Muno

When I run in the mornings, I usually have kids calling at me, “Muno! Muno!” When Yuna (who is Korean) and I walk down the street together, we hear kids again, calling at us, “Muno! Give me 100 shillings!” The local language of the Acholi people is Luo, and according to our Luo-English dictionary, muno means: “n. a white man; originally it was a name given to colours other than black, the whites being called otara, but later on when the Arabs became known to be different, then only the whites were called muno.”

This definition is very unclear and warranted some explanation. Yuna and I asked Chris (one of our friends from Gulu) what muno exactly meant. He said that the word otara refers to white European and American people. Muno, on the other hand, means everyone else who is not this type of white, but everyone who is not black either. Basically, muno meant everyone who is in-between black and white. However, if you are muno or otara you are still a muzungo. And a muzungo means foreigner.

While muno and otara essentially mean two different colors, Chris explained to us that both these terms are lumped into one category: white. You are either black or white in Uganda, and if your skin color is any shade lighter than black – you are considered to be white. And when you are white, you are a muzungo and people automatically assume you come from privilege and have money.

But why do people here assume that if you are any shade of brown, you must still be white? The NGO workers and missionaries come from all different countries, but are mostly white. We have seen a handful of people from Asia, also here on business or “to help.” And there is a huge Indian population in Gulu and in Uganda in general. They are the store and business owners, and they usually make much more money than the average Ugandan. While we were having dinner at one of the fancier restaurants in Gulu, Apollo pointed out to us the “richest man” in Gulu, who is Indian. He owns many businesses here and lives in a huge mansion with his Ugandan wife. It’s no wonder why Ugandans assume that even if you’re not from the West, but you’re a lighter shade of brown, you are wealthy.

It’s been a very interesting experience to witness my identity change depending on the country I am in. My biracial background and ambiguous looks have granted me access to places and opened up cultures in a way that would be denied to me previously if I was phenotypically Caucasian. In every other developing country I have traveled to – I am a woman of color, and almost always, I can pass as a native. Yet now in Africa, I am perceived in a whole new way that I have never experienced before: I am white.

The last country I was in where I was highly aware of looking different was actually the Philippines. This was a confusing experience because I assumed that this would be the one place where I would blend in and not feel different than anyone else. After moving to a mostly white suburban town when I was 12 years old, I grew accustomed to feeling like an outsider although at the time I knew I couldn’t place the feeling. Straddling two different cultural worlds was my constant struggle, invisible to my white friends. After a few years in college, surrounded by diversity, the desire to travel to the Philippines to know myself and my roots became urgent. At 20 years old, I stepped off the airplane in Manila into a sea of Filipinos thinking, “Finally, finally – a place where everyone looks like me.” However, walking the streets of Manila, I constantly heard comments from strangers, “Mestiza, mestiza.” Mestiza, in the Philippines, meant someone who was a half-breed. In the past, during Spanish colonization, it meant half Filipino and half Spanish; in the present day, after American colonization, it means half Filipino and half white. And then during the duration of my visit, my Tito (uncle) Fred exclaimed on more than one occasion, “You look so much like your mother, Kristen!” What? I look like my mother? My white mother? Really? I spent my whole life having people ask if I was adopted when I was with my mother and saying I looked exactly like my father. But here, here in the homeland of my father – in a place where I thought I’d blend in, my biracial roots were noticeably apparent in my features. While this trip deepened my understanding of my Filipino heritage, family, and personal history, it also, for once in my life, created within me a high sensitivity that even here – in the Philippines – I still did not fully belong. But this realization, coming through comments from my family in the Philippines, saying I resembled my mother so much, spoke deep to my need to be recognized as my mother’s daughter – an identity that had always been denied to me by others outside my family because I did not visually look like her. Here in the Philippines, I understood and deeply connected with my Filipino identity, but also with my identity as being biracial – and half white.

