Hybrid Identifications,Mixed Feelings: Reply to Commentaries

In responding to the insightful papers of Suchet and White I explore further my own hybrid identifications in regard to the socially constructed category of race. The paper explores the dangers of both idealization and denigration of otherness. It shows how a traumatic confrontation with otherness may destabilize later identifications in favor of earlier more archaic ones. Melanie Suchet, in her very gracious response to my paper, comments that I refuse to “reside in the comfortable.” However, any wish I may have had to reside in the comfortable was derailed by the thought-provoking comments of both Melanie Suchet and Cleonie White. Both authors prompted me to confront myself and to examine a number of painful issues. These included not only a resistance to owning my own vicarious traumatization but the fact that I was subject to the return of the repressed as the personal meanings of the signifier black shifted and changed in the course of my paper. But most significantly, both authors confronted me with the challenge of Otherness.