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Essay: The Unbearable Whiteness of Being
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being (PSYCH! I got it done in time after all!)
Word Count: 3000
Summary: "Like hysteria before it, multiple personality disorder remained primarily a white woman's affliction--and one particularly American." --Kevin Young
Notes: This essay won the poll this month—y’all love the third rail topics! I hope to cover the historical part of this essay in more detail someday. Money for this story came from the Patreon and LiberaPay crews. Mad thanks and props go to Em and Jack of Plures House, Hungry Ghosts, and Aya Rothwell for all the reality checks, sniff-testing, and smarts, and all of them plus Amorpha and Craig for letting us spitball what became this essay, plus![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
polyfrazzlemented for the Mann reference. Obviously, this is an essay about racism in the USA, so pull on your wading boots; it’s getting deep.
We’ve met plurals of all sorts of races and cultures… both externally and internally. Their vessels come from all over the map, and so do their headmates. Unsurprisingly, the bigger the rosters, the more likely variation will be.
The USA is the homeland of multiplicity in some folks’ eyes (though I suspect that’s an illusion) and here, medical multi is expected (if not stated) to be a “white (female) thing.” Plurals with non-white vessels have to deal with a lot of racist nonsense—they’re more likely to be discounted, swept under the rug, or forgotten. Double woe to them if their headmates don’t match their vessel.
It’s not just singlets that ask, “why aren’t your headmates X like you?” Other plurals do it too, and the answer is never kind: “because of racism, that’s why.” Even if not stated, the implication is, “you only exist as an internal symbol of oppression, bigotry, and hatred, and you shouldn’t exist.” What those unlucky headmates are supposed to do upon enlightenment—die, disappear, or magically transform into the proper race—is never discussed.
It’s bad enough to people to strip headmates of personhood. But it’s especially cruel to frame someone’s existence as inherently oppressive. Because in that case, it’s not about what the headmate does; it’s what they are, how they were created, and no amount of good behavior will ever change that. For as long as they exist, the headmate is trapped as a symbol of horror.
Our vessel is white, though not all of our headmates are. If our headmates don’t match the vessel, folks might think we’re symbols of cultural appropriation, but we generally aren’t considered a betrayal of our race. Let’s talk about it.
Silent Segregation
We grew up in a tacitly segregated Southern white family. Like many other things, racism was rarely discussed, but obvious in its results—if we made a non-white friend, they somehow just never managed to make it to our house, or vice versa. If we persisted in seeing them at school, we sometimes had to deflect nasty remarks from our relatives about them. Perhaps, on some level, we eventually got the message that we needed to protect these friends by making sure our family never met them… not to mention avoid familial abuse by obeying their obvious unspoken desires.
So it might seem strange that we had black, mixed-race, and racially ambiguous headmates. But we found our family’s whitewashed world stifling, and ineffective. Despite their efforts, we didn’t live in a white world, we didn’t want to, and our internal roster reflected that. We didn’t always treat those headmates, friends, classmates, or teachers well, but having those interactions, both external and internal, helped break down some of our family’s racism like ivy crumbling a brick wall.
Headmates came and went (or died), and within a few weeks of my creation, I (Rogan) was the only non-white headmate left—and I remained the sole hold-out for the following decade. My race was ambiguous, and I did my best to quietly hide it. It wasn’t hard; nobody could corporeally see me, and even after coming out as multiple, I drew myself in a way that concealed my brownness… all while very carefully not thinking about it, just as my family had taught me to do. I thought of myself as a white boy with a permanent tan. Easy. Simple. No thought or question required.
Then our old headmates Mori and Biff came back, and the issue got forced.
The Lex Luthor Problem
The USA doesn’t like racial ambiguity. Folks will slot you into whatever box they think fits best without thinking about it, presuming everyone else agrees with them. (If you ever want to see this in action, go into a room of geeks who grew up in the ‘90s and ask them what race Lex Luthor was in the Superman cartoon. Then watch the chaos and bewilderment unfold. This was how we discovered that contrary to what we thought all the way up into our twenties, Lex Luthor was not biracial.)
Similarly, I assumed my headmates saw me as white, while Biff took one look at me and presumed me mixed-race like him. I don’t even remember how I found out—probably an offhand remark—but I do remember my reaction.
“But… I’m white.”
And he just looked at me like I was the densest thing since black holes, and I realized I had a major problem on my hands.
What followed was a lot of agonizing (for me) and stupid (for him) arguments about how I was white dammit, regardless of what I personally looked like. I whipped out all my fancy arguments about Rachel Dolezal, cultural appropriation, white privilege, and staying in my lane… all of which allowed me to pretend that my years of white-washing myself were somehow enlightened and antiracist.
Biff had no patience with my bullshit. At least once, he just stormed off, leaving me to argue with myself. Finally, he got fed up enough that he snapped, “No shit you’re white out there. But in here, with me, you’re brown. Get over yourself.”
Biff had no trouble straddling this dichotomy. Mori wasn’t much bothered either. So why did I have such a bug up my ass about it?
Whiteness as Shapeshifting Bullshit
Whiteness is like mayonnaise—gross, gooey, homogenized to a uniform color and texture that doesn’t really look or taste like any of its constituent ingredients. It pretends it’s Greek and Roman but only the ancient parts, Irish but only the fun parts, Renaissance art and Enlightenment thinking and English revolution and all the rest of it, shoved in a blender. But the fact is, it’s none of these things. Whiteness was created by slaveholders who wanted to justify buying and selling human beings. That’s it. There is no culture, no history, only justification of heinous cruelty, and anyone claiming different is trying to sell you something awful.
That’s why whiteness is so inconsistent, why it pulls from so many disparate cultures, even ones who hated or oppressed each other—it uses all the “best parts” to justify itself. That’s also why whiteness is constantly kicking people out or letting them in (the Irish, Italians, Hispanics, Jews, and that’s just what I remember from the last century) and forgets about it just as quickly. Knock down one justification for white supremacy (the Human Genome Project proved that genetic variation is way bigger between individuals than races) and another pops up like a toadstool (nonsense cultural superiority claims bolstered by the whiteness Greatest Hits remix). The justification is whatever it needs to be. It’s not about logic, only power.