In other countries, I have had quite the opposite experience, and in these experiences I whole-heartedly love and celebrate being biracial because it has granted me access to cultures because I can “pass” as a native. For example, when I traveled solo to Nepal, my first stop was in Thailand. In Thailand - I was Thai. This was my first experience of being able to “pass.” When the woman who sat next to me on the airplane found out I was traveling alone, she decided to adopt me for the duration of my stay in Thailand because I reminded her of her niece – and heavens forbid something happened to me. Both her and I moved freely in Bangkok, and I didn’t felt awkward or stared at even when she brought me to a Thai funeral of a friend of hers. She introduced me as her adopted niece for the week, people smiled at me, shook my hand, and that was that.

In Egypt, I wore a variety of identities ranging from Egyptian, Persian, and Moroccan in order for my traveling companion (who spoke Arabic) and I to get the discounted rate for Muslims at tourist sites. However, even when I veiled with a scarf covering my head, Egyptian shop owners, who were used to international travelers could identify that I was not Arab and would ask if I was Hispanic or Asian. It was and is very rare for anyone to guess that I am Filipino, let alone biracial.

In Ecuador, I passed as being from somewhere in South America. During the first week of my stay there, I befriended an African-American girl from the States who was also in my program. My host sister, Patricia, joined me one evening when I went with my new friend back to her host family’s house for a goodbye party for one of the other American students. Upon our arrival, everyone greeted my friend and said to her looking at us, “Oh look, you brought your native friends with you!” My friend had to explain that I was also American, but the rest of the night, out of a party of 15 or so white, rowdy Americans, only a one or two other people came over to talk to Patricia and me. I felt invisible. I was invisible because I was assumed to be just another native, another relative visiting the host family, nobody important, no one of common ground. I realized that “passing” gave me privilege to move around Ecuador more freely than my white companions, but it made me invisible to a community in which I am suppose to be from. I’m not saying that it could have been partially attributed to the fact I was an outsider coming into a party (and we’ve all experienced that in the States – where nobody pays attention to you because they just don’t know who you are), but the fact that from the very moment I walked in the door, the Americans were already convinced I was “just another native girl” separated them from me. In fact, my entire time in Ecuador, I felt more at home with my host siblings’ friends, who took me in as their own. My own Filipino background (including the similarities between cultures, value systems, food, and our similar collective histories of Spanish colonization) and Catholic upbringing provided us with common ground as well as a cross-cultural connection. In general, I think this was more of our connecting thread rather than my ability to blend in because the skin color of people of Ecuador ranged across the spectrum, so you could be fair or dark skinned in Ecuador and people wouldn’t really look at you twice.

I spent 4 months in Nepal being Nepali. It was strange, yet comforting to feel almost completely a part of a culture and a people due to my ability to blend in and cultural background. I was completely aware that if I could learn to speak Nepali fluently, I could make a life here where no one would question my ethnic identity. In some way, this was alarming -- that I could reconstruct my identity like this (because would that deny my Filipino roots?), but I was highly aware the privilege this ability also awarded.

During my duration of my stay in Nepal, I had such freedom of movement that I walked the streets without any harassment, unlike my white American friends who, if they were male, would be solicited for money; and if they were female, they would be solicited for sponsorship or for marriage. Nepali men on the street were mostly street musicians and would approach white women, no matter what country you were from, and ask them if they would monetarily fund and support their music. Now, not just by giving a few rupees at that very moment, they wanted support for their music and living expenses. Or they would blatantly ask women to marry them. Again, we see the power dynamics of 1st world versus 3rd world trickle down to the micro level. Yet, unlike the Philippines, where Filipina women are actively searching to marry white, Western men (through match-making websites, mail-order bride companies) to save their families from poverty, we see Nepali men actively seeking out white women to also circumvent poverty.

