Expressing My Experiences -- An Interview with Writer Genevieve Slosberg

Interviewed By Nate Davis

Edited for Clarity

Genevieve Slosberg is a brilliant writer who has worked with publications like The Daily Californian and Huffington Post, many of her work focusing on tackling and understanding her mixed identity. Currently, Genevieve is not writing for a specific publication but her inbox is still open for commission based pieces.

Nate Davis: The first question I have for you is relating to sort of your journey as a mixed person- you write for The Daily Californian, right?

Genevieve Slosberg: I do, yes, currently

ND: And recently you’ve written about the issues that come about being half Chinese half Jewish, correct?

GS: Yeah all of them relate to being mixed and most of them contain experiences that are either in China where I grew up or in the US where I currently reside.

ND: So, what made you start writing?

GS: So I actually have liked writing for a while. Writing has always been like a really relaxing and sort of cathartic thing for me to do. Last year, freshman year of my college at Cal: firstly, I was realizing that the current discourse of campus social justice didn't quite fully represent my experiences. I just felt like there was just kind of predominating discourse that was implying, like, you know if you're part-white or white passing P.O.C then social justice spaces aren't really for you type of thing. And I thought some people assumed a clear separation between being white and being a person of color, like they’re mutually exclusive. and that clearly didn't fit my experience. Personally, I felt that conversation that was being had about race was not nuanced enough So then I kind of thought, "All right, I'll write this article or something" and then initially had written this draft article about how people who are equate my experiences to that of a white man because I’m mixed with white are really missing the full picture of who I am, right? That's initially what I'd written about, and I submitted that to the Daily Cal and they hadn't gone back to me, so I was like I'll submit the same thing to HuffPost. And HuffPost got back to me and was like, "We don't want to publish this exact article, but we'd love to publish something else that you wrote." So I wrote them a different piece that basically is like a broad rundown of how I have come to accept and celebrate my mixed identity. And this post got a lot of positive reception. Lots of folks really felt like it was insightful and thought-provoking to hear about my experiences. So then that was like, "Hey, I can actually, you know, make a good name in doing this," like, "Woah, what the fuck. People actually enjoy what I have to say about myself? That's crazy". It really helped me, like, comb through my own experiences and validated that I had a voice, something I had to say. Then... I had always wanted to write for the Daily Cal. So I reached out to the Daily Cal's opinion editor, their name is Kaitlyn. And we sat down for, like, two hours. We talked about everything that I wanted to write about, and they basically thought that this was a voice that needed to be uplifted, and something that is missing on campus. So yeah, I got the gig and I wrote every week for a semester.

ND: Kind of bouncing off of that, do you think your biggest goal is educating people who aren't aware of mixed life or kind of reaffirming mixed experiences to mixed people? Like, what are you aiming for with your writing?

GS: So the biggest goal that I had when I started to write for the Daily Cal was imagining sort of these little moments where mixed folks would read the Daily Cal and feel like, "Oh I relate to that. That's something that I see". I felt like I was aiming for, one, to express my experiences in a really accessible, readable manner to folks who might have never encountered a mixed race narrative before, and to  clearly see how being mixed complicates how you see yourself and how you're positioned in relation to society. But I think primarily I wanted folks who are mixed to see something like this and feel like there's a part of them that relates to that. I think having that kind of visibility in general is a good reminder for both the campus community and for whoever reads to sort of think about race in a more complicated manner. It's not just you're one race or another, you can be more than one. And there are things that you experience intersecting identities, that you experience out of all that.

ND: Speaking to that sort of mixed experience, one thing that's another pretty common thread- is there being a time when it kind of clicks, where you're like, "Oh I am mixed- I'm not just this, I'm not just that"- like you were talking about, realizing that there was something different? When do you think you became most aware of that? Or do you think it was like, your whole life you knew there was something off?

GS: Well I didn't grow up in a multicultural environment. So I think from a very young age I knew that I was different, because this was literally late 1990s/early 2000s China. You had one white person per, like, five miles. So it was impossible for me not to stand out, I stood out like a sore thumb. I remember the first experience of non-normativity that I had, now that I think of it, was the time that I walked in the first day of classes in my first grade classroom and I watched as my mother, when I sat down, she went up to the teacher and she was talking to the teacher and I didn't understand why. So I peeked over and I saw that everybody's name was written Chinese but mine. My legal name is English, because I'm a U.S. citizen. So yeah, it was like a bunch of capital English letters on a page of very neat Chinese and I just felt like I stood out. I felt like I was immediately "othered". I wasn't the same as everybody else. There's something off about me that I had to compensate for. So that was the first experience that was really distinct to me that I realized that I was different from my peers. But I do think that since I was very young there was this awareness; my identity couldn't be separated from how i looked, basically. In China, how I looked drew a lot of attention.