That isn’t to say that whiteness isn’t real. It’s bullshit, but it’s enduring bullshit, repeated so many times and embedded so deeply in our culture that tearing it out is going to take labor and time. Until we reach that point, whiteness’s power casts a long shadow, including over multiples. All the most famous USA multiples have white vessels; the rest get buried, forgotten, and ignored. Because of my white vessel, people are more likely to see me as harmless and nonthreatening, rather than dangerous. They’re more likely to assume that I’m a tragic victim of circumstances, not a liar or parasite. They’re more likely to presume I know what I’m talking about, despite lacking any formal training in psychology. All those little things add up, giving me advantages brown-vesseled multiples don’t.
Kevin Young was right to notice that medical multiplicity is depicted as “a white woman thing.” But that doesn’t mean it is.
Plurality as a White Thing
Folks have probably had more than one mind/spirit/person/soul to a body since time immemorial. But they didn’t call it plurality, because they didn’t need to. The idea that there’s only one mind riveted to one body forever and ever (and that therefore you need words like “plural” to differentiate from it) isn’t universal. Pre-Longhouse Iroquoian spirituality gave bodies two spirits apiece, a gannigonr-ha and an erienta. Is that plural? Akwaeke Emezi is an ogbanje; is that plural? Is “plural” a true umbrella term, helping people band together to fight for common goals, or is it just another way of making mayonnaise?
Multiple Personality Disorder is very much a white USA medical concept—there was one mind to one body, weirdly separated (thanks, Descartes) but nevertheless stapled together for life, and anything different was crazy. This was a diagnosis created by white people and overwhelmingly applied to white people—as kids, we remember reading books where therapists remarked with shock when they encountered multiples with black or brown vessels, because the idea was so alien to them! And that became a self-fulfilling prophecy—if the mental image of a multiple is one with a white vessel, than multiples who don’t fit that image are more likely to be diagnosed with something else, if not dismissed entirely.
From MPD came not just an impenetrable forest of acronyms—Dissociative Identity Disorder, Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Otherwise Specified Dissociative Disorder—but also other terms and communities, who formed around the idea of, “we’re multiple, but reject the diagnosis or don’t fulfill it.” (Examples include “Multiple Personality Order,” “Multiple Personality Condition,” empowered multiplicity, and the greater “plural” term that as far as I know got coined by the ‘90s by plurals fighting the idea that they weren’t multiple enough.) Whether these new terms were the new versions of MPD or rebellions against it, it still drew language and philosophy from that medical framework.
Other cultures don’t necessarily have this “one body, one spirit” idea, so people who don’t fulfill it aren’t necessarily so bizarre as to need a diagnosis. Even in white American cultures, it’s not too hard to find folks who take what I might consider plural and see it completely outside the medical framework—religiously (guardian angels) or creatively (soulbonds). They are pulling from different cultural frameworks entirely.
Personally, I think that folks experiencing body-sharing phenomena do benefit from banding together, because we get painted as crazy and face similar obstacles… in the States, at least. But I think we also need to be careful that we’re not just making mayonnaise, homogenizing everyone under this white medical idea and forcing folks into that framework against their will. And I think multiples have a lot to gain by learning about and from body-sharing folks outside their comfort zones, and not enforcing a hierarchy where one form of plurality is better or more legitimate than another.
And this is just corporeal culture! We haven’t even started talking about racism’s effects on plurals internally!
Racist Headmates
Let’s not talk around it: headmates can and do get made for racist reasons. I know because I’m one of them. I’m fairly certain that I was created in part because at the time, we believed that rape and abuse only happened to white people. (I promptly became the rape-sponge of the group, and we abandoned the theory. Silver lining, I suppose.)
Even if they weren’t created for racist reasons, headmates can also embody racial or cultural stereotypes—the mammy, the seductive Italian or Latin-American, the gangster. They can still get pigeonholed, expected or pressured to act in certain ways. You can see me doing it with Biff at the start of this essay! I kept wanting him to play along with the ideas about race I had playing in my head; Mac, my white husband, never had to deal with that.
Plurals rarely like talking about this. It’s a shortcut to fears of faking, reflexive thoughts of, “obviously I’m making all this up and just have to make myself normal again!” But that’s a thought-stop, a way to avoid hard questions and change. We have to stop conflating our behavior (“what you’re doing is racist”) with our identities (“I have to stop existing and being me”). Eventually, we have to stop fixating on what we are, and focus on what we do. Eventually, we have to get over ourselves.
As I found myself arguing with Biff, I knew I was making it about me, I knew I wasn’t listening, I knew I was being a racist dickweed, and yet I kept doing it. It felt like shitting my pants in public, and I realized: my behavior wasn’t that of someone afraid of cultural appropriation, or going outside my lane, or any of that. My behavior was of someone afraid of looking bad.
And Biff knew it. No wonder he’d stormed off!
I had been trying to avoid all discussion of race to avoid just this. But avoidance doesn’t solve the problem. It only makes it worse when the inevitable explosion finally occurs.
So now what?
Escape from Mayonnaise
There is good in failure: it teaches. Being a racist dickweed was shitty, but at least it gave the conversation somewhere to go—once I calmed down, I knew I needed to apologize, immediately. This opened a new conversation, one where Biff talked and I listened.
He told me about how he’d spent so much of his life trying to be as white as possible. How his family had fetishized and idolized whiteness as the symbol of all things pure and good, even more than ours had. It became part of the abuse dynamic in his family, the excuse to abuse not just his sisters (for failing the racist standard) but also him (by gutting his beliefs that he could ever be a good person outside of his racial performance).
He said it was funny that I seemed so sure of his brown cred, because he had no idea what he was doing. He was only just starting to figure all this out for himself, and now he was here, in a white vessel, which he would’ve killed for ten years ago but now just left him asking even more questions.