In Africa, it’s a similar situation. I’ve heard (and corrected) our hosts and other people who refer to me (and Yuna, and sometimes even Nadia, who is lighter shade of brown African American) as white. If your skin is any other shade lighter than black, you must come from somewhere other than Africa, from privilege, and therefore, are expected to give out charity and free things. If you’re a white or light skinned brown woman (from any race), you also become the target of unwanted advances or marriage proposals from men. Just yesterday, my boda-boda (motorcycle) driver, after two minutes of driving together and small-talk, told me I should stay in Uganda and marry him.

Although I am half white, I identify as a woman of color because I cannot “pass” as white, and therefore, have never, will never, and can never assume the privilege that comes from being white. I am all too highly aware that I could have been born fairer skinned, and that would have drastically changed the way I am perceived in the world and my experience within it. My biracial friends and I know all too well the range of experiences people of biracial decent have depending upon their mix and skin color. Yet, even if one can “pass” as white – that does not ease up on one’s identity confusion. But people of biracial decent are not the only ones who are constantly cognizant of our racial identities, all people of color move through the world constantly thinking about the color of their skin and how they are being perceived in the world. Questions run through our heads like, “Am I being treated this way because of my race or the color of my skin?”

The history behind children who are of mixed race is not a pretty one. During slavery, white plantation owners would rape black women, and their children -- half black and half white – depending on the shade of their skin would either live as slaves or attempt to “pass” as white. Passing as white, however, was at your own risk, and if your true heritage was found out, you risked greater persecution. In the Philippines, prostitution flourished around US military bases – in a country where the economy failed to provide jobs for its people, Filipina women chose to sell their bodies in order to avoid poverty, while white American men chose to exercise their privilege and power over third world women by buying sex and women's bodies like a commodities. In addition to this, Western men bought Filipina women as mail-ordered-brides to fulfill their fantasies of a having a submissive, exotic Asian wife that was lover, slave, and maid wrapped up in one, and if she did not live up to this stereotype, she was at risk of domestic violence. In both these scenarios, the products of these relationships were biracial children. More than often, historically, biracial children were the violent result the colonizer dominating the colonized.

Miscegenation laws were only recently abolished in the United States in 1967 (see the story of Lovingday v. Virginia at www.lovingday.org). Before then, it was illegal for people of different races to marry in sixteen states in the US. So, the question is, what does it mean to biracial in today’s society? Despite the history of biracial unions, we find that biracial relationships have evolved (however there are still stereotypes that exist). We see different dynamics between our parents from different races and between each other in our own interracial (romantic or non) relationships in the present day time. And as much as I feel anger at colonization and at the oppressor – for many of us, the reality of being biracial is that we are the combination of both -- the oppressed and the oppressor. In my work for social justice, this presents some interesting contradictions, but makes this work, again, extremely personal. My anger at the injustice faced by people of color by the dominant race is real, but my existence is realer. For me, it is no longer the colonizer versus the colonized. It is no longer white verses black or people of color. It is no longer the majority versus the minority. It is no longer the oppressor versus the oppressed. Because then it is my father versus my mother? This mission of social justice all of a sudden transcends this reality of black and white or us versus them because in being biracial -- that reality just does not exist because we are both. And despite my own struggles straddling two different cultural worlds, my parents have offered a loving environment where diversity is celebrated and where being half and half didn’t matter because I was still whole. Being biracial in this current day and age, I believe our ability to maneuver between different racial and cultural worlds, to adapt and to connect to a wide diversity of people grants us a unique perspective to see and experience life from multiple racial and cultural vantages points. While I can be angry at the collective history of people of color being oppressed by white people, I am highly aware that my own mother is white – and that this mission to promote social justice and human rights means so much more than uplifting the oppressed (and in turn not becoming the oppressor), but to transcend race all together.

The fact that our president is biracial gives me hope that we will see in our lifetime at least the beginnings of a movement to do just that: to transcend race and instead look at each individual as a unique person with a diverse background, a divine spark, and an important member and contributor of our global community. Perhaps when that time comes, the children in Uganda will cease to call me or anyone lighter skinned muno or muzungo, but instead larem, which means friend.