Brown Boxes: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Cultural Identity and Fluid Positionality

Abstract

Through personal vignettes, the author explores how racial, religious, and citizenship aspects of cultural identity shift in meaning both across the lifespan and across borders. The author evokes tension and growth in the vignettes to communicate a felt understanding of the emotional implications of colonial displacement, offering an opportunity for readers to resonate with the diasporic experience. The author further calls for social scientists to reframe positionality as a persistent reflexive process that is as fluid and dynamic as we are (rather than a methods section feature) and similarly reframe diversity to find new ways to relate to one another.

When writing about our positionality, we are often asked to list the “boxes” in which we fit and connect them meaningfully to the research. We learn that differences from our participants put us outside their box, separating us from their experiences. We present these boxes as solid and essential to who we are at our core, as we use them to make predictions about their implications for the research. Yet, how do we articulate the overlaps between these boxes? How can we be sure that sharing a box with our participants means we will have insights to their eyes? Where does that box live, and from what meaningful context does it emerge? These questions around the intricacies of reflexive practice were floating around my mind long before I ever heard the word “positionality,” because the experiences I have had with the “boxes” of identity challenge the idea of a straight-forward positionality. They expose the tensions between the terms we use and the overflowing meanings they try to carry. In this work, I share my experiences to illustrate fluid positionality, and call for reflexive practices to develop intercultural dialogues that foster critical cultural awareness. I first review the conceptual paradigm that informs my argument, then discuss the autoethnographic methodology. After describing the vignettes of my experiences, I call upon readers to use the nuances of fluid positionality to avoid cultural reductionism.

The following vignettes describe my experiences as a “brown” woman across the sets of meanings (or, “boxes”) that label has taken on. I am an American, Muslim woman born to parents of Indian descent from the Caribbean. My ancestors were Muslims who came to Trinidad & Tobago from an area of South Asia at the time known as India to work the plantations as indentured servants. Both of my parents hold this heritage. My parents immigrated to the United States, where I was born in 1996. After financial struggles in New York, my family moved to Kuwait in 2005. We moved to Pennsylvania in 2008, where I began writing this work in 2017. The experiences I recount describe these identities as I interpret them throughout the different stages of my life, and as they change meanings according to the sociopolitical and cultural context across national borders.

Conceptual Paradigm

Drawing influence from works by Narayan (2000) and Anand (2009), I arrange my narrative vignettes to show how I have interacted with what I call the “box” perspective of cultural identity, including when it is imposed onto me, my own internalization of it, and my resistance. Through narratives, this work challenges a phenomenon that Narayan (2000) refers to as the “package picture” of culture, describing the view that people are part of neatly divided cultural packages, each with distinct contents that do not overlap. She identifies this cultural essentialist perspective as a part of the feminist movement, initially adopted to avoid gender essentialism (i.e., the view that women’s concerns are universal across the gender). However, she argues, gender essentialism was not enriched but replaced by cultural essentialism, creating categories like “Muslim women” and “Indian women” to delineate the difference between Western and non-Western women and depict these groups as homogeneous (Narayan, 2000). Such categories are created through a process of “selective labelling [. . .] whereby those with social power conveniently designate certain changes in values and practices as consonant with cultural preservation and others as cultural loss or betrayal” (Narayan, 2000, p. 1085), highlighting that the categories are regulated by those in power to meet their interests.

The dangers of these categorical constructions reside in the colonial hierarchies they create and perpetuate. Narayan (2000) notes that historically, Western institutions’ “insistence on sharp contrasts between ‘Western culture’ and ‘Other cultures’” (p. 1083) were used to imagine the supremacy of Western culture and justify the colonialization of the “Others.” Anand (2009) further critiques such cultural essentialist frameworks for their propensity to attribute political and economic events in a state to the culture of its people, thereby ignoring the context of international material relations and enabling a speaker to rank the efficiency or success of particular peoples. He notes that statist paradigms (that view cultural identity as determined primarily by nationality) depend on neat categories of homogeneous cultures aligned with the state wherein “population = territory = government = sovereignty” (Anand, 2009, p. 105) to compete in neo-colonialist hierarchies. These dominant narratives of cultural belonging weave colonial ideas about superiority and inferiority into their constructions of difference.