He didn’t know what it all meant yet. All he knew was that he wanted to find out, and that if I wanted to, I could try and find out with him. Out there, in the corporeal world, we would be white. But when it was just us, we could be just us, whatever that ended up being.
In a way, that was far scarier than the little mayo squeeze-bottle I’d been hiding in. As unpleasant and ugly as it was, whiteness offered easy rules, an easy identity. It told me what I was, what culture I had a right to, what I could and could not do. And racist thought-stops helped protect me from the pain of realizing just how racism had undermined my life—the people I had hurt, the friends I had lost, the mayonnaise it had offered instead of actual culture.
This thing with Biff, though, was a strange new place where the rules and boundaries weren’t clear, where things were raw and tender, where I (and him) would absolutely fuck up and hurt each other… and others too, if we weren’t careful. I’d already been a bull in the china shop of his heart, knocked everything over and shat on the floor… and yet here he was, still letting me in, just with the insistence that I clean up my mess. I was humbled, and I realized that as scary as this freedom was, I also wanted it. I wanted out of the squeeze-bottle.
And not just for Biff, but for all the other people in my life—friends, colleagues, fans, neighbors, random strangers, headmates. I had so many wonderful people in my life; they deserved better from me. I didn’t want to be the bull in their china hearts. It was time to start learning.
I started small. I started reading books—because with books, I could have whatever emotions came up without fear of hurting someone. I started trying to learn what racism was, what whiteness was (or wasn’t), how they intertwined with things I already knew a bit more about, like medical multiplicity. I started making race a normal, everyday topic of conversation, starting with friends I felt pretty solid about, and then slowly branching out, so I would get more used to it and panic less. I’ve been paying more attention to and trying to boost the work of plurals who didn’t get the advantages of a white vessel, the folks less well known who have so much to share and say. I try to hire them and pay them for their work.
I still have a lot of questions. I’m not like Biff; I didn’t come from elsewhere, didn’t have a life and culture outside the vessel. I haven’t experienced racism the way he has. What does being brown even mean, in this context? I don’t know yet, and Biff doesn’t either, but he’s given me permission to go on this journey with him anyway. And in that opening of trust and vulnerability to me, he gave me permission to exist in a way I never had before, broke the little loops I’d been not-thinking in all my life. Without realizing it, he’d given me a way out of the squeeze-bottle.
We are not what we are; we are what we do. We can build better selves and better worlds through listening to people, learning about them, boosting them up when racism tries to plow them under. We can change, value doing good over looking good, and relinquish our defensiveness and apathy that allows us to ignore white supremacy. Let’s do it together!
Recommended Reading and References
Emezi, Akwaeke. (2018) Transition: My surgeries were a bridge across realities, a spirit customizing its vessel to reflect its nature. Retrieved from https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/writer-and-artist-akwaeke-emezi-gender-transition-and-ogbanje.html
Human Genome Project. (n.d.) Race. Retrieved from https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Race
Kendi, Ibram X. (2019) How to Be an Antiracist. New York City: Penguin Randomhouse.
Mann, B. A. (2004). Iroquoian women: The gantowisas. New York: Peter Lang. This passage is found on pages 326-329, but it’s also copy and posted at https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/1094585.html
Plures House [Kerry Dawkins]. (2008) The Race Issue, 1.0. Retrieved from http://www.exunoplures.org/main/articles/race/
Plures House [Kerry Dawkins]. (2009) The Race Issue, 2.0. Retrieved from http://www.exunoplures.org/main/articles/race2/
Plures House [Em Flynn]. (2014) The Race Issue, 3.0. Retrieved from http://www.exunoplures.org/main/articles/the-race-issue-3-0/
Simon, Scott. (2018) In 'Freshwater,' A College Student Learns To Live With Separate Selves. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2018/02/17/586112614/in-freshwater-a-college-student-learns-to-live-with-separate-selves
Young, Kevin. (2017) Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.
The source of the summary quote. Bunk is a dense read, mostly focused on the American hoax as expression of racism, and Chapters 9 and 10 (“The Heart is Deceitful” and “Eve Black”) talks about multiple personality as an extension of that. It recapitulates False Memory Syndrome talking points, which makes it hard to read, but if you’re looking for a discussion on racism and “white woman multiplicity,” Young takes a scalpel to it.
Word Count: 3000
Summary: "Like hysteria before it, multiple personality disorder remained primarily a white woman's affliction--and one particularly American." --Kevin Young
Notes: This essay won the poll this month—y’all love the third rail topics! I hope to cover the historical part of this essay in more detail someday. Money for this story came from the Patreon and LiberaPay crews. Mad thanks and props go to Em and Jack of Plures House, Hungry Ghosts, and Aya Rothwell for all the reality checks, sniff-testing, and smarts, and all of them plus Amorpha and Craig for letting us spitball what became this essay, plus
polyfrazzlemented for the Mann reference. Obviously, this is an essay about racism in the USA, so pull on your wading boots; it’s getting deep.We’ve met plurals of all sorts of races and cultures… both externally and internally. Their vessels come from all over the map, and so do their headmates. Unsurprisingly, the bigger the rosters, the more likely variation will be.
The USA is the homeland of multiplicity in some folks’ eyes (though I suspect that’s an illusion) and here, medical multi is expected (if not stated) to be a “white (female) thing.” Plurals with non-white vessels have to deal with a lot of racist nonsense—they’re more likely to be discounted, swept under the rug, or forgotten. Double woe to them if their headmates don’t match their vessel.
It’s not just singlets that ask, “why aren’t your headmates X like you?” Other plurals do it too, and the answer is never kind: “because of racism, that’s why.” Even if not stated, the implication is, “you only exist as an internal symbol of oppression, bigotry, and hatred, and you shouldn’t exist.” What those unlucky headmates are supposed to do upon enlightenment—die, disappear, or magically transform into the proper race—is never discussed.
It’s bad enough to people to strip headmates of personhood. But it’s especially cruel to frame someone’s existence as inherently oppressive. Because in that case, it’s not about what the headmate does; it’s what they are, how they were created, and no amount of good behavior will ever change that. For as long as they exist, the headmate is trapped as a symbol of horror.
