The New American Normal: Jillian Powers at TEDxPineCrestSchool (Full Transcript)

I was raised Jew-ish. I’m the child of intermarriage, and while my mother converted, I felt like I still grew up with almost as many “Our Fathers” as “Baruch ata adonais.” So not being able to remember my Jewish grandfather’s name, it made me feel really uncertain in this space.

To me, his name was like a mark of verification; with his name on my tongue I had proof that I belonged here. Without it, how could I even participate in this trip? My very identity felt like it was being challenged and called into question. We hadn’t even landed yet, and I already felt exposed and revealed as the Jewish fraud that I felt like I was. Like an unprepared student during a final exam, I looked over at Lindsay’s paperwork. Unfortunately, I couldn’t lift any of her Jewish experience from the answers that she was writing on her Israeli entry forms.

So I sighed deeply, and I looked around the plane to see if I can see any Jewish signifiers that would jog my memory. In front of me, to my left, by the bathroom, there were a group of college kids, and they were having a great time. They were laughing loudly, they were gesticulating wildly, and they were definitely having a great time. It seemed like they all knew each other, although I knew that they all just met each other a few hours before in the airport terminal. Behind me, to my right, by the emergency exit, was an intimidatingly pious looking man.

I’d never seen his level of Jewish observance before. It was wholly different than the secular and Yiddish undertones, that shaped my Jewish experience on Long Island. He had a small black box that was strapped to his head by thick black straps, and whenever he would move to adjust the prayer shawl over his course wool suit, he would expose the fringes around his waist and the black straps that just seemed to continue up his arms. And while his back was towards me, I could just make out his jaw line, as it was moving in prayer. Yeah, and I got nothing.

I got nothing on the grandfather, friends. I felt caught; caught between secular socializing, which I wasn’t invited to join in on, by the way, and devout religiosity, which I wouldn’t even know how to if I was, and between these two, I felt really awkward, and really out of place.

So I turned to Lindsay, “Will Birthright send me back to New York if I can’t remember my Jewish grandfather’s name? Am I going to have to pay for this trip if I put down Guillermo?” And as the words came out of my mouth Lindsay started to laugh, and I smiled, because we connected in the moment, and it felt sort of subversive to make fun of myself and call attention to the border regions of Jewish identity, to neutralize my feeling of discomfort, and do as I always do, I cracked a joke. But upon reflection, my silly joke revealed just how deeply I’d internalized these narrowly defined, but widely shared ideas, of who counts as what sort of person. I am aware that there are Jews of Spanish descent, and I am sure there are few Jewish Guillermo’s walking about.

My Guillermo? He’s not Jewish. My Guillermo was Catholic. Most importantly, my Guillermo was Puerto Rican. Growing up, the only other Jewish Puerto Rican I knew of, besides my brother, was Geraldo Rivera. And he wasn’t exactly a great role model to understand how I could bring these two disparate pieces of myself together.

Because the stereotypical characteristics that we attribute to Jews as a people, and the stereotypical characteristics we attribute to Puerto Ricans as a people, both the positive ones, and the negative ones, and I’m not going to think of them, I’m going to let you do that for yourselves, I’m not going to go there today. But as you can see, they don’t really complement each other. In fact, we’re actually quite contradictory. So it sometimes feels like the pieces of me rest rest uncomfortably inside my body, like oil and water. While I’ve tried to create a sense of self within this weird and uncomfortable liminal space, it’s left me feeling fragmented.

It never feels like I have enough knowledge or substance of any of my identity categories to work with. Whatever the standards of belonging are, I regularly feel like I fall short. As a child of intermarriage, I’m Jewish, but only by conversion I’m Puerto Rican, but I don’t speak Spanish. And while I appear upper-middle class — I have this nice blazer on — I grew up with working-class values that I just can’t seem to shake.

I’m also aware that I have many privileges. For example, as a light-skin Puerto Rican, I don’t actually experience any overt racial discrimination. As a Jew, who grew up on Long Island, the form of Judaism that’s visible and celebrated by the mainstream, it’s the one that I’m familiar with. So with all of these intersecting, and sometimes, contradictory pieces that make up who I am, I struggle to position myself within ever-shifting patterns of belonging and exclusion. I live a life betwixt and between.

I’m between places, between identities, between languages, and between cultures. It leaves me feeling like a trespasser or an interloper wherever I go. I just always feel like the perpetual outsider. Living within the border regions is definitely not comfortable, but as my body stretches across the boundaries that divide us, you can see yourself when you see me, because we’ve all had moments where we felt included in some groups, yet excluded from others. That uncomfortable feeling of belonging, yet, not belonging, it’s familiar.