However, these dominant narratives of culture can be challenged. Narayan (2000) speaks in context of the feminist movement, noting that people are capable of resisting the “selective labels” imposed upon them. “Undoing the package picture” of culture necessarily means confronting diversity within categories of identity and producing change through collective action (Narayan, 2000). In contrast, Anand (2009) focuses on centering diasporas (a collective of people displaced from a common homeland to a new hostland). Yet, he similarly finds potential in challenging dominant narratives about culture through diasporic subjectivity as an ethical position that “rejects cultural conformity and celebrates culture as a site of contestation” (p. 103). He proposes a diasporic awareness of culture, recognizing that the identities of displaced peoples are necessarily at odds with narratives that straightforwardly portray the state as the determinant of cultural identity, asserting that “you cannot be comfortable and ignorant about your identity if you are diasporic” (Anand, 2009, p. 106). By engaging with stories that counter dominant narratives of concrete, isolated cultures, researchers can develop critical insights to call attention to omitted diversity.

Indeed, my own stories affirm that I have been neither “comfortable” nor “ignorant” about my identities as a diasporic woman, a subject well-suited for autoethnographic exploration. Unlike ethnographies that can describe a still portrait of a culture at a particular moment in time (Bruner, 1986), the autoethnography enables an author to detail their culturally situated transformations over time via their collected experiences. In contrast to the pervasive academic emphasis on “being a something” (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005, p. 966), autoethnographies describe processes of becoming. Bright (2018) uses the analogy of a river to describe cultural identifying: “A flow of life, never fixed, never complete, a river that never finally is, but that is always becoming,” (p. 34).

The narratives in this autoethnography show this perpetual becoming through my emergence out of the brown boxes of identity using the concepts outlined by Narayan (2000) and Anand (2009) in each vignette. Specifically, I use the idea of selective labeling to ask which labels are being imposed on me, which labels I am acting upon, and how these labels are mobilized by the people involved to produce desirable outcomes. In addition, I use Anand’s (2009) concept of embracing cultural identity as a site of contestation to investigate what identities are being contested in each situation (and by whom) as well as track the signifiers of the conflicting identities at play. The concepts help illustrate how I am weaving a tapestry—notably, not a patchwork quilt—of multifaceted identity as an effort to cultivate versatility. Furthermore, the autoethnographic format allows readers to not only think about how the concepts can be applied but also to feel (Bochner & Ellis, 2016, p. 212) the concepts manifesting in lived experiences. Here, I invite readers to feel the ambiguity of cultural identity pushing against the boundaries of the “brown boxes” I describe, and to continue this critical thinking journey as they conceptualize culture in their own work and lives.

Methodological Considerations of the Autoethnographic Voice

After I presented the first iteration of this work at a seminar, a colleague who had written her own autoethnography described the method as a “strange beast.” Her words stuck with me, as they so aptly described the sense of peculiarity and intimidation surrounding autoethnography in academia. Indeed, the approach “breaks away from the web of beliefs enforced and disciplined by the culture of inquiry into which many of us were socialized” (Bochner & Ellis, 2016, p. 213), asking researchers to use first-person, emotionally engaging description of their own experiences. Against positivist scientific traditions that esteem detached, objective analysts studying outsiders, autoethnographic inquiry may seem out of place. However, like other forms of qualitative social science work, autoethnography is quite at home in growing bodies of postmodern and poststructuralist thought.

During the mid-1980s, positivist research assumptions were being contested by postmodernist and poststructuralist researchers (Bochner & Ellis, 2016). Postmodernists criticized the idea that “any method or theory, any discourse or genre, or any tradition or novelty has a universal and general claim as the “right” or privileged form of authoritative knowledge,” (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005, p. 961), proposing instead that researchers have partial knowledge, specific to their own local experiences. This is not portrayed as a weakness, but a legitimate and valuable way of knowing the world. Poststructuralism—a subdivision of postmodern thought that emphasizes the link between language and power (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005)—builds upon this idea of a socially, politically, and culturally situated speaker. Poststructuralists argued that people articulate their experiences through the socially constructed discourses available to them (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). Such ideas help qualitative researchers gain a reflexive grasp on their knowledge horizons as situated speakers and free researchers from needing to write in an omnipotent voice (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). In line with postmodernism and poststructuralism, I write this work within relativist paradigms of truth, noting that my interpretations of the data are intimately and contextually bound to the subjectivities of my reality (Wall, 2008), and making no claim to objectivity.

