1.7 People like us, do things like this
open up the greenhouse
Sorry for the silence—it’s been a few weeks! I had a lovely spring break with three out of four kids at home, so that was part of it. But the other part is that I’ve been struggling to write an essay on a difficult subject: social status. I’ve written several versions of the essay but haven’t sent it out because something about it felt both incomplete and overburdened. It felt overly vague but also too detailed (probably a good definition for “unfocused”). I’m still working on it. But in the meantime, here’s a musing on the liminal space.
I’m Japanese and white American (my dad’s family has southern U.S. roots that are English and French). My husband is Lebanese and white American (his dad’s family came to the U.S. from England in the 1600s). And to date, we haven’t met anyone with my kids’ background: Lebanese, Japanese, and English.
My kids have even scoured TikTok, looking for anyone who looks like them, who might have a similar ethnic background. They’ve never met anyone who grew up in a home that blasts both Arabic and Japanese pop, but who are also simultaneously firmly rooted in a community with ancestors that go back almost to the Mayflower. My kids think it would be fun to celebrate their diversity with others who share it, because otherwise they are literally just a group of four on this planet, which is startling to consider. I mean, it’s a big planet.
Seth Godin (read his blog here, his podcast is here) uses this phrase often: “people like us, do things like this.” This is his definition of “culture.” I find it highly useful, and I quote him all the time, much to my kids’ annoyance. But really, it’s the only way for us mixed people to thrive. Otherwise, we feel like we’re strangers no matter where we go.
So I try to stress the ways in which we have things in common with the people around us, not the fact that we don’t have all things in common. We go to school together, work at jobs together, live in the same town. We watch the same shows, we like the same foods, we enjoy the same fashions.
We’re members of lots of different tribes, and seen that way, it’s a source of joy. I try to stay on the “joy” side of the equation in every way I can.
It’s fun to feel like you’re a member of the same tribe; it’s fun to be at a baseball game, wearing the same garb and hollering for the same team. Godin calls this “affiliation.” It’s all the good stuff that comes with being a member of a group.
Affiliation is the infinite game of culture building, sustainability, cooperation and resilience. (Seth Godin)
But the not-fun part of being a mixed kid is what Godin calls “dominance.” This doesn’t need a definition; when someone is engaging in “dominance” we know what it looks like. It’s when there are winners and losers, rules about who belongs, and hierarchies where people at the top oppress people at the bottom.
When you’re on the edge of a group, you’re not experiencing affiliation. You’re experiencing dominance. If you’re bad at math and you’re in a math class filled with math majors—that’s the kind of gut-level anxiety I’m talking about. The sense of never belonging, never connecting, always watching everyone else while you hover on the fringes, constantly afraid of looking stupid and making mistakes.
If the math majors worked to include the math-anxious, to share their love for math, to feel empathy for those of us whose brains work differently, that would lead to affiliation. We might all come to appreciate math together. We might bond over math, and at the very least, those of us who find it challenging would understand why some people love it so much.
We want to be included, all of us, to share in that amazing feeling where you’re connected at a group-wide level. And what I think is key is the idea that not everyone shares your mindset, and that maybe there are people in the room who need a hand.
The quote that I love from Godin’s blog post:
When you’re in one mode, it’s tempting to believe that everyone else is too. But depending on which pocket of culture you’re in, which ticket you bought, what state your persona is in, it might be that you’re not seeing what others are seeing.
Getting in sync requires doing the emotional work of changing state long before we start using words and rational concepts. When in doubt, assume the people over there might be engaging in a different sort of theatre than you are. [emphasis mine]
As a mixed person, I often feel like I’m not “in sync” with anyone else. I grew up among lots of Asians, and specifically lots of Japanese-Americans, but my background was very different from theirs. And when I came to the mainland U.S. I discovered that my whiteness wasn’t white “enough” in lots of groups. Even if it wasn’t malicious, I was often questioned or told that I was “different.” And among half-Japanese people everywhere, there are too many differences for us to be a tribe—where our non-Japanese parent came from and our level of Japanese language ability, to start.
I think this hyper-awareness of affiliation and dominance gives me a powerful perspective, and definitely a level of empathy that is easy for me to step into. We’re just more used to being left out. We’re more used to being the exception. It’s when my daughter looks around the cafe and whispers to me that “we’re the diversity here,” even if her dad’s family has lived in this town for two hundred years. It’s when the clerk says to me, “No, where are you really from?" when I’ve already explained that I’m American and have always been.
Affiliation and dominance are not just about ethnicity or race. They are about education, income, sexuality, gender—every kind of group. If you’ve ever felt left out or pushed out, you know the feeling of the liminal space, that confusing sense of wondering where you belong. Mixed people feel that all the time, and we often can’t talk about it except with our families, because even mixed people aren’t necessarily in “affiliation” with other mixed people.
But the liminal space has no walls. That’s the best thing about it, and the worst thing about it. It’s hard to get your arms around, but it’s freedom. We need to welcome more people into it, is the answer. It doesn’t really matter if you have the “privilege” of belonging to majorities everywhere you go, since ultimately we’re alone when we die. Being alone is pretty much the human condition; death is the ultimate dominance, which means that it’s also the ultimate affiliation. That’s a good reason to look for commonalities instead of differences.
This is also why I choose joy. I choose affiliation with as many groups as I can. I belong to them all. I reject the idea that I need to be a greenhouse plant, looking and acting like every other plant. I’ll be the weird one in the group, gladly. Just take the roof off the greenhouse and let the sun and rain come on in.