Our vessel is white, though not all of our headmates are. If our headmates don’t match the vessel, folks might think we’re symbols of cultural appropriation, but we generally aren’t considered a betrayal of our race. Let’s talk about it.
Silent Segregation
We grew up in a tacitly segregated Southern white family. Like many other things, racism was rarely discussed, but obvious in its results—if we made a non-white friend, they somehow just never managed to make it to our house, or vice versa. If we persisted in seeing them at school, we sometimes had to deflect nasty remarks from our relatives about them. Perhaps, on some level, we eventually got the message that we needed to protect these friends by making sure our family never met them… not to mention avoid familial abuse by obeying their obvious unspoken desires.
So it might seem strange that we had black, mixed-race, and racially ambiguous headmates. But we found our family’s whitewashed world stifling, and ineffective. Despite their efforts, we didn’t live in a white world, we didn’t want to, and our internal roster reflected that. We didn’t always treat those headmates, friends, classmates, or teachers well, but having those interactions, both external and internal, helped break down some of our family’s racism like ivy crumbling a brick wall.
Headmates came and went (or died), and within a few weeks of my creation, I (Rogan) was the only non-white headmate left—and I remained the sole hold-out for the following decade. My race was ambiguous, and I did my best to quietly hide it. It wasn’t hard; nobody could corporeally see me, and even after coming out as multiple, I drew myself in a way that concealed my brownness… all while very carefully not thinking about it, just as my family had taught me to do. I thought of myself as a white boy with a permanent tan. Easy. Simple. No thought or question required.
Then our old headmates Mori and Biff came back, and the issue got forced.
The Lex Luthor Problem
The USA doesn’t like racial ambiguity. Folks will slot you into whatever box they think fits best without thinking about it, presuming everyone else agrees with them. (If you ever want to see this in action, go into a room of geeks who grew up in the ‘90s and ask them what race Lex Luthor was in the Superman cartoon. Then watch the chaos and bewilderment unfold. This was how we discovered that contrary to what we thought all the way up into our twenties, Lex Luthor was not biracial.)
Similarly, I assumed my headmates saw me as white, while Biff took one look at me and presumed me mixed-race like him. I don’t even remember how I found out—probably an offhand remark—but I do remember my reaction.
“But… I’m white.”
And he just looked at me like I was the densest thing since black holes, and I realized I had a major problem on my hands.
What followed was a lot of agonizing (for me) and stupid (for him) arguments about how I was white dammit, regardless of what I personally looked like. I whipped out all my fancy arguments about Rachel Dolezal, cultural appropriation, white privilege, and staying in my lane… all of which allowed me to pretend that my years of white-washing myself were somehow enlightened and antiracist.
Biff had no patience with my bullshit. At least once, he just stormed off, leaving me to argue with myself. Finally, he got fed up enough that he snapped, “No shit you’re white out there. But in here, with me, you’re brown. Get over yourself.”
Biff had no trouble straddling this dichotomy. Mori wasn’t much bothered either. So why did I have such a bug up my ass about it?
Whiteness as Shapeshifting Bullshit
Whiteness is like mayonnaise—gross, gooey, homogenized to a uniform color and texture that doesn’t really look or taste like any of its constituent ingredients. It pretends it’s Greek and Roman but only the ancient parts, Irish but only the fun parts, Renaissance art and Enlightenment thinking and English revolution and all the rest of it, shoved in a blender. But the fact is, it’s none of these things. Whiteness was created by slaveholders who wanted to justify buying and selling human beings. That’s it. There is no culture, no history, only justification of heinous cruelty, and anyone claiming different is trying to sell you something awful.
That’s why whiteness is so inconsistent, why it pulls from so many disparate cultures, even ones who hated or oppressed each other—it uses all the “best parts” to justify itself. That’s also why whiteness is constantly kicking people out or letting them in (the Irish, Italians, Hispanics, Jews, and that’s just what I remember from the last century) and forgets about it just as quickly. Knock down one justification for white supremacy (the Human Genome Project proved that genetic variation is way bigger between individuals than races) and another pops up like a toadstool (nonsense cultural superiority claims bolstered by the whiteness Greatest Hits remix). The justification is whatever it needs to be. It’s not about logic, only power.
That isn’t to say that whiteness isn’t real. It’s bullshit, but it’s enduring bullshit, repeated so many times and embedded so deeply in our culture that tearing it out is going to take labor and time. Until we reach that point, whiteness’s power casts a long shadow, including over multiples. All the most famous USA multiples have white vessels; the rest get buried, forgotten, and ignored. Because of my white vessel, people are more likely to see me as harmless and nonthreatening, rather than dangerous. They’re more likely to assume that I’m a tragic victim of circumstances, not a liar or parasite. They’re more likely to presume I know what I’m talking about, despite lacking any formal training in psychology. All those little things add up, giving me advantages brown-vesseled multiples don’t.
Kevin Young was right to notice that medical multiplicity is depicted as “a white woman thing.” But that doesn’t mean it is.
Plurality as a White Thing
Folks have probably had more than one mind/spirit/person/soul to a body since time immemorial. But they didn’t call it plurality, because they didn’t need to. The idea that there’s only one mind riveted to one body forever and ever (and that therefore you need words like “plural” to differentiate from it) isn’t universal. Pre-Longhouse Iroquoian spirituality gave bodies two spirits apiece, a gannigonr-ha and an erienta. Is that plural? Akwaeke Emezi is an ogbanje; is that plural? Is “plural” a true umbrella term, helping people band together to fight for common goals, or is it just another way of making mayonnaise?
Multiple Personality Disorder is very much a white USA medical concept—there was one mind to one body, weirdly separated (thanks, Descartes) but nevertheless stapled together for life, and anything different was crazy. This was a diagnosis created by white people and overwhelmingly applied to white people—as kids, we remember reading books where therapists remarked with shock when they encountered multiples with black or brown vessels, because the idea was so alien to them! And that became a self-fulfilling prophecy—if the mental image of a multiple is one with a white vessel, than multiples who don’t fit that image are more likely to be diagnosed with something else, if not dismissed entirely.