Because the paradigm allows me to prioritize the intersubjective data of human experience over objective data, I do not need to be concerned with the mimetic accuracy of the narratives—that is, I do not view the narratives as attempts to “imitate a reality” that can be objectively expressed (Frank, 2010, p. 88). Therefore, there are several aspects of the work that represent reality, but do not reflect it. First, the data are presented in the form of vignettes, all pulled from my memory. Wall (2008) found herself being asked to justify the use of memory as data in her own autoethnography under criticism that the memories were not reliable records to inform interpretation. She responds to this accusation by noting that even prominent ethnographers such as Margaret Mead have depended on their memories of interviews and observations to meaningfully interpret their field notes and transcripts (Wall, 2008).

Second, the names in my story have been omitted or changed. We do not exist separately from our social context, so my narratives of cultural identity navigations are necessarily intertwined with those around me. However, these narratives are not to show the development of the characters around me; therefore, their growth is not for me to speak on, and their names do not appear.

Finally, autoethnographers must face the question of representing an authentic self (Wall, 2008). While writing their narratives, researchers may consider how the audience will judge their character, and may be tempted to alter their narratives to portray the self in a positive light. Under the poststructuralist paradigm, whether or not these changes occur has no effect on the strength of the work. Because I am not attempting to replicate reality, I am not trying to portray a “real” or “authentic” self. Such words suggest a stagnant character with a predetermined list of qualities. On the contrary, the narratives tell the story of a young woman growing, untangling socialized internal conflict. They expose flawed modes of thinking, the process of recognizing those flaws, and the choice to embody a different way of being in the world. The narratives detail a self that is anything but stagnant.

Vignettes

Muslim/American

Short temper

The attacks on September 11 occurred when I was in preschool, so I don’t have much memory of a time “before.” However, I noticed a sense of anxiety around the topic of religion while I was in elementary school in New York. My parents and I, miles away from the rest of our family, were not practicing or part of a Muslim community. Yet, I have patchwork memories of attending masjid very young, and praying with dozens of people. After 2001, as openly expressing the faith made one susceptible to attacks from eager patriots, so Muslim communities moved to the shadows. For example, when my family was moving to Kuwait, my third-grade teacher pulled me aside and asked if I was excited, to which I replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” in an attempt to keep secret my association with Islam. I absorbed rampant islamophobia before I ever got the chance to understand the content of the religion, nor the rich virtues of its principles and traditions. The context made it especially difficult for my mother to teach me how to be “good” in ways that were uniquely Muslim.

Spring was coming to an end, and the heat of summer was just beginning. On the first warm morning of third grade, I arrived school wearing my usual—jeans and my sparkly shirt, with glittery bubbles and hair clips throughout my long, black hair. Today, however, I noticed that my usual was out of the norm. Everyone else had their knees exposed. All of my other classmates were wearing shorts—jean shorts, bright orange shorts, and tartan shorts. But I was not.

“Oh no!” a classmate said to me, “You’re not wearing shorts. If you were, then our whole class would be!” She looked at me curiously, like I was an unwanted outlier in her study.

I felt bad, like I had done something wrong, although I couldn’t articulate what. Fearing another faux pas, I was determined to start wearing shorts to school, but I didn’t own any. With resolve and purpose, I asked my mother as soon as I got home that afternoon.

“Mom, I need to wear shorts to school.” I said as I walked into the kitchen, where she was preparing dinner.

“Why?” she asked curtly, looking up from her chopping board.

“Because everyone else was wearing shorts at school today.” Looking back, I realize that this is the least persuasive way I could have phrased it, but it seemed to make sense at the time.

My mother looked back down and continued chopping, dismissively saying “If everyone else wants to be haram, then they can do that.”

I thought to myself, ““Haram?” What does that mean?” as I stormed off.

I didn’t know that the word meant “sinful,” but even if I did, I wouldn’t have understood why something my peers were doing was considered bad. It was frustrating. I was upset that I was singled out from a seemingly mundane activity for cosmological reasons I could not understand. But how could my mother have possibly explained it, at that time, in that place? How could she explain the ethical strengths of modest dress to a young girl who is surrounded by peers who think differently? How could she connect it to Islamic practice if, outside of my home, I was surrounded with messages describing Muslims as a dangerous threat? Unfortunately, the most she could leave me with was a vague sense of “otherness” I would have to accept.

