Liminal living
on Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom
It is not easy to place yourself within the spectrum of colour. It is all the more difficult to imagine that if you were a shade darker or lighter the world would be exponentially more punishing or rewarding, depending on where you are located. But we are all familiar with and complicit within this system, and we know that the darker someone is the more likely they are to be profiled as incompetent or violent. That is true here as it is out West, though when class and culture enter this equation it is kneaded and pulled in many different ways. But the formula holds.
McMillan Cottom wrote of liminality, of beings born or socialised into two cultures at once. I am one such being, and along with “where are you really from?“ and, “Your English is very good,“ I have also heard “you look Malay, but you’re very fair—pretty.” I am fair enough to be seen as competent and, hell, pretty (because white is a benchmark of beauty), and dark enough to benefit from the ethnocentrism of my own country. In the realm of Whiteness, I fulfil the role of the “exotic”: exploitable, in what McMillan Cottom calls the “post-colonial game of Western credentialism”, equipped with a kind of competence that will not substantially threaten Whiteness. Suddenly I understood what she meant when she wrote that Whiteness is elastic.
“...Conforming to somatic expectations of race, gender and sexuality minimises invasions of your privacy and property,” she writes, and by God it’s true. It is a great privilege to exist like so in this spectrum. Being liminal means I conform to the expectations of multiple parties, though never to the satisfaction of any one of them. Further, “duality can breed insight,” she writes, “but it can also breed delusion”. My two selves have formed a coalescence that has both enlightened me and blinded me. My ticket to trust, to competency, to friendship and community, even, holds within it a fine print that just might get me kicked out and disowned from both ends of the spectrum. Yet I hold to it still, counting on those who never read the fine print. It is a complicated privilege.
In the global South, being liminal might win you some battles - but it is a war you are sure to lose. These small “wins” are nothing but reminders of our inferiority complex; of the flourishing industry of skin whitening, the stark divide between the “expat” and the “migrant”, and the slew of celebrities who boast European blood as key competency. It is a “competency trap”, as McMillan Cottom puts it; a collective delusion, and the liminal—the Eurasians—hold significant currency in protracting it. No, surely you cannot blame someone for the blood they are born with. But you can rightly demand that they acknowledge the privileges that it affords them, and ask: do their victories defend you or betray you?
There was a time when I believed that being liminal means that you can enjoy the best of both worlds. I cherrypicked away; thinking that I can arrive on neutral grounds, feet on both sides of the fence. It is easy to believe you could if you buy into the delusion that these two worlds exist on even grounds. But one preys upon the other, mercilessly, in acts of blatant exploitation and saviourism. Of course, identity is much more complex than racial components: there is, for instance, the fact that I cannot name a generation of my family that was not born on this land. This is the culture I proudly wear; the one against which my sense of identity rests, but I would be remiss not to say that Whiteness (or, perhaps more accurately, the appearance of it) is enticing: it elevates you almost immediately, it injects you with competence. But it comes at the expense of my colour—my people—and the delusion cracks, cracks, cracks. The lie will betray us all, just you see.
Perhaps the delusion breaks with guilt. A small part of it is guilt, I'm sure—of being descendants of colonisers, of being so closely associated with Whiteness and benefitting from the proximity. But a large part of it is consciousness: Whiteness expands to exclude, and it will register my colour, my mother and my soil as "other".
"I almost forgot once," McMillan Cottom writes, "Old trees and new whites are a seduction. But my soul remembers my grandmother's memories."
