Janae Pierre: It's Janae Pierre in for MHP. We're back with more of The Takeaway. Now check this out.
Christopher Rivas: What is brownness? The vague but large gap in the middle where things are forgotten, often don't exist, don't matter, and don't belong? What is brownness? A concept, an ambiguous identity that doesn't offer the same diasporic bond as being Black, yet it provides none of the power or grace that comes with navigating the world as white. What is brownness? Everything between black and white. What is brownness? The global majority. It's all just a spectrum. It all depends on who you ask, what they stand for, where you are, what you want, what they need, what you acknowledge, and when and where.
Janae Pierre: That was the voice of our next guest, but I'll let him introduce himself.
Christopher Rivas: Hey, my name's Christopher Rivas and I am the author of Brown Enough: True Stories About Love, Violence, the Student Loan Crisis, Hollywood, Race, Familia, and Making It in America.
Janae Pierre: Chris is also an actor who appeared in Call Me Cat and a one-man show called The Real James Bond Was Dominican. Melissa spoke with him recently. Here's their conversation.
Melissa Harris-Perry: It's certainly a bit of a feminist trope at this point to say it, but you really do bring us the personal and the political and the personal as political in this book.
Christopher Rivas: Yes, James Baldwin is a huge hero, inspiration, mentor, teacher, guide, whatever word you want to use. When I had first read his personal essay work, I was really blown away that we could use our lives to learn from ourselves, to meet ourselves, and to examine the world in which we are a part of, to either unplug or to stay plugged in. It changed my life and that's how my work is always-- I'm not a role doll. I can't come up with a giant peach, but I can look at my own life and the brilliance and pain of my own life.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I love this language you use about, "Who would I be if I'd known that space existed?" It suggests that although you are discovering this space and in your discovery in part making and remaking it, that it is a space that preexists, right? You name-check James Baldwin here in part to acknowledge that we're doing work all of us in our moments, but we are tied to how the work has occurred in the past.
Christopher Rivas: Yes, we're all bound to each other. I think that's the spiritual Buddhist in me. We're not separate, and I can quote Baldwin again, and I'm maybe butchering the quote, but it's like, "As soon as you put one person in a cage, you put everyone in the cage. No one's free until we're all free. That includes whiteness and then everyone under the cage of whiteness."
I am bound to everything that came before and this space exists, I just didn't have recognition of it. Then it was awoken to me and I've decided to claim it, which I think is any person in this world, especially women, bodies of culture, anyone who is not your standard typical white above a certain age male, there is space for you, but you do have to claim it. We have seen that over and over with our great teachers and guides and mentors. What does it mean to claim your space?
Melissa Harris-Perry: On the one hand you say you're not Oprah. [laugh] You are not.
[laughter]
Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm sorry, there's so much [unintelligible 00:03:32] in the first few pages. You are like, "I'm not Oprah, I'm not Abraham." I'm sorry, that really-- Whew, the joy I've felt with that paragraph, but you do give a piece of advice. It's a bit later in the book, maybe around the middle of the book, you say, "Always lie when someone asks if you meditate."
[laughter]
Melissa Harris-Perry: Why should you always lie [laughs] when someone asks if you meditate?
Christopher Rivas: This really beautiful woman in college asked me if I meditated, and she could've asked me anything. She would've said, "Chris, are you an idiot?" I would've said yes. She asked me if I meditated and I said yes because I wanted to be in her good graces. I maintained this lie for about-- We dated for like a year, until my 21st birthday, she got me a ticket to fly to a silent retreat in Barre, Massachusetts. Instead of telling her the truth, I went to this silent retreat.
Now, it's one thing to meditate, it's one thing to never meditate and then go be in silence for seven days. Hardest thing I've ever done in my life. Greatest thing I've ever done in my life. I meditated every day since that day. That's been over 10 years now. I would say all lies aren't created equal and it's the greatest lie I ever told. Meditation has been completely medicinal to my well-being and to my writing practice.
Melissa Harris-Perry: You drop early in the text that in some interaction that you had with Ta-Nehisi Coates, he told you that you didn't belong in the race [chuckles] conversation. What was that interaction?
Christopher Rivas: Yes, I was at a library in downtown LA, and I got invited. I'm going to be honest, I didn't even know who he was at the time. I hadn't read his work. When I got the invitation and someone said, "You should definitely be here for this. You're going to love this man," I had read a Case for Reparations, which I think at the time was the most read article on the internet. I was like, "Tight, I'm down. Let's go do this thing."
He's doing his thing and he's brilliant. He's a brilliant thinker and writer and man in the world, but I didn't see myself in the entire conversation. It dawned upon me that in this black-white world, especially around race, I didn't know where my voice was, where my body stood, and so I asked him, I said, "In a black-white world, where am I? Dominican, Columbian, brown kid from Queens." He didn't really give it much thought and he said, "Not in it." Fast, quick, he just said, "Not in it." That was it. No follow-up. They took the mic away.
I sat down and I was just like, "What?" I was shattered a bit. I went home and I didn't sleep. I thought, "What is it to not be in it? What does it mean to claim it? To be in it? Where's my pops and my mother and so much of my community, I grew up in Queens, this crazy melting pot, you're telling me most of Queens isn't in it?" I started this work of what it means to be in it and what does it mean for a brown body to be in it.
Brownness is way beyond skin. When I say brown, I think I'm thinking, what does it look like to live in a non-binary way, to live outside of a box and a label, outside of she/him, this/that, fail/pass, yes/no. What does it look like to embrace the middle? I think there's really a lot of potential for us as people to claim our space and to find our voice and to take up space and to be seen when we start embracing that middle space.
Melissa Harris-Perry: What does the world look like for you in some more idealized space? It's not so much tell me the nirvana, but maybe it's in part going back to the silent space of meditation, when you're sitting like a chicken, when you're just sitting for a minute in this exploration, when you're talking about doing the work, when you're talking about engaging across these boundaries and creating new spaces and rediscovering spaces that have been previously made. Toward what end?
Christopher Rivas: I think my nirvana is less of a place of arrival. Again, because I think that falls into the trap of we're going to cross the finish line. We're not crossing any finish line because nothing is ever finished. My place of arrival that I imagine is, actually, when I read this book in a crowd of people and I can see someone's growth, I can see their internal growth. I can see that they're ready to find their space, to use their voice, to claim their freedom, to reclaim their name. That's something I get the most of, is like, I've been calling myself Annie, but my name is Anan, or I've been calling myself Molly, but my name is Malan Ali.
I think my nirvana is just more people doing the unplugging, taking back their names, taking back who they are, code-switching a little less, disrupting white spaces a little more, not standing for the old ways a little more. It's more spaciousness, more people taking up more space, claiming their space and claiming their voice.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Christopher Rivas is author of Brown Enough. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Christopher Rivas: Thank you so much for having me. It was an honor. Honesty is what I can control. Honest with the fact that I can deeply want things to change, and at the same time, be complacent in the actions that keep things the way they are. Honest with my confusion, anger, love, rage, disruption, hurt, lust, and contradiction. Honest about how important and good it feels to see oneself and to be seen. Honest about how I am just beginning to discover a space that I didn't even know existed.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a person some academics have called our modern day James Baldwin, told me in a room full of people that there was no space for my brown body in the race conversations. Who would I have been had I known about this space?
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