Understanding

I’ve been told that my skin does not “match” my voice. Raised in New York speaking only English, my typical speaking voice carries a Northeast American accent (unless I am speaking with my family, when I “automatically” switch to a Trini dialect). This has afforded me a certain level of privilege, allowing native English speakers to speak naturally and comfortably with me despite my brown skin, and enabling those with English as a second language to exercise their English skills and show their high status. While my accent can signal sameness for some people, it coexists with other indicators (of sameness and of difference) in a network of layered characteristics. As a person discovers these characteristics, they use them to determine which side of the “us/them” boundary I fall on, and therefore how I ought to be treated, as I learned on a spring day in 2017.

As president of a campus student organization, I was responsible for organizing community service opportunities for the club. At a meeting, one member suggested volunteer work at a local animal shelter. The club showed interest, so the member gave me the phone number of the shelter.

A few days later, I had driven to campus about 15 min earlier than I needed to be. Parked in a mostly empty lot on a bright May morning, I decided to use this spare time to call the animal shelter. From the driver’s seat of my CR-V, I dialed the number and waited through several rings before I heard a woman’s voice answer, raspy yet sweet. The remnants of Pennsylvanian Dutch from generations prior still lingered in her accent. I explained that the club wanted to do some volunteer work and she was delighted to hear it. She readily explained what paperwork needed to be done before volunteering, what tasks we would be completing, and gave me information to pass on to the rest of the club.

“I am really just thinking of coming in for a weekend or two to help clean, if that’s okay.” I said, confirming our arrangement.

“That is perfectly fine, any help is appreciated! Can you come this Saturday at noon?”

“No, I’m sorry, I’ll be busy until 1.”

“Well it takes about an hour to fill out all of the paperwork. Why don’t we start filling yours out now, to save you that time? Can I get your name?”

“Sure! Sarah Mohammed.”

Then, silence. The loud kind of silence. I started to wonder what was happening on the other side of the phone.

“Can you repeat that?” she asked, the pitch of her voice dropped to a low drone.

“Sarah Mohammed” I replied, wondering about the sudden shift in tone.

“And how is it spelled?”

“‘Sarah’ with an ‘h’ . . . M-O-H-A as in ‘apple’ . . . M-M-E-D”, I replied, assuming she was writing it down .

“Right . . . well . . . you said you could only work this weekend, right?”

“Yes, if that’s okay, and maybe a few others.”

“Yeah . . . well we’re actually looking for volunteers that can dedicate more of their time. Do you understand?” Her voice was slower now.

“Oh, well can the rest of my club come in? I’m sure someone else can dedicate more time.” If I’m honest, I was relieved. I love animals, but might be too squeamish to spend a whole day cleaning up after them.

“No, that’s alright. We don’t need them, do you understand?” Each word of the “do you understand” dripped out of her mouth, slow and saccharine like bitter molasses.

“Yes, alright. That’s fine, thank you,” I replied before she hung up. What an odd interaction, I thought. Why the sudden shift? I shrugged it off, left the car and carried on with my day.

About a week later, I learned that the member who had given me the phone number had already arranged a day to volunteer, coincidentally for the Saturday I was planning to go. After completing his volunteer work, he shared his experience with us at the following club meeting, recounting that the woman openly talked about other races derogatorily, even when unprovoked. For example, when asked what her favorite animal was, she stated that she would prefer to say “the Blacks,” but frequently uses the answer “dogs” instead. He said that she also made anti-Muslim comments, but after hearing her racist opinions, I was both too afraid and too disgusted to hear what she had to say about Muslims. I realized how much I didn’t understand in my conversation with the woman—it all clicked now. She was enthusiastic about us coming in until I told her my name; the phone hid my brownness behind my voice, but my last name was a tell. We immediately reported the experience to the Division of Student Affairs, who assured us the university would avoid working with this shelter in the future.

Indian/American

Dirty house

Our plane had just touched down in Kuwait as myself and my parents, with luggage and cat carrier in hand, approached a taxi waiting for us outside of the airport. The transition from the air-conditioned airport to the dessert heat was as striking as the sudden wave of warmth when you open an oven, but much more intense. I shoved my suitcase into the trunk of the taxi and slid into the back seat with my mother. My father sat in the front seat, perusing a binder that was given to him as a token of welcome from his employer. Interested, I peered over my father’s shoulder as the Bangladeshi taxi driver started the car. As my dad flipped through the pages, I saw emboldened words: “Maids are encouraged!” The page went on to explain that many Kuwaitis and foreign residents often hire maids and child care workers to live and work in the house, and the perpetuation of this industry was seen as mutually beneficial for the employers and employees.