From MPD came not just an impenetrable forest of acronyms—Dissociative Identity Disorder, Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Otherwise Specified Dissociative Disorder—but also other terms and communities, who formed around the idea of, “we’re multiple, but reject the diagnosis or don’t fulfill it.” (Examples include “Multiple Personality Order,” “Multiple Personality Condition,” empowered multiplicity, and the greater “plural” term that as far as I know got coined by the ‘90s by plurals fighting the idea that they weren’t multiple enough.) Whether these new terms were the new versions of MPD or rebellions against it, it still drew language and philosophy from that medical framework.
Other cultures don’t necessarily have this “one body, one spirit” idea, so people who don’t fulfill it aren’t necessarily so bizarre as to need a diagnosis. Even in white American cultures, it’s not too hard to find folks who take what I might consider plural and see it completely outside the medical framework—religiously (guardian angels) or creatively (soulbonds). They are pulling from different cultural frameworks entirely.
Personally, I think that folks experiencing body-sharing phenomena do benefit from banding together, because we get painted as crazy and face similar obstacles… in the States, at least. But I think we also need to be careful that we’re not just making mayonnaise, homogenizing everyone under this white medical idea and forcing folks into that framework against their will. And I think multiples have a lot to gain by learning about and from body-sharing folks outside their comfort zones, and not enforcing a hierarchy where one form of plurality is better or more legitimate than another.
And this is just corporeal culture! We haven’t even started talking about racism’s effects on plurals internally!
Racist Headmates
Let’s not talk around it: headmates can and do get made for racist reasons. I know because I’m one of them. I’m fairly certain that I was created in part because at the time, we believed that rape and abuse only happened to white people. (I promptly became the rape-sponge of the group, and we abandoned the theory. Silver lining, I suppose.)
Even if they weren’t created for racist reasons, headmates can also embody racial or cultural stereotypes—the mammy, the seductive Italian or Latin-American, the gangster. They can still get pigeonholed, expected or pressured to act in certain ways. You can see me doing it with Biff at the start of this essay! I kept wanting him to play along with the ideas about race I had playing in my head; Mac, my white husband, never had to deal with that.
Plurals rarely like talking about this. It’s a shortcut to fears of faking, reflexive thoughts of, “obviously I’m making all this up and just have to make myself normal again!” But that’s a thought-stop, a way to avoid hard questions and change. We have to stop conflating our behavior (“what you’re doing is racist”) with our identities (“I have to stop existing and being me”). Eventually, we have to stop fixating on what we are, and focus on what we do. Eventually, we have to get over ourselves.
As I found myself arguing with Biff, I knew I was making it about me, I knew I wasn’t listening, I knew I was being a racist dickweed, and yet I kept doing it. It felt like shitting my pants in public, and I realized: my behavior wasn’t that of someone afraid of cultural appropriation, or going outside my lane, or any of that. My behavior was of someone afraid of looking bad.
And Biff knew it. No wonder he’d stormed off!
I had been trying to avoid all discussion of race to avoid just this. But avoidance doesn’t solve the problem. It only makes it worse when the inevitable explosion finally occurs.
So now what?
Escape from Mayonnaise
There is good in failure: it teaches. Being a racist dickweed was shitty, but at least it gave the conversation somewhere to go—once I calmed down, I knew I needed to apologize, immediately. This opened a new conversation, one where Biff talked and I listened.
He told me about how he’d spent so much of his life trying to be as white as possible. How his family had fetishized and idolized whiteness as the symbol of all things pure and good, even more than ours had. It became part of the abuse dynamic in his family, the excuse to abuse not just his sisters (for failing the racist standard) but also him (by gutting his beliefs that he could ever be a good person outside of his racial performance).
He said it was funny that I seemed so sure of his brown cred, because he had no idea what he was doing. He was only just starting to figure all this out for himself, and now he was here, in a white vessel, which he would’ve killed for ten years ago but now just left him asking even more questions.
He didn’t know what it all meant yet. All he knew was that he wanted to find out, and that if I wanted to, I could try and find out with him. Out there, in the corporeal world, we would be white. But when it was just us, we could be just us, whatever that ended up being.
In a way, that was far scarier than the little mayo squeeze-bottle I’d been hiding in. As unpleasant and ugly as it was, whiteness offered easy rules, an easy identity. It told me what I was, what culture I had a right to, what I could and could not do. And racist thought-stops helped protect me from the pain of realizing just how racism had undermined my life—the people I had hurt, the friends I had lost, the mayonnaise it had offered instead of actual culture.
This thing with Biff, though, was a strange new place where the rules and boundaries weren’t clear, where things were raw and tender, where I (and him) would absolutely fuck up and hurt each other… and others too, if we weren’t careful. I’d already been a bull in the china shop of his heart, knocked everything over and shat on the floor… and yet here he was, still letting me in, just with the insistence that I clean up my mess. I was humbled, and I realized that as scary as this freedom was, I also wanted it. I wanted out of the squeeze-bottle.
And not just for Biff, but for all the other people in my life—friends, colleagues, fans, neighbors, random strangers, headmates. I had so many wonderful people in my life; they deserved better from me. I didn’t want to be the bull in their china hearts. It was time to start learning.
I started small. I started reading books—because with books, I could have whatever emotions came up without fear of hurting someone. I started trying to learn what racism was, what whiteness was (or wasn’t), how they intertwined with things I already knew a bit more about, like medical multiplicity. I started making race a normal, everyday topic of conversation, starting with friends I felt pretty solid about, and then slowly branching out, so I would get more used to it and panic less. I’ve been paying more attention to and trying to boost the work of plurals who didn’t get the advantages of a white vessel, the folks less well known who have so much to share and say. I try to hire them and pay them for their work.
