A White Scholar in a Brown Body
Dr. Mariana Alessandri on seeing Anzaldúa and Kierkegaard through serpent and eagle eyes
In college, I was still white.
It’s only in the last ten years that I have come to understand and accept that I am a woman of color, despite my Chilean grandmother’s perhaps-surprising insistence that I’m white. My reluctance to embrace my brown-ness came from wanting to avoid the struggles of those whose dark skin prevents them from gaining access to exclusive academic, economic, and social circles. My financial privilege shielded me from some forms of discrimination, and my colorblindness shielded me from the rest.
“Only in retrospect do I recognize the microagressions that occurred before I was conscious of them.”
With the academic job market being what it is and with continuing denigration of the humanities in general, even a white girl has a hard enough time becoming a philosophy professor — good thing I wasn’t aware of my limitations. In the 1990s, the only way into academia was to be able to converse about canonical figures. Being white in college twenty years ago is the reason I can stand in front of mostly white philosophers and theologians at professional conferences today.
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I recently went to Northfield, Minnesota to present my research at the eighth annual Søren Kierkegaard conference, and my aged college professor was there. He reminded me, along with strangers in the audience, that I had been Mary back then. The name didn’t ring a bell. I’d assumed that she’d died.
But white Mary lives inside of brown Mariana. The former got a PhD so that the latter could make room for the next generation of academics of color. Had Mary been brown in college then, or even today, I don’t think she would have studied Kierkegaard. Mariana might have been directed to Ethnic Studies, which began as a validation of works written by and about people of color but ended up getting ignored by other fields. This is the nefarious dichotomy at play in academia that my research is currently trying to dismantle.
I was at the Kierkegaard conference to talk about the influence of the Danish theologian on brown feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa. Anzaldúa is not typically read as a philosopher, much less as a theologian, but she called herself a philosopher and was powerfully drawn to Aztec spirituality. Having read Kierkegaard in elementary school, as she remembers it, Anzaldúa found a companion in despair in Kierkegaard. She interpreted his writings on despair as akin to her own struggle as a queer Chicana.
Gloria, like Mariana, did not formally study philosophy, because the discipline had no room for scholars like her in the 1980s. But she left a trace of Kierkegaard in her most famous book, Borderlands/la frontera, which I suggested to my predominately white audience be taught alongside Kierkegaard. In fact, Kierkegaard might be more attractive to brown folks if he were taught with them in mind. Those in attendance, most of whom had never heard of Anzaldúa, graciously received my message. I was proud of them for having shown up to a brown woman’s talk on a brown desconocida, and I was proud of Mariana for using Mary’s platform to reach such unlikely ears. The message I delivered was my test of Philosophy’s readiness to adapt to a new demography, and I was pleased with how open they were to me, to Anzaldúa, to all the Marianas.
Mary got us in the door, but Mariana did the teaching.
One month prior, I had presented this same research for the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa. The conference attendees could not have been more different, and my test was in reverse: How ready was this demography to adapt to a new philosophy?
“How ready were these mostly queer Chicanx scholars to adapt to the work of a straight, white, male, Danish theologian?”
They were as unfamiliar with Kierkegaard as the Kierkegaardians were with Anzaldúa. While those disinterested in philosophy stayed away, perhaps pooh-poohing the topic altogether, some bridge-builders did shown up. I talked about how reading white male philosophers still has value, and how personally liberating it was for me to be able to love Kierkegaard out loud, now that I had proof that Anzaldúa had done it first. I could finally teach Kierkegaard’s Melancholy Dane and Anzaldúa’s “La Prieta” to the same students. I could finally, finally halt my mental, emotional, philosophical, and nominal mitosis.
The paper I delivered made one Anzaldúa student cry. She thought, as I had, that as a woman of color studying Anzaldúa, she’d have to abandon Kierkegaard. As Mary-Mariana, I lay the bridge on which both thinkers can meet. What we end up with is not a synthesis of the two philosophers but the permission to carry on a conversation with both at once.
I could only build this intellectual bridge because my embodied experience taught me about reconciling dual identities. Reading Anzaldúa and Kierkegaard together improved my reading of both her queerness and his despair. By reading them together, we can see through serpent and eagle eyes, as Anzaldúa learned to do from her intellectual bridgework, and through a dialectic lens, as Kierkegaard challenged us to do.
In other words, Mary didn’t have to die to give Mariana life.
Today, my dual identity serves both intellectual communities.
Today, I exist to bridge worlds.
Today, I teach so that Marys can study Anzaldúa and Marianas can study Kierkegaard.