Liminality then, standing at the threshold or feeling like you’re caught in between, it’s not an identity, it’s a state of being that transcends the categories that divide us, and thus, can be used to find spaces and places of commonality despite all of our differences. I didn’t come to that grand insight quickly. It didn’t happen on that plane or on that trip to Israel. Instead of feeling satisfied or settled, I walked off that plane 10 days later with a gnawing fascination about what brought me there to begin with. Why would I think that movement, here in the form of international travel, could offer me some form of transformation? Why did I think that heritage or knowing my roots would give me a sense of natural and fundamental comfort? My scholarship became a way to study this in-between status of belonging, yet not belonging.

I doubled down on liminality. I became a cultural cartographer, a border crosser and a collector of myths I travel, I teach, and I write, in order to understand what connects us, and I speak and I share to bridge those divides. To do this work though, I had to open myself up, I stopped living silently, and I began to share intimately, like I am with you today, about how the terms that shaped me shape my participation in the world. As I started to walk through life with my liminality on my sleeve, I wound up connecting to other border-crossers and boundary-makers.

You’d be surprised I found them everywhere. Of course, I found them when I traveled internationally. Americans abroad are literal border-crossers. We can all agree on that. With their blue passports in their hand, they are defining and demonstrating what American-ness looks like abroad.

But you’d also be surprised, I found border-crossers and boundary-makers in my community, in my family, and the spaces where I’ve been spending most of my time recently as a college professor, in college classrooms and college campuses. There was a border-crosser and a boundary-maker in every single seat. It was the first semester freshman, who was so excited to go away from home, but felt really uncomfortable now, because they didn’t feel like they fit in yet. This wasn’t home yet. It was the first-generation college student who felt out of place and out of class, who couldn’t really talk to a parent and say, “Was this what it was like when you were in college?” It was the student of color who was sick and tired of telling everyone, “No! I am not here on scholarship.” It was the actual scholarship student who was trying to figure out how they could stretch their scholarship to cover both the meal plan and all their textbooks, and figure out how many work studies they would need to do.

It was the checked-out senior who was so ready to move on, but super-pissed because they realized that “moving on” meant moving back in with their parents. It was the super-involved senior who couldn’t even fathom moving on. It was the international student. It was the kid whose fashion sense meant he was always mistaken for the international student. It was the lone black kid who was called out whenever a professor wanted to make a point about race stuff, because you know what that’s like.

How isn’t that awkward and uncomfortable? It’s the trans or gender-fluid student, who has to correct everyone’s pronouns daily, especially their professor. Again, that’s really uncomfortable, and those power differentials matter. It’s the lone guy in a Women’s Studies class, the lone woman in a Computer Science class, the budding feminist, whose trying to reconcile her politics with her involvement in the Greek system. It’s the social justice ally or accomplice, trying to figure out how to contribute to a movement without overstepping. It’s also the student whose never really paid attention to social movements anyway, and doesn’t even know what all the fuss is about to begin with I could go on, but you get the gist.

And of course I’m not calling out any specific students I know here, nor is this list complete. It’s just a rough sketch that paints a larger picture of how that unsettling feeling of belonging, yet not belonging, it’s just the new American normal. Once I start to interrogate my own Guillermo feelings, – Oh, I like that! As I’m now going to refer to them, trademark – my defenses over belonging began to peel away. The more I revealed, the more I invited others to share, and the easier it became to see the threads of connection within a world of difference. My vulnerability was capable of turning walls into thresholds, because we all got “-ish.” We’re carrying it silently. I am just so done with that! I am committed now to settling in that liminal space. I’ve dropped anchor here, and I plan to stay a while, because I’ve discovered I don’t need to crossover. I can meet others in that space between. Whenever I meet someone in that space between, it’s when I feel the most.

I feel aware, I feel awake, and I am fully present. It doesn’t mean I always feel comfortable. Connecting over difference is actually quite challenging, because there is no one-size-fits-all model. The terms that shape my participation and sense of belonging are not universal, and to think so, that would be incredibly presumptuous, now, wouldn’t it? If I used my own lens, and my own Guillermo feelings to see you, I would be over simplifying your experience, and I would be denying you that complex personhood that I want you to see in me. So, to connect to others, I have to listen to you humbly, and I have to participate in your world fully, knowing that my knowledge is partial.

Yes, I have a PhD, but I do not know it all. My story is also my own. Yes, my story is not yours, but what it does do is it serves as a gesture. The gesture that can possibly close the distance between us. It’s hard to explain that powerful crystallization of root feeling.

When it happens, I don’t take it for granted, because I know it took work, and I know it took a lot of courage. To bridge is to build community, and for that, we must risk being open to intimacy and risk being wounded. Because we’re all there anyway. We’re all standing at the threshold of something, not quite sure where we fit, or what the next move should be. Now wouldn’t it be easier if we were all standing there together? Thank you.

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