Although we never considered having a personal maid, we did get the benefits of hotel cleaning staff, as we ended up living in a spacious hotel suite for the entirety of our stay in Kuwait. Therefore, the hotel’s housekeeping staff was required to clean our apartment.

Months later, my father answered the door to three uniformed women with a cart full of cleaning supplies.

“Clean today?” one woman asked, holding up a spray bottle and gesturing toward the inside of the apartment to better communicate.

My father cheerfully agreed and invited them in. My mother offered them drinks, which they politely refused as they continued into the bedrooms clearing the floors of refuse and wiping dust from the surfaces. Although they only spoke a few words of English, later conversations revealed that these three women were from India. Their dark complexions were mirrored in the taxi driver we encountered when we first arrived, or in the street cleaners collecting garbage in parking lots. They looked like the baggers inside the grocery store, but not the managers. They could be seen dressed in worn uniforms and sweating under the intense sun, or waiting tables at the high-end restaurants, but never as patrons. They looked like the kids at my British-run school, but only the ones that the teachers yelled at, not the ones who got away with leaving their shirts untucked. As a descendant of Indians who were similarly displaced to Trinidad, I saw that complexion in the mirror every day, but only now acquired these associations. Despite coming from America with a certain amount of class privilege, I grew increasingly anxious I would be subjected to the same treatment.

“Dad, I don’t want them coming in to clean today. They smell bad . . . like sweat and chemicals!” I told my father, eager to distance myself from the new meanings I saw linked with my race.

“That means they are working very hard, Sarah,” he replied—a necessary piece of wisdom for a ten-year-old girl.

For a while, his words were drowned out by messages from the social context outside the home (school, media, peers) that solidified and naturalized this hierarchy. I uncritically absorbed this inequality and fought to climb the ladder, accepting to play a game I could only lose.

Where are you from?

Since returning to the United States, I’ve encountered Americans who characterize Kuwait as a dramatic world of war-torn instability and Islamic fundamentalism. From their perspective, this is a world entirely different than the United States, but my experience challenges this view. While I can’t deny the palpable culture shock, I often found that living in Kuwait felt much like living in America. For example, the two countries share an affinity for fast food. I found myself in familiar surroundings at age 10 when my family and I went to eat at a Burger King. Like in America, this Burger King had a play area for children, complete with colorful climbing structures, a slide, and a ball pit. It reminded me of home, until I received a shocking reminder of where I was.

While my parents were finishing their burgers, I threw myself into the vibrant ball pit over and over again, trying each time to sink deeper into a sea of colors. I recognized this place; I knew the lightness of the plastic balls in my hand, I knew the smell of French fries in the air, and for the first time since coming to Kuwait, I recognized the comforts of home.

I was soon approached by a boy around my age. We were both waiting for our families, and we were the only two in the play area, so we decided to play in the ball pit together. After energetically throwing balls at each other for a while, I figured out that he spoke English and we started talking. I was in the middle of asking for his name when he abruptly interrupted me with the question:

“-wait, where are you from?”

His demeanor had changed from playful to quizzical suddenly, like my nationality didn’t occur to him until I began speaking with my very northeast American accent. I thought, “Well, I was born in New Mexico, which is not Mexico but a US state, later moved to New York, but not the city . . . no, something simpler. He’s wondering about my accent, so . . .”

“I came here from New York, where I grew up.” I said confidently, but he pressed further.

“Are you Indian?”

“Oh,” I thought, realizing the stakes in the situation. “He looks kind of wealthy, so he’s . . . probably not supposed to be hanging out with someone from India. Well, technically I’m only descended from India, so . . .”

“No, my parents are from the Caribbean. That’s why I look like this. They are from Trinidad and Tobago.” I responded, less confidently than before.

Incredulously, he raised an eyebrow, and began chuckling. “You’re lying. That’s not a real country. You’re one of the Indians and you’re just pretending.” Without another word between us, he spun around and left the playroom.

To my frustration, he abandoned our conversation, and to my anger, he denied that my parents’ country existed. He did so because he could not risk being seen around someone like me. Even at that age, he understood the social damage he takes when he associates with someone below his status.

He was cold and discriminatory, but I affirmed those discriminations—I never admitted to being Indian at all, and I still ask myself why. Maybe I wanted to keep playing, but maybe I was ashamed of my heritage—I don’t know. I do know, however, that my first answer wasn’t satisfactory because it wasn’t the answer he was looking for. He wanted to affirm certain ideas about me, but my mere existence challenged those ideas. I suppose he wasn’t up for a challenge.

