Will

Mar 4

I was born in London, and I lived there until I was about five. And from what I remember it was a great time, I'm close to my parents, then we moved to Hong Kong. And that's where I lost my accent. I went to American school over there, one of my biggest regrets in life was losing my English accent. We lived in Hong Kong for 6 years, and then moved to Houston. And Houston was the first place race identity kind of came into play. It's not that I don't think race isn't a factor in Southeast Asia. I just went to international school. And I think Hong Kong more than anything is classist, rather than there being any kind of race component. So I went to public school in the suburbs of Houston. And that was a weird adjustment period where I just didn't fit in. I think the things that I thought were cool just didn't have currency in conversation. I wanted to buy into the Black experience because it had more currency in America than the Indian experience. But people kind of gatekeep that card pretty intensely.

Could you speak a little bit more about gatekeeping and being Black as a type of currency?

So I think being Black comes with some implicit privileges of cool. I never get gate-keeped by other Black people, by the way, other Black people always accept that I'm Black. It's usually people of other races, who are like, yeah, but you're not really Black. And so you get into this kind of like, Judith Butler, gender performance, but with racial performance, right? Are you performing enough with the indicators for us to to basically give you the space in which to validate your Black experience? And so I felt like a lot of the people around me, by their rhetoric, just didn't accept me as a Black member of their group. And part of it was also me trying to take a culture that I didn't really have a direct relationship with. My dad is African American, grew up poor, grew up during segregation. But I was trying to co-op an element of Black culture that I had no experience with, which was the commoditized, commercial element of it. And I was trying to wrongfully pass that off of my own lineage. I changed the way I spoke to African American Vernacular. And I was doing a lot of things to basically try to make that cultural lineage my lineage, so I get the wanting to withhold that from me. But then there was a point where there's kind of a fight for identity that I think is unique to the American experience. Because one of the great things about having studied in the UK, and having so many friends from Europe, race doesn't mean the same thing over there. In America, so much of identity is performed through race. And when you're mixed, it's like, how do I perform authentically, right? How do I perform the way in which that people are going to accept? And also, what does this mean about me as an individual in these contexts and situations?

Absolutely. It’s not only how we see ourselves, but it's how others see us. And it's just this constant battle and anxiety about, okay, am I fitting what other people are expecting of me while still feeling authentic to myself?

1,000,000%. And one of the things that kind of makes it interesting is when I shave my head bald (so I will shave my head bald sometimes), I look 100% African American. And so there's also an element of me being – and I made a Tik-Tok about this – about being transracial, where I literally transition and I watch all of a sudden, I don't change as an individual, every one of my preferences are still the same, all my inclinations are still the same, but how people are responding to me is different. And that was one of the first times it really clued me into the fact that I was like, oh, a lot of our race isn't even about us. Right? Our race is kind of about other people not wanting to see us as an individual. So in terms of it being a tool to find out things about me, it's not really an adequate tool, because it was never meant for my own self discovery. It was meant to actually, I don't want to go as far as to say to dehumanize, but it definitely means to some people [an excuse] to not know anything about you and to just make that a blueprint. So what's interesting is as my hair grows, I can't say a lot of Black jokes. Even if I tell people in advance, because there's a disconnect with the audience where it's like, does this person have permission to say this? Does this make me a bad person for me to say this to work, when my head is bald, that's no longer an issue. And this makes me think a lot of race has really nothing to do, really, with your genetics or your past or anything like that. It really just has to do with acceptability for other people and making you palatable and easy to explain.

This one time I got an argument with a person on Facebook, back when Facebook was relevant. I was saying it's funny to me that a lot of kids of immigrants talk about Western civilization as if we're not a part of it. And this person came in knowing that I was African American, saying well, I'm gonna be honest with you, Black, African American people aren't really a part of Western civilization. He said, they haven't contributed any real intellectual works, besides the Civil Rights Era, which we should all treasure but... And I said, well number one, if we're going off of contributions to intellectual work, then 99.9% of white people aren't part of Western civilization. I said, but I don't think that's the argument that you're making. And I knew about this guy's background, I knew that his family was from Siberia, and that he was from Russia. I said, “well, you know, the funniest thing about this is if we want to gatekeep history, my family's been here since the 1600s. I can date back papers, receipts, all these other things. I am the only man who has not fought for this country in my direct line from the slave ships, I have so many ancestors that have contributed, who have made this country very wealthy, I could make the argument you're not part of Western civilization, your parents didn't speak English as their native language. I'm not going to say that. But I'm going to say the argument that you're saying, I could really alienate your experience right here.” And the thing that kind of annoys me is that the second anybody gets off, it doesn't matter how long, as soon as they lose their accent, they become part of white culture and get access to all of history. Whereas when you're a minority or you're mixed, you're perceived as happening outside of that history, kind of a footnote to it. And I really resent that, because number one, this is all of our history, we're all part of this made up thing. Western civilization is made up, it's a mythology that we're buying into. So is race, so is all of these things. So it can be as elastic as we want it to be. And so he really backpedaled after that, because yeah, if you want to try to take away my American card, I will take yours back. But I'm not going to use that logic. I'm just going to show you the faultiness of it in that circumstance.