I still have a lot of questions. I’m not like Biff; I didn’t come from elsewhere, didn’t have a life and culture outside the vessel. I haven’t experienced racism the way he has. What does being brown even mean, in this context? I don’t know yet, and Biff doesn’t either, but he’s given me permission to go on this journey with him anyway. And in that opening of trust and vulnerability to me, he gave me permission to exist in a way I never had before, broke the little loops I’d been not-thinking in all my life. Without realizing it, he’d given me a way out of the squeeze-bottle.
We are not what we are; we are what we do. We can build better selves and better worlds through listening to people, learning about them, boosting them up when racism tries to plow them under. We can change, value doing good over looking good, and relinquish our defensiveness and apathy that allows us to ignore white supremacy. Let’s do it together!
Recommended Reading and References
Emezi, Akwaeke. (2018) Transition: My surgeries were a bridge across realities, a spirit customizing its vessel to reflect its nature. Retrieved from https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/writer-and-artist-akwaeke-emezi-gender-transition-and-ogbanje.html
Human Genome Project. (n.d.) Race. Retrieved from https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Race
Kendi, Ibram X. (2019) How to Be an Antiracist. New York City: Penguin Randomhouse.
Mann, B. A. (2004). Iroquoian women: The gantowisas. New York: Peter Lang. This passage is found on pages 326-329, but it’s also copy and posted at https://lb-lee.dreamwidth.org/1094585.html
Plures House [Kerry Dawkins]. (2008) The Race Issue, 1.0. Retrieved from http://www.exunoplures.org/main/articles/race/
Plures House [Kerry Dawkins]. (2009) The Race Issue, 2.0. Retrieved from http://www.exunoplures.org/main/articles/race2/
Plures House [Em Flynn]. (2014) The Race Issue, 3.0. Retrieved from http://www.exunoplures.org/main/articles/the-race-issue-3-0/
Simon, Scott. (2018) In 'Freshwater,' A College Student Learns To Live With Separate Selves. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2018/02/17/586112614/in-freshwater-a-college-student-learns-to-live-with-separate-selves
Young, Kevin. (2017) Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.
The source of the summary quote. Bunk is a dense read, mostly focused on the American hoax as expression of racism, and Chapters 9 and 10 (“The Heart is Deceitful” and “Eve Black”) talks about multiple personality as an extension of that. It recapitulates False Memory Syndrome talking points, which makes it hard to read, but if you’re looking for a discussion on racism and “white woman multiplicity,” Young takes a scalpel to it.
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That is so true! Time and again, when I've needed to learn about experiences that are foreign to me, books have been the way to go... They force you into active listening. Thanks for putting that in words!
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--Robin
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We've been trying to learn more about queerness in Chinese culture before European ideas moved in, and we recall reading somewhere that, at least for men, same-gender relationships were just thought of as something that some people chose to do. There wasn't a specific *identity* attached to it, a specific concept of an *innate* orientation.
Obviously this didn't mean things were all fine and dandy. Even before European influence, those relationships were just something that were *allowed* as long as the men in question also had respectable heteronormative relationships. We haven't read as much on queer women and trans people (beyond the Golden Orchid Society, which iirc was further on in history) but we're guessing they did not get even that. Still made us wonder how West-centered the LGBT+ label(s) are, though, and whether the idea of orientation itself is also, to a degree, a Western construct.
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Still made us wonder how West-centered the LGBT+ label(s) are, though, and whether the idea of orientation itself is also, to a degree, a Western construct.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised! What little I recall of the idea of orientation all came from (you guessed it) white medical doctors, so... yeah.
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It's one of those things where the concept is so recent, and yet, people act like it's existed in all cultures for all eternity. That the most natural way of dividing people is "gay vs. straight." Sort of like how people treat plurality labels like an eternal thing. I don't really even know how to talk about it at front tbh, because in the world I come from, there obviously are people who would be called gay or LGBT or queer in this culture, but that's not how we call them or think of them in my own culture. I just kind of settled on... using the English words and hoping people will be understanding.
One of the problems, also, with LGBT labels (in my opinion, speaking for myself) is that from the history I've read, people, from the time the labels were created, have tried to use them to get science to legitimize them in the hope it would make people stop persecuting them. So a certain number of people have always latched onto the idea of gay brains or gay genes, even though, while it may really be something you can't change, "but I'm only this way because I can't help it and that's why you should accept me" is a REALLY BAD argument for tolerance. It leads to the kind of tolerance where people turn up their noses and get snippy and say "well I guess they can exist, but not around ME." Or at worst, to talking about eugenics and how to try to get gay/trans/whatever genes out of the human race.
-Lotte
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Kona
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--Hikaru
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In terms of race as separate from ethnicity, Troops for Truddi Chase had Mean Joe, who was basically an introject of the football player Mean Joe Green and superficially appeared to be a "big scary black man" stereotype, but was actually a protector of the children in system. There were a number of cringeworthy articles through the 80s and 90s where various headmates were described as "tough black men" or "spiritual Native Americans," basically as walking stereotypes, although since sensationalism was the order of the day in those articles, it's impossible to tell if they were really as one-dimensional as depicted, especially since the multiples discussed in those articles seemed to just completely vanish afterwards.
Spiritualism and channeling/mediumship activity, which had a large and messy overlap with multiplicity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had more in the way of (purported) spirits of a different race than the body, though it was often used for explicitly racist purposes, like Theosophy's ideas about "root races." A lot of Theosophists (proto-New Agers, basically) were fascinated with Tibet as a purported source of spiritual knowledge but believed that white people were destined to succeed them as the highest form of human life. There were some people claiming to be channeling Tibetan spirits, ancient Egyptian spirits, and ancient Arabian spirits, but that also often went along with things like claims to be channeling Atlantean spirits who gave detailed accounts of Atlantis being a real place that was destroyed because people committed the SIN of interracial marriage, and similar.
