What’s An American Fusion?

  Since my blog is titled “An American Fusion”, I want to explain the meaning and intent of the words.

    In 2004 I attended an Intercollegiate Conference of “Multiracial” students. In conversations some of kids told me they were fusions. I had no idea what they meant. So, they explained. The United States lacked positive ways to describe so called multiracial men and women. Mixed, half, exotic, tragic mulatto, hapas, and half breeds were the only labels in town and none offered a sense of self esteem, not to mention an accurate rendering of their humanity.

    The students then explained the fusion concept by using this metaphor. Suppose you took chocolate and vanilla ice cream and whipped them together in a bowl. Could you ever separate the two flavors? Like the ice cream, a fusion of (for example) Chinese and European heritages created a person that was whole rather than half, inextricably fused rather than cut into pieces by the racial prejudices of U.S. culture.

    The students’ creativity was rooted in the need to escape a cultural dichotomy that defines Americans by what divides Americans. You are white or black, white or nonwhite, white or a person of color, or, finally, a minority as compared to the white majority. The dichotomy’s deepest roots lay in slavery and it is such a powerful (and ugly) distinction that it actually makes the multiracial student invisible. A November, 2005 study from the Seattle based Mavin Foundation discovered that only 27% of 298 universities even allowed students to choose a “mixed heritage on admissions forms”. Moreover, even when they did so, 60% of the universities recoded the students, and made them white or black.

     The kids hated being erased and one response was to declare a personal declaration of independence. I am a fusion, I am proud of all my heritages and I refuse to feed into the ugliness of a culture that uses skin color and race to poisonously divide the nation and its three hundred million inhabitants.

  Rooted in the students’ insights, I think it is possible to use the word fusion as a core national identity. For example, if anyone asks me if I am white, black, or a person of color, I answer that I am a fusion, a person who believes it is impossible to create a colorblind society if we continue to use skin color when we describe one another; and when we describe the many millions of post 1965 immigrants who are exceedingly confused by the way Americans think. For example, is it a successful assimilation if millions of Mexicans decide they are white; and millions of South Asians decide they are black?

    My aim is to find a way to define three hundred million people in a manner that unites rather than divides us. Like Ms. for the women’s movement the fusion identity says that I adamantly refuse to echo the conventional wisdom. I want my grandchildren to live in a society where the significance of skin color is at best marginal; and I mean to root that future society in the beliefs and values embedded in the fusion label. Those beliefs and values are:

·         Fusions deny the concept of race. There is one race, the human race, and it is, by definition, a series of ceaseless unions.

·         Fusions deliberately refuse to use skin color as a basic category of identity. Fusions think that it is ridiculous to key on a physical attribute determined by a miniscule percentage of our genes.

·         Fusions believe that, instead of being self-segregating barriers to interaction, body type differences are delightful and diverse manifestations of the underlying and indissoluble unity of six billion people.

·         Fusion is a core identity that happily allows room for other forms of self and group expression. Fusions think of differences in nationality, religion, ethnicity or geography as potential sources of interest rather than as a reason to discriminate or self-segregate.

·         Finally, and this is crucial for political activists, the fusion label offers the possibility of a shared sense of solidarity among, for example, Asians, Chicanos, West Indians, Arabs, Indians and Puerto Ricans. Members of each group will recognize that fusions want to create serious social change by moving beyond the race and color distinctions that so often create barriers to activists interested in uniting their efforts. Under the fusion umbrella there is ample room for all Americans.

     I glued the word American to fusion to make a point about a set of beliefs that many Americans willingly endorse. These include the fundamental equality of all men and women; they include a respect for the inalienable rights of all people to freedom, justice and a fair shot at societal and personal success. And they include a willingness to accept that America is always a work in progress. To use a Marxian analogy, we can reconfigure U.S. culture in a revolutionary manner if we willing to abolish the white/black dichotomy that is a superstructure built on the base of racial thinking.

   Destroy base and superstructure by embracing the label American fusion. Make the conventional wisdom impossible by using the fusion label whenever anyone speaks in colors and we can begin a –in millions of everyday interactions- a conversation that creates a new consensus, one that absolutely refuses to endorse the racial thinking created by the very worst representatives of U.S. history and culture.