not articulate why people saying things like “but you’re not really black” or “you’re one of the asians, though” or “OMIGOSH! You’re blasian??” made me angry or uncomfortable. I did know that the boys at the back of my English class throwing bits of paper into my hair was very upsetting, but I did not realize until possibly even college that they had never done that to any other girls’ hair, curly or not. The curls of my African heritage were uniquely different from the hair types of white people, and my school had very few other black kids. In high school, I often joked there was only half a black kid in most of my classes (me), which, in a school of almost 4,000 students, was a sure sign that there were significant diversity issues, which, unfortunately, I never felt they addressed very well.
On discovering Tumblr (yes, Tumblr) as well as just growing more mature and reading more race and discrimination oriented literature, I began to realize that there actually were many other people like me who suffered the same confusions and problems, and these problems were not only my own, internal struggles. I realized more fully that discrimination of many forms still certainly exists. Being biracial presents its own unique problems--biracial people do not have a single unifying culture or attribute, so there’s less dialogue on the topic or group action. As I said before, many biracial people, depending on where they grew up or what their families were like, identify more strongly with one race or culture than another, and I truly identify fully with both. Throw in other things, like gender or socioeconomic status, and it soon becomes apparent just how, well, diverse issues of diversity, race, and social justice can be!
While I (and the rest of the nation) (and probably the rest of the world) am still figuring it out, and potentially will always be figuring it out, I think the most powerful piece of knowledge I acquired was simply knowing that I was not alone, and that it was not all in my head. That’s where Tumblr and other social media came in, and the way I discovered how powerful social media can be. To see people who were like me--just teenagers on the internet who, alongside racial dialogue, often re-blog potatoes--rather than a sophisticated study publishing statistics on race was very comforting. Serious academic studies are very important to contribute to racial dialogue, of course, but seeing very normal, ordinary people discussing these topics on the internet validated my own experiences, and made me more comfortable with myself. I hope, throughout my time here at Be More, I’ll be able to lend some of that individual experience to this fantastic mission, and its ultimate vision.
See you next time!
--Selam