I have a couple of cousins on my dad's side, who are direct descendants of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, and they don't wave a confederate flag. And I think it's interesting, though they're direct descendants they're literally like Confederate royalty, that should be a real emblem of their history. But some guy from Michigan, whose grandparents came in 1917 from Ireland, never been to the south, HE waves the Confederate flag. Or some guy in Poland is waving the Confederate flag. And you realize that these are all just part of a mythos of ideals that have really no tie to it. And I think the more we learn about our own independent journey, like the people, the actual individuals that had to survive to make us and no matter what color you are, we have ancestors who lived through insane atrocities and find pride in those individuals. I think we lose this grip that race has on us, because race is nondescript. It's minimizing, it strips from us our uniqueness and it takes away from our past. If you just learn about those people, I think that you get to a place where you can really, number one, appreciate where you came from. And also just buy less into race. I think race is a faulty tool to distinguish people from one another. And I think we're going to continue to run into problems. If we continue to use race as a primary way of identity and explaining other people to ourselves. Just like in medicine and in surgery, you would never trust a heart surgeon who only knew the word “heart”. If you don't see nuance, eventually it implodes on itself.

Can we surpass this myth of race and Western civilization?

Yes, I think we can. We just have to have better storytellers. And I think we have to have people willing to let go of the currency that their race provides them. And I think it comes from difficult conversations, right. Sometimes I debate race realists and stuff like that on Tik-Tok. And one of the arguments that come keep comes up is that they'll be like, oh, you know, well, we invented the automobile. We built the railroad we went to the moon, I said, Who the fuck is we? My older sister went to Wharton School of Business. That's my blood. I can't write Wharton on my resume. That's someone I'm directly related to, look a lot alike. So what ability do you have to latch yourself on to that cultural journey? You don't. And I think the more we do that, the more we actually celebrate individualism, by not letting people claim the successes, appropriate the successes of other people, I think we will become a lot stronger as individuals.

After Mr. Brooks got killed by the police officer, I made a podcast episode, because there were so many people who were like, well, if he had only not resisted, he wouldn't have been killed. And that's you disagreeing with the personal philosophical position of what he did, which was, and I'm gonna be honest with you, I agree. I don't think there's many people who were like, that's the best way to handle that situation. But that's not what we're upset with. And I'm upset with the fact that I live in a country where a man offers to walk home, is not displaying any violent tendencies, and somehow ends up dead. That's not the type of country I want to live in. So if you keep putting the responsibility on the individual, the bar keeps getting lower for our government. And so I think there's this constant conflation of like, my philosophies as an individual are Nietzchean and Übermensch, but I will not use that as a narrative to validate the oppression of other people. I recently made a video about my dad, who is such a tremendous man: born in 1947, fought in Vietnam as a marine, got promoted to sergeant, went to UCLA on the GI Bill, went to law school, became a general counsel for a Fortune 500 company, was with Prince Charles and Reagan, same guy who couldn't sit at the same counters as white people, is now at parties with Prince Charles and Reagan, lives all over the world, becomes a UK citizen. The only reason he could do that was because of the GI Bill. And so when I think about policy, I don't think why can't more people be great like my dad, I think: how many great people like my dad are we losing out on because we have bad policy? And that's happening in all these other spaces. And I think sometimes race gets in the way of us being able to have the specific conversations about these things that we want. I think the only reason we don't have socialized healthcare in America is because of race. I think there is this idea that people think I don't want someone who doesn't look like me profiteering. Whenever someone uses the homogeneity of Sweden, or Norway, as, oh, well, they're homogenous, [that’s why it works]. What are you really saying? We're all the same species of individual. We're all the same people. We're all US citizens. Right? And does that not mean something to you? And to me, being a US citizen, there's a standard, it's actually more real than race. There's a bunch of weird racial quagmires and stuff like that. There's no 22% American. I think it doesn't have to do with homogeneity as much as it has to do with the amount of people that are in America, and the amount of space in between them. I have a lot of family there in Singapore. Tons of social benefits, very diverse, tons of different types of people, but they live so close together, and they can't build a mythos about each other that isn't true, because you're constantly confronted with this reckoning that no, they're not bad people. They're just people. We don't have that in America. A person in North Dakota might never see somebody who doesn't look like them, who might not even be from the same state as them. And I think that we need to make a more honest attempt of integrating and traveling. I think that we need to do school sponsored trips, kind of like birthright, but for different parts of America, where these kids can just go to different parts of the country and see, oh, these aren't evil people. Right? These are just people. And I think that that's really important moving forward.

It's like Plato's Allegory of the Cave, where people are being shown the shadows. And this is one of the reasons why I think the suburbs have ruined America is because the suburbs are basically a place where you insulate yourself from the feared other, the reason they even exist is because they wanted a place where people didn't have to interact with people who are different than them outside of the work setting. So when people are trying to get in touch with reality, they depend on the news. Which the news is always a jester, I don't put the news responsible for being the news, right? It's going to need to entertain or whatever. There's just a lot of people who don't know that. When you have Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, men who are on the judicial records saying that they're not news, and no sane person will believe it [as news], but yet people are buying into it. Because they trust this icon, which is the Fox News emblem, or CNN. And these things continuously make race an issue. So we end up believing that this division is real. Right now I'm writing a book called The Holocron. And I talked about the transit culture and the things we all understand and that we're in a trance, but you've probably had this experience when you travel where you're like, Oh, they do things completely different. And it becomes very real for you how indoctrinated you become with certain kinds of narratives, I never realized I'm that American until I'm hanging out with a bunch of people in the UK or in Berlin. And we're drinking and they're like, you're so American, and I just don't even think of myself as that.

Margaret Canady

Will

Taylor

Tia Monet