There are two specific works I know of about multiplicity in majority nonwhite areas or countries-- Multiple Personality: An Hispanic Perspective by Alfonso Martinez-Taboas (a Puerto Rican psychiatrist), which we want to read someday, and a paper called Current status of Multiple Personality Disorder in India by M.D. Adityanjee, G.S.P. Raju, and S.K. Khandelwal, which I can't find anywhere that isn't paywalled. The abstract mentions that at least at the time the paper was written (1989), people who appeared to present as multiple were much more often diagnosed with possession syndromes (as I understand it, a patient's belief that they are possessed, not so much a doctor's actual judgement of whether possession is real) that are specific to Indian cultures, but apparently presented with similar symptoms to Western patients diagnosed with dissociative disorders.
The only reason we even know about the latter paper is because it was cited in a paper by a therapist named Regan McClure. It's one of those "writing like bad translations from French is the way to write!" things, and we don't even want to try looking at it now, but she did cite some really obscure papers from India and Brazil (I have to go back and look at the summaries of the Brazilian sources sometime when we can handle it). But her take on race in plurality, roughly, was "our EXPECTATION is that white patients will have alters who correspond to racial stereotypes that work to their benefit, like black men being tough and strong, and nonwhite patients will have white alters who exist to conform to social white norms." It's the kind of thing we can shrug off now, but when we first came across it it spooked some people here back into the closet about their actual race, because we were like "oh god, this is EXACTLY WHAT WE WERE AFRAID PEOPLE WOULD THINK."
...she does at least ACKNOWLEDGE the existence of plurals whose vessels aren't white, though, even if she doesn't believe people can really be any race other than the vessel's. That's a point I have to give her.
-Amaranth
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Oh ugh, this just makes me feel even more weird about people in the tulpamancy community trying to prove their validity by saying "it's a thing that Tibetan monks did!"
Like, come on guys. If you want something to point to, the whole long precedent of writers' characters coming to life is RIGHT THERE. Nimoy literally wrote about Spock talking to him!
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In the Tibetan context, the words tulpa/tulku (which although it is found all over western occult literature via Neel, in the Tibetan context is rather obscure, not found in most Tibetan texts, and most Tibetan buddhists fail to recognize it) seem to refer to an "emanated body" like the Dalai Lama, and doesn't have much to do with tulpamancy as we know it.
In other words, tulpamancy seems to have more to do with Neel's western occult tradition than with Tibet (and even then modern tulpamancers tend to actively distance themselves from the occult) and the Tibetan connection originates with errors in cultural interpretation and word usage made by Neel.
My personal opinion on the matter is that the word tulpa has already long since been popularized and gotten stuck, and will probably be stuck for a long time, and like most turns in language change this cannot be helped, for better or worse. I think it causes more damage for people (both tulpamancers mistakenly claiming a historical continuity with Tibet, as well as the majority of cultural appropriation crusaders on a mission against the word's use or the practice of tulpamancy altogether) to exaggerate the connection to Tibetan history and pretend that there was an ancient forgotten Tibetan tulpamancy tradition for which there is no evidence, while on the other hand simply using the word (without spreading bad history about Tibet or claiming any connection to Tibet besides an old misplaced word) does negligible damage.
http://www.blueflamemagick.com/index.php/2014/09/14/tulpa-not-what-you-think/
I rely mainly on this source for my knowledge about the Tibetan context for now (intend to read more in the future). While the author's understanding of tulpamancy is weak (tulpas can and do learn how to front) and I personally disagree with the final conclusion, their ability to provide an accurate context for the word from a Tibetan buddhist perspective is very helpful
--Janusz
(hopefully I don't sound too snappy since I had an argument with a completely unrelated person about this topic recently. this little mini rant was intended as a response both to tulpamancers who claim their practice originates with tibetan monks, and to people who claim that tulpamancy is cultural misappropriation since they both tend to be mistaken about the same things)
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(I just ran across this paper on dissociation in China when searching for the latter paper. There's also this one about Turkey. )
--Robin
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--Robin
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-Amaranth
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As for the system members being allegedly racial stereotypes I always wonder how much of it is really just the biased perspective of an outsider looking in, the way the concept of "Emotional Part" makes no distinction about whether or not someone is actually a fragment or a person trapped in an emotional flashback.
--Janusz
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Thank you for this post. I'm currently in the latter half of a "slowly, then all at once" process of learning about multiples, and at this point I think it qualifies as a special interest*. Having sorry yesterday read like half of Plures' articles, I set out to ask them questions, -- some in good faith, but also, I think, some leading ones I thought I already knew the answer to -- but found this instead of a way to contact them. Your more personal/story-based writing style (or maybe it was your converse situation, or even simply your second opinion) really helped me wrap my head around aspects of alters not matching their host vessel's. I've long come to understand that people experience gender more strongly than I do, but someone having an internal sense of race flew in the face of everything I've learned about the biology of race (that it's 99% bull). If race is a social construct, then how can someone have an inner sense of it different from how society treats their vessel? Yesterday, it was absurdity, today it's obvious: by having an inner society.
It should have been obvious yesterday, too, especially with all of Plures' talk about their inner world/society, but I guess I was having trouble with that, too. Still am, to be honest, but with more research, reflection, and a little luck, I'm sure today's absurdity can again be transformed into tomorrow's obviousness.
Thanks, again, for sharing -- both what you are and what you do.
*Er, in the autistic sense, for anyone unfamiliar with the term -- something I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about, researching, talking about
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that resulted in a lot of… well, actually, reading this, we might start calling them “mayonnaise headmates” because that fits a lot better (and is also funnier). previously we were saying “white headmates,” but that’s not entirely true. they’re headmates with no real ethnic identity who got turned into mayonnaise by our racist assumptions of whiteness as a default. a lot of them turned out jewish or vaguely latine.
it wasn’t until we really started unpacking that shit that i realized i was not only not white, but also less white than the body—which i also briefly panicked over, before realizing that if my headmates were allowed to be white i sure as shit was allowed to be 10% more american indian than the vessel.
this is also reminding us we need to get in touch with our tía who is by anglo definitions plural but doesn’t use that terminology—in our family’s home country, channeling is considered a relatively normal (if uncommon) spiritual practice, while DID is significantly more stigmatized in comparison. we need to look more into it because honestly it might fit with our way of being multi, and while we are grateful for the white plural community and all it’s done for us, we’d definitely like to have more to do with our cultural forms of plurality! -crow&
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they’re headmates with no real ethnic identity who got turned into mayonnaise by our racist assumptions of whiteness as a default. a lot of them turned out jewish or vaguely latine.