ND:  Yeah, and especially in your writing in your column, you address a lot of issues in the East Asian and Jewish communities individually, and in the overall mixed race community. What are some either really common questions, really controversial stuff that comes up- what's sort of the discourse around that, and how do you respond to that?

GS: Well I get a lot of negative comments. If it’s not a productive comment, if it's something meant to tear me down, meant to invalidate my experience, I don't respond to it. The issue of people not being able to relate to my experience and therefore react negatively to it have come up. At the end of the day, the kind of writing that I have been doing is about myself. And it centers around myself. And I'm telling my own truth. And if somebody has an issue with the way that it is framed and things that I can be more inclusive in any way that's discourse that I'm welcome to have. But if somebody is just not receptive to what I'm saying and want to assume ill of my writing, I'm not obligated to defend my own experiences to people. Because that's what mixed people suffer, that we have to defend ourselves to everyone, as if we have to prove our heritage and what we go through and it's just, like, no. And a lot of the time the criticism that I receive proves my point. At times i’m like, "I’m Jewish" and people are like "No you're not", and I write about people saying, "No you're not". It's like people just prove my point.

ND: And so I think, sort of a bit more wrapping-up type question. One thing that you can actually speak to is how do you notice the reception of what being "mixed" is changing, both in how you how you view your own identity and how others do, as you graduate through life phases- like from middle to high school to college. How are you noticing both your acceptance of your identity and others changing?

GS: So I mean I obviously grew up in different places. So when I was younger being mixed was always the kind of thing where, for a long time I thought other people like didn't like me because i was white. I didn't think it was because i was mixed. But basically, in China there was a lot of white worshipping. And my white privilege manifested in a really toxic manner. I’m not saying i didn’t receive privilege, I obviously did, like I got these appearance-based opportunities that Asian kids, Chinese kids have more trouble getting for sure. But at the same time it manifested in this super toxic way which when people were just always commenting on how i looked, talking about my facial and bodily features as if its normal to do that. Sexualizing and objectifying me. So i very much so didn't like being mixed. I felt like this is, like, the Scarlet Letter that makes me different or something. I feel like I couldn't separate my identity and  my own self from the sexualization that people imposed on me. And then when I came to like high school in the US I hung out a lot more with Asians than with white people. And I didn't really think critically about how being mixed impacted my place in society or what are my privileges or intersections of my privileges until I started at Cal. Because Cal just makes you think about those things. And then also when I when I came to college that's when I started to have more access to opportunity to embrace my Jewish identity. So I started to really learn more about Jewish tradition, Jewish religion. I feel like this is when I achieved more of a balance between the two identities being Chinese and being Jewish. Previously I very much strongly gravitated towards my Chinese side, because its where I grew up. So like I have to start unpacking how I wasn't able to truly understand what my privileges were as a white woman because so much of that privilege in China was connected to cultural exclusion and sexualization. And frankly in the U.S. it most certainly is a privilege, I most certainly have benefited from having white features. So like I had to start unpacking a lot of that and looking at how can I use this privilege, how can I be aware of this, how can I check this privilege, how can I use it to uplift those who are mixed but have been erased because they don't fit a certain Eurocentric standard. Grappling with holding leadership positions in a mixed race organization as a white woman, and how can I faithfully uplift and represent all of these different experiences within the community, and how can we incorporate these narratives into our work and not assume that our experience ourselves is the norm- I'm still in the process of learning how to do that, and I'm still learning how to be a good organizer for the mixed community.

ND: Any final remarks?

GS: I'm trying to think of a nice thing to end with. .. I just want people to know that the reason why I write is, yes, it's to tell my own story. Our experiences are so different as mixed people that I do not believe I can fully represent anyone else's narrative- even if they're my mix. I don't represent anybody else's experiences. But I do really hope that mixed folks can read what I write and see certain similarities between my experiences and theirs. And even if they don't feel empowered, see that authentic, honest, and sometimes even painful and truthful mixed race narrative are being uplifted and their's can be too.