FAMILY AS CULTURE   |   HERITAGE 

OTHER FORMS OF IDENTITY   |   DISCUSSION POINTS

Many participants focused on family as the definition of their culture and the subject of their visual culture jam. I have chosen to discuss the following two participants because of their contrasting relationships with their families and how this affects their worldviews. Also, I found it interesting that the two participants were part of the group of students who felt they “had no culture” or expressed color-blind ways of seeing. While color-blind ways of seeing is a troubling worldview, Kathryn Bowen[1], a participant in this study, helped me to understand why some people adopt this point of view.

In response to the second narrative prompt, “Do you feel your race/culture/ethnicity impacts your day-to-day life?,” Kathryn, a participant, responded,

I don’t feel any impact from my ethnicity or race in my day-to-day life.  I don’t think about either.  I forget that I’m a different “color” from most people…I think about more important things like how I’m going to pay my bills and where I’m going to try to live after college. (personal communication, December 3, 2012)

While this response seems to dismiss the severity of being color-blind by devaluing it as not as important as paying the bills, her visual culture jam offered a clearer explanation of her thoughts. During her visual culture jam, Kathryn was followed by another participant reading a script and acting as her mother. The “mother” was overly nagging and concerned with the choices Kathryn was making in her life. Kathryn continued to walk away and was silent, eventually sitting on the floor waiting for the barrage of comments to stop. After her performance, she explained her piece,

This project was really hard for me because I don’t feel like I have a culture…my culture    is essentially the attitudes in my family and my reaction to that…So I think what’s that done is created, like, a vacuum in my brain. I just don’t really see different colors when I look at people…When I teach, it’s going to be in a way that welcomes everyone to express themselves however they wish and to not allow anyone to target them or bully them based on that. (emphasis added, personal communication, December 4, 2012)

Through her performance, we learn that Kathryn adopted a color-blind way of seeing as a way to counteract the negativity and judgment she has experienced through her family. Therefore, one can infer that her choice to be color-blind is not one based on insincerity or superiority, but rather one that attempts to make no judgment at all.

 

Another student, Mallory, had the same draw to explore her family, but she found her family as a strong, positive influence in her life. In her *narrative response she stated,

I don’t really ever think about my culture, ethnicity, or race since I don’t really identify with it at all. Maybe if I was placed in another country, or a part of this country that would make me a minority then I would be more conscious of it, but based on being here   and where I live at home it never really crosses my mind. So even though I don’t think about it on a day-to-day basis, I see it sometimes when I am placed in different situations. (personal communication, December 2, 2012)

* Read a transcript of Mallory’s performance or her narrative responses.

For her performance, Mallory stood in front of a picture of herself with her siblings (Figure 1). “I’ll be Home for Christmas” was playing over the speakers, and she told us about Thanksgiving dinner and her youngest brother being accepted to college. I found this story an interesting choice for her visual culture jam, especially since in her narrative she talked about a small “jam” experience when she went to Italy and experienced what it was like to be viewed as an “American” from the eyes of Italians. Maybe this wasn’t a big enough “jam” for her to explore or maybe I, as a researcher, did not push enough for students to really explore these disruptions of identities.

Either way, when she ended her performance, I thought to myself, “That was really safe.” It was not until our post-performance discussion, though, that I learned while this was a “safe” performance, it was where she was with her cultural identity right now. During our post-performance group discussion, she told the class,

I was literally scared, I like had no idea of what I was going to say…I don’t really feel like I have a culture in the sense of nationality or like race. It’s always just like I’m White…It was just interesting to see that I wasn’t just the only one who felt that way. (personal communication, December 4, 2012)

I believe this expression of fear and then comfort to be a positive sign of the project because it demonstrates the safety students felt to express their feelings and ideas surrounding race, ethnicity, and culture. As a researcher, I did not want to force my participants to falsely create these moments of “jam” just to meet the requirements of the assignment. I am happy Mallory, and others, felt comfortable to express their uncomfortability with the project because it is in this space where participants experienced the “in-between,” a moment filled with possibility, change, and transformative learning (Greene, 1995).