YES THAT THING. That thing there. I'd always struggled to put it into words. Our white headmates who came from elsewhere have a decent sense of their ethnic identity--Falcon has ALWAYS been Italian-American, Mac and Biff had Celtic folks in their ancestral tree, as does our own vessel. We may not know very many DETAILS about that ancestry, who they were and how they ended up in America (asides from the potato famine), but it still exists as a separate thing than the mayonnaise of whiteness.
in our family’s home country, channeling is considered a relatively normal (if uncommon) spiritual practice,
Yeah, this seems to be true for a lot of peoples and places over time! The more I've gone digging, the more I've found and the more I'm suspecting that the white medical idea of multiplicity only exists because the culture gave no other vessels to hold it but "medical condition."
we need to look more into it because honestly it might fit with our way of being multi, and while we are grateful for the white plural community and all it’s done for us, we’d definitely like to have more to do with our cultural forms of plurality!
I think that's a wise decision. Learning more about other folks and how they do things is NEVER a bad investment!
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Hi, this was a really good read! It feels Very Uncomfortable to talk about race for a lot of people, me included, but it still deserves to be talked about!
Personally, I (Max) have a very confusing relationship to race, because I'm a very Americanized Asian guy, who's SEAsian but apparently doesn't look SEAsian enough to get racial microaggressions beyond being called Chinese (derogatory) in 2020. Race is a very weird thing to grasp when you've grown up being told that you need to speak English but actually you should be multilingual buuuut there's no classes for your mother tongue, sorry, go fumble some new language and forget the old one, it's useless for talking to strangers you know - and then you're not even counted under "brown and black" when discussing American racism! It feels very weird to live with the model minority myth where you're clearly Othered from whiteness and also from the darker people of color who have it Obviously Worse Than You. I feel like, maybe, everyone would benefit from dismantling white supremacist hierarchies, so then nobody needs to feel ousted and ashamed and confused for having Racial Baggage from societal racism without a community to fall back on because You Know Everyone Else Has It Worse?
And racism isn't only a White Thing! I've done racist shit before myself, it wasn't any less racist because I wasn't white, and I don't lose my POC card for that! It was just a dick move and I could act like less of a dick without saying that I've become The Oppressor and I need to Grovel at the feet of people who could absolve me. That's a less esteem-crushing way to do it! It's not helpful to think I'm defined by my worst moments and that I've somehow Stained My Character by BEING A RACIST, I could say I'm A Racist Forever or I could say I did a racist thing and that just sucked, my bad, won't do that again.
Also - is it just me, or is the System Race Policing almost exclusively a white thing? I'm guessing it's related to the demographics you've talked about, how plurality IS seen as a majorly white thing and how it's largely a Western construct and community, but every time I've seen people saying "you can't have headmates who aren't your race!" they've been discussing the horror of a white person with a headmate of color. Like, hey, what about us? I'm a person of color, I share my body with another person of color, is that more or less racist? I share my body with a white person, does that make me a race traitor or something? It's not an angle I ever really see discussed! It's always hating a white-bodied system for having a POC in there!
--Max
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I feel like, maybe, everyone would benefit from dismantling white supremacist hierarchies, so then nobody needs to feel ousted and ashamed and confused for having Racial Baggage from societal racism without a community to fall back on because You Know Everyone Else Has It Worse?
Couldn't have said it better myself!
And racism isn't only a White Thing!
It sure fucking ain't! Remove the singlets, and plurals will constantly create their own ableist pecking orders. An all-women society won't magically be above misogyny either, as the Lesbian Sex Wars so exhaustively illustrated!
is it just me, or is the System Race Policing almost exclusively a white thing?
I've encountered it from folks of color, but not too many. Most of the time, I haven't been sure of the race or ethnicity of the people spewing the shit, and it seemed to be playing into the bullshit to dig or ask. I've definitely noticed that it looms large in the anxieties of white-vessel systems I've talked to. When white-vessel groups do it, I interpret such behavior as, at best, showing their asses regarding their own feelings of insecurity and self-loathing projected outward. (At worst, it's just bullies discovering an acceptable target, cynically using whatever weapon is at hand.)
every time I've seen people saying "you can't have headmates who aren't your race!" they've been discussing the horror of a white person with a headmate of color. Like, hey, what about us? I'm a person of color, I share my body with another person of color, is that more or less racist? I share my body with a white person, does that make me a race traitor or something? It's not an angle I ever really see discussed! It's always hating a white-bodied system for having a POC in there!
Perversely, it just shows how WHITE-drenched the whole milieu is, that they can't imagine any other scenario! It's never, say, a Japanese-vessel system with a Korean headmate or something. It's always extremely American, steeped in extremely American racial norms, so the Japanese/Korean example would be fine, because they're the same American "race" (even though the ethnicities are totally different and have a violent, upsetting history)! I even remember HAVING a conversation with someone about that as they realized they felt differently about a white-vessel system with a [their ethnicity] headmate, but not a [their ethnicity] system with a [ethnicity their group oppressed] headmate! It felt like a moment of rare clarity where I saw under the hood.
Meanwhile, me and Mori's ethnicity doesn't exist in this world, and we appear racially ambiguous to boot, but that doesn't matter; we're STILL forcibly sorted into a bullshit American racial system; we are not allowed to opt-out, and trying just makes the folks involved madder, because we're trying to "escape" our privilege or some such bullshit. (And then, once we're sorted, we're presumed to be "appropriating" from the box we're sorted into, even though that box is entirely a projection of American cultural norms, not reality.)
Biff STILL doesn't voicebox at front because he has an accent that screams "Southern beige trash" to people and it gets a reaction out of them that he doesn't want to deal with. He calls it being "race-tested."