Trinidadian/American

Imposter

While I lived with my parents, my home was distinctly Trinidadian. From the food my mother cooked, to the movies we watched, to the language we used, and the music we played, my domestic life was enveloped in Trini flavors. Yet, my experiences on the island itself were limited. I spent no more than 2 years there as a toddler, but after we moved away, we only returned occasionally. Every few years, a large family event such as a wedding or funeral brought us back to the island for a few weeks.

When I was 15 years old, my grandmother decided to hold a prayers for my grandfather, whose health was poor. A prayers is a formal event in which family, friends, and community members are invited to gather at a home to pray together. The prayers are oriented toward one person, to celebrate them, show appreciation for them, and bring well wishes for them. The festivities can also include food and dancing. It was important that we attended, and that we arrived well in advance to help my grandmother get everything set up.

From our first morning there, I was being driven around the island to visit different family members. For my parents, it was an opportunity to reconnect. For me, it was a chance to meet people I had only heard stories about. I heard what every teenager does during family reunions; “Look how fast she’s growing!” “Do you remember me?” “I hardly recognized her.” While we were visiting my mother’s side of the family, one phrase stuck out to me in particular. As they were discussing how different I looked, my older cousin touched my jaw gently and told my mother “Yeah, the last time she was here her face looked more . . . wrong.”

I thought, “Wrong? What does it mean to look wrong? Did she call me ugly?” I was insulted and embarrassed. I stewed in that distress for the next hour or so, although I said nothing. A few days later, I was eating breakfast with my mother, father, and uncle.

“Sarah, we are spending the night at the house in Charlieville, so make sure you pack an overnight bag,” my mother explained, indicating that we would be staying with her side of the family.

Without missing a beat, I refused. “I don’t want to spend any more time with them!”

“Why? I thought you liked them.” she prodded.

“You were there! Remember? When my cousin told me my face was wrong.”

My mother smiled and chuckled. “Sarah, you don’t know our accent. She said your face used to look more round.”

My father and uncle started to laugh with her. They thought it was hilarious. It occurred to me that since the last time I visited, I had lost a noticeable amount of weight. My cousin was commenting on the weight I lost in my face. They were right—it was really funny. I don’t blame them for laughing. Still, those words “you don’t know our accent” hit me like daggers. They shot an interrogative light on me, exposing my fraudulence. With those five words, my mother drew a line in front of me, with herself, my father, and my entire family on the other side. I was embarrassed and upset, but I tried to chuckle along as best I could.

Where are you from? (Reprise)

The 2016 election came as a shock to many, including myself. Every projection I followed said that “Hillary will win,” and “Trump’s hate-fueled campaign will be a blip in US history,” but they were wrong. As visible minorities in a mostly white and conservative city, my parents and I noticed people becoming more vocal in their support for Trump’s xenophobic promises following the election. Still, life goes on, and I tried to face school and work with a brave face.

A week after Trump’s inauguration, I was waitressing at a local restaurant on a busy, energetic Friday night during happy hour. Patrons flooded in as the drinks flowed and the music pounded. A group of about seven adults had just sat at a table in my section when a man who had been drinking at the bar joined them, beer mug in hand. After checking on another table, I walked over and welcomed them to the restaurant, introduced myself, informed them of the specials, and began taking orders. When I finally got around to the man from the bar, he ordered his food and made eye contact with the woman next to him.

“And uhh, I’ll be paying for her sandwich,” he said, pointing to the woman next to him and making sure she noticed his gesture.

The woman quickly asserted that she would prefer to pay for her own meal, and she meant it. He continued insisting, but she seriously and adamantly asked to pay for her own food. She did not want to owe him anything.

He turned to me, demanding “No no, put it on my tab! You’re going to put it on my tab, right?” I’m not sure how long he had been drinking, but he started raising his voice.

“It’s not up to me, it’s up to you two to figure out,” I replied, trying to unpeel myself from the situation with a lighthearted chuckle, but he suddenly leaned into my face close enough that I could feel the heat of his breath and smell the ale.

“No it’s not. Trump is the president now; what the man says goes!”

