You and All Your Pieces: Poetry for the Mixed Kids in American Higher Education

Abstract

In this poem, I transcribe my experiences as a mixed-race student into simple language. Given race’s construction as something quantifiable and categorizable in the foundation and organizational processes of the United States, being part of more than one racial category has historically been too intangible for systems and individuals to conceptualize. The result is too often reducing a multiracial person to a category without any explicit distinction. Frequently, after hearing of my African, American, Mexican, Apache and White mixedness, my friends, teachers, and others conclude: oh, so you’re everything. There is no room for nuance in this perception; I’ve struggled to minimize my experiences for others, even when it’s easier for them to reduce the facets of my identity down to nothing. “You and All Your Pieces” is my response to these experiences and the preface to a longer research project that seeks to (1) investigate how American higher education landscapes fail to meaningfully support multiracial people on campus and (2) propose a policy solution informed by the experiences of mixed-race students at Stanford University. My work suggests that diverse spaces advance monoracial understandings and displays of multiracial communities on campus, thereby increasing the struggles mixed race students experiencing in navigating categorical spaces that ask them to render one part of their racialized background more salient than others. This poem offers one interpretation of resisting the monoracial demands of higher education by exploring lived experience through imagery and centering a self as the foundation for knowledge.