"Adventures in Ambiguity"
I've finally got up the gumption to do it. What with this Hines Ward and sudden attention given to mixed-race people and the rare fact that black-Koreanness is in the news, I decided that it was going to be either now or never the time to pull this old project out of the digital dust and let some people see it.
This is a work-in-progress, one of the several major projects in my life over the last few years that never quite got completed. Since this was last updated in October of 2000, just a bit before the popularization of the word "blog." In my case, I didn't even know that I was "blogging" and since I was just doing old-fashioned HTML, technically, I wasn't. So what I was doing technically wouldn't qualify as a blog, although my idea to web publish my work so that my friends and fellow writers could critique it easily without me having to send lots of boring MS Word files was, in retrospect, a pretty good one.
I submit this piece of writing quite tentatively because it is 1) unfinished, and 2) personal. Either of the two being true by themselves wouldn't be a problem, as this was designed to be a personal piece that I had hoped to publish as a book, but it being unfinished gives me pause, as we all want to put out best foot forward.
I considered editing up just the introduction and first two chapters, but after spending a couple hours just dealing with the fact that I had designed the graphics to go against a black background and they looked horrible repasted into my blog, along with the task of either editing forever or just allowing the work to just "be" as-is, like I left it – in the end, I just decided to at least let myself get credit for the significant amount of work I'd already done on the site. I do like the simple and bare design, as well as the white-text-against-black thing.
But please – read it with a few grains of salt: I wrote this several years ago, it's unfinished, and I also have never been satisfied with the title. Additionally, I was in a different mindset then, when I had been thinking about how to critique identity politics and race in the United States, something that is a bit different from all the Hines Ward and mixed-race discourse I am critiquing in Korea these days. The errors in thinking about the reality of "race" as socially constructed categories and obsessing over "identity" are very American, but related concerns exist in Korea as well, although out of different circumstances.
So read, enjoy, and please give your comments back to this post!
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