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Mica Pollock is a faculty member in the Human Development and Psychology area at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Miranda Christou of the Office of International Education conducted this interview, a version of which was originally published in the Spring 2002 edition of the International Education newsletter.
Q: In your work, you describe "the bending of racial categories" that youth engage in. How has that kind of research affected your understanding of culture from the way you understood it before you went into anthropology? A: As an undergraduate, I was very interested in the historical creation of racial categories. I realized that there had been a moment in time in the U.S. before racial categories existed, and I got interested in watching how, historically, they were created by legislators and people involved in slavery. In graduate school, I decided that I wanted to study race being made in the contemporary world—by listening to and watching young people and adults struggle with race categories. I saw young people in particular living out a very paradoxical treatment of race—this idea that race groups are not actually real but that people have made them real over time, so we have to deal with them. In my book on race talk, I boil this paradox down to the statement "we don't belong to simple race groups, and yet we do." Race groups are both not real and real simultaneously, and racialization is about walking that line. Q: How did the students in the high school where you taught in California "bend" the racial categories? A: Young people in the school where I taught and where I did my dissertation research were constantly challenging the very idea of race categories. Theirs was a student body that considered itself highly "mixed"—a word they used to describe themselves. They also had six simple labels that they called racial: Black, White, Latino, Chinese, Samoan and Filipino. Even though a number of these labels are often called ethnic or national in social science, the kids called them racial, so that's what I came to call them. They were using these terms to negotiate in a system of power relations, a system of inequality, and I think that's why they called them racial—not because they thought they were biological. What interested me was how young people were simultaneously throwing up for grabs the very idea that race existed and holding this idea of being "mixed," and reinforcing the idea that people could be classified into single lump-sum racial groups. Somebody would be a little bit Chinese, a little bit Samoan, a little bit white, a little bit Native American and then at another moment he would just be "Samoan." So bending meant simultaneously challenging these race categories and employing them. The students were playing with them, questioning them, but not breaking them apart and throwing them away. The categories existed before these kids showed up and so they were not able to fully break them. A lot of living in a culture means negotiating with these pre-existing categories. People don't make the world just as they please, but they do have agency in trying to change the world and change existing structures. I'm interested in how people learn and wrestle with these categories of gender, race, or disability. In anthropology, a lot of the work is about people sort of fighting with these categories while also employing them, celebrating them, enjoying them. I'm interested in those kinds of negotiations. Q: How do you think about the fact that these are not mere categories but each has certain power differentials? A: One of the ways I ended up thinking about questions of power in my study of race talk was noticing that, when it came to questions of equality, race categories got especially simple. That was when people stopped saying they were members of six or seven categories. In the hybridity of young lives today, a young person who calls himself Nicaraguan, who sometimes says he's from Los Angeles, who often calls himself Latino, is the same one who grabs a simple race category to use it in an equality argument. Categories of difference are incredibly simple in legal thinking about inequality for a reason, because resources do get distributed along very simple lines. I'm interested in when, in our discourse about people, we simplify ways of describing others or ourselves, and when we complicate them. I'm much more at the point now of thinking strategically about when to use race categories to deal with inequalities, and when to contest them in dealing with inequalities. Q: Where is your future research taking you? A: I have two other projects that I'm involved in. One is to think through what I learned about civil rights working in the Office of Civil Rights, to think through what I learned about how lawyers measure what inequality is and how people in schools measure what inequality is and what discrimination is. I like seeing how different players have to negotiate these definitions. Another project involves thinking about global links in inequality structures—how the shirt you are wearing has inequality packed into it, and what are you going to do about it? After September 11th, I met some youth organizers and started to learn more about this global youth organizing movement of people who think very globally about what is unfair. In this global youth project, which I want to call 'global youth, global justice,' I would like to look at these young political organizers both locally and internationally. There are youth organizations based all over the world, many of them organized via the Internet, even holding conferences. How do they cope with having different inequalities to work with, different inequality systems, local inequality problems alongside global inequality problems? They're confronting a problem of scale to create a global justice movement. I am interested in looking at how young people have a local and global analysis of inequality operating simultaneously, and how they actually work together. For More Information
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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