The restaurant seemed to disappear behind me. The man’s black goatee and glaring eyes burned into my head, and his face felt like all I could see. I stared at him in disbelief, processing how to respond. In a single moment, I tried to evaluate my best course of action. He humiliated me in my place of work, and as an employee on the tipped wage, I felt helpless. My thoughts were racing. Do I argue with him? No, he and his friends might walk out and I would lose a large amount of my tips for that shift. I think table 50 needs their check. If I said something, he would call my manager—would my manager defend me, or would I get punished? Does table 53 need a drink? If I stay quiet, I’m letting this behavior continue without consequence. Is his tip worth more than my dignity?

Before I had a chance to say anything, he leaned back with a smug smile. “You didn’t like hearing that, did you?”

That’s it. I made my choice, tip be damned. “Look at me,” I said, referring to the skin color on my arm, “what do you think?” I snapped back.

He just laughed, and the woman next to him apologized for his behavior.

I put the order in and continued serving my other tables. When I saw his table had all started eating, I came over to check on them. He put his burger down to talk to me.

“Hey, listen. The food is excellent, thank you so much. I wanted to apologize for before.” He said in a much calmer tone.

“I’m glad you like your meal! And it’s no problem, I forgot about it already.” I hadn’t forgotten.

“Where are you from?” He dropped the question as he picked up his burger.

Here we go again, I thought.

“My parents are from Trinidad, but I grew up in New York.” I responded.

“So you’re from Trinidad? Where is that?” he asked through mouthfuls of burger.

“No, I grew up in New York, and was born in New Mexico. But yeah, Trinidad is in the Caribbean, south of Jamaica.” I explained.

“Oh, okay. So you grew up in New York, but you’re really from Trinidad.” he replied with confidence.

I sighed. Why all this interest in where I’m “really” from? When I tell him my story, why does he insist on rewriting it to fit his definition? At that moment, I replied that another one of my tables was calling me over (very conveniently and very subtly—almost imperceptibly, even!). The only time I came back to that man was with the check and a smile goodbye.

Winter butterflies

There is no instruction manual for navigating multiple cultures, but if there were, I’d like to think one of the first chapters would be titled “Modulation: The Ethnic Hierarchy and You.” Through experience, I learned how to modulate between cultural identities, meaning I would bring forth or hide particular cultural signifiers in my interactions. Part of learning how to appropriately navigate these identities in a way that best served me was absorbing information about the hierarchical arrangement of cultural signifiers in different contexts (i.e., knowing when it is better for one to present as more or less “brown”). For example, in a professional setting, I considered myself best served to diminish any signifiers of myself as brown. There is no class to learn this. These modulations are automatic, like a survival instinct, not intentional—except once.

During my time as a campus writing tutor, I had the opportunity to work with students from many different backgrounds. On an early November afternoon, one student came in to work on her paper. As she entered the writing lab, I greeted her with a smile, and gestured her over to the table adjacent to a large window as she pulled out her laptop. She quietly explained that she needed help with citations. As we began looking over the references page on her laptop, I noticed that this session involved much less communication than my usual sessions. The student was very quiet, but I figured it was because we were going over citations. How talkative can I expect someone to be about references? I thought.

About halfway through the session, I looked up toward the bare birch tree outside the window, and noticed a few fluffy snowflakes falling. Without thinking, I commented aloud,

“Oh! It’s the first snow. A little bit early this year, isn’t it?”

The student looked up from her laptop, and timidly asked,

“That’s snow?”

I was confused by her response at first. What else could that be? Maybe she’s seeing something entirely different? I seriously considered that she and I were occupying two entirely separate realities in that writing lab.

“I think so?” I replied, suddenly doubting everything.

“I’ve never seen snow before,” she said, still gazing out of the window.

“Wait—where are you from?” I asked, finally putting the pieces together.

“Jamaica.” She replied, sheepishly. “I’ve only been here for two weeks.” This entire time it had not occurred to me that she was an international student.

Explaining my connection to the Caribbean, I immediately dropped into my Trinidadian accent to speak with her. Everything I said to her from there on out was in my Caribbean dialect in an attempt to make her comfortable enough to communicate the issues with her paper. My mouth rebelled against me. It strained to make the right sounds, fighting hard to hit the American “R”s and use the Queen’s standard syntax, knowing that I’m in a professional role. Somewhere in my mind, a red flag was raised as I felt a sense of dread and danger from exposing my brownness at work. Yet, the lilting melody of the Trini accent eventually pushed itself through.

The student started smiling during our session and speaking with more volume. She explained that when she first arrived at the university, people couldn’t understand her accent, so she stopped talking. Going to this college was her first experience outside of Jamaica, and she was afraid her accent would further isolate her. I was glad to offer some sense that she wasn’t alone. By the springtime, I saw her again, this time laughing loudly with a group of friends alongside the campus pond.

Call to Action: Avoiding Cultural Reductionism Through Fluid Positionality

Through exploring my journey navigating cultural identities, my stories call attention to the meanings surrounding those subjectivities fluctuating across time and space. Although I have focused on cultural identity as it is constructed by race, religion, and nationality, the interactions I have detailed are each additionally shaped by my gender, my age, my able body, and my class. My positionality is made up of these categories and the intersections between them. Indeed, our “social positions influence how we approach, investigate, and analyze data; it determines the lens through which we see the world” (Jacobson & Mustafa, 2019, p. 8), so it is necessary for qualitative researchers to reflexively engage with these positions and declare how they interact with the research. However, tidy categories (such as “female,” “white,” “middle-class,” “able-bodied,” and “American”) lack the robustness to capture how dynamic these subjectivities are and all the different meanings they can carry across different contexts. In many positionality sections, “the researcher is presented as atopic, atemporal and disembodied, with our identities presented as impervious to change,” (Torres-Olave & Lee, 2020, p. 137). My own narratives show examples of subjectivities shifting in meaning across my developmental stages, across borders, and across political atmospheres. While I acknowledge the importance of recognizing researchers as “situated speakers” (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005), there remains a question surrounding on what we are situated. Are we each standing on mountains, sturdy and unmoving? In my own experience, I am situated in ocean waves, gaining new perspectives as I am pulled by water and wind to new locations. In this sense, my positionality is more “fluid” than solid, and I’m not the only autoethnographer to reveal this fluidity through writing.

Autoethnography has proved a useful tool for social scientists to explore issues of positionality in research and cultural identity in academia. However, researchers have yet to connect reflexive practice in research with the nuances of cultural identity. Some scholars have used autoethnography to highlight how positionality enriches—rather than limits—research by informing the entire paradigm (Secules et al., 2021) and to narratively explore best practices with culturally diverse participants through lived experience (Kelley, 2021; Pitard, 2016). Although they make a strong argument for reflexivity in research, these discussions of positionality pivot around an unchanging, archetypal self. In contrast, autoethnographers from diasporic and intersectional communities (like myself) describe their process of growth and developing a sense of belonging in multiple cultural communities. They recount their experiences navigating multiple marginalized identities such as Queer and Indigenous (Henningham, 2021), negotiating modes of language in different contexts (Thomas, 2018), learning the changing meaning of identities after migration (Bawany, 2021; Eguchi, 2014), and figuring out how to embody a minority identity in academia (Batac, 2022; Sykes, 2014; Tsalach, 2013). Autoethnography provides these authors with a voice to deconstruct otherness and disrupt mainstream understandings of identity. However, these lessons from diasporic and intersectional academics have yet to be adopted by nonmarginalized academic researchers. Such lessons can inform more nuanced handlings of positionality, thus empowering researchers to find new ways to connect with participants who hold diverse social positions. Along that path, I hope my own autoethnographic work can lend insights.

I have expressed the tension, discomfort, frustration, learning, maturity, and courage punctuated throughout each experience, and have invited you to feel these along with me. Now, I invite readers who are researchers to extend these thoughts on fluid positionalities to your own work. Specifically, I call for qualitative researchers to reconceptualize positionality as describing not just your demographic characteristics, but the way those characteristics meaningfully manifest in our everchanging contexts across the lifespan. Because meanings are always in flux, researchers must consistently practice reflexivity to re-evaluate and re-negotiate our meaningful identities. In my own conversations, people sometimes preface a description of their privilege with “As a white person . . .” and while I appreciate the acknowledgment of our different viewpoints, such statements prescriptively assume that whiteness negates any experience of marginalization, representing only privilege (and, since I am the audience, can also reduce my experience to one of only marginalization). By reframing positionalities as fluid, and continuously developing contextually bound reflexivity skills, researchers can blur these binary distinctions between abject “privilege” and “marginalization” to find moments of unity, enabling us to support one another through empathy rather than sympathy. This is easier said than done; it requires a sense of vulnerability not typically taught in academia (Ellis, 2004, p. 138). Yet, this vulnerability fosters a deep understanding of your own relationship to your research topic, and therefore to your participant’s experiences (Ellis, 2004, p. 138). Through our reflexive development as researchers, we can acknowledge and respect our personal growth while finding ways to connect with participants through solidarity.