Yiddish Book Center: Karen Encarnacion, raised in a mixed Jewish-Filipino Catholic home, talks about the evolution of her Jewish identity, from the Catholic education she received as a child to the point when she began to identify as a Jew.
Yiddish Book Center: Karen Encarnacion, raised in a mixed Jewish-Filipino Catholic home, discusses her family’s move from multicultural Honolulu to Boston in 1971, when the city was struggling to integrate its public schools. She reflects on how the tense racial politics of the time influenced her own sense of self as a multiethnic person.
Karen Encarnacion: The Racial Politics in the City were very, very tense and everything was, kind of, defined in terms of Black and White in a way that I’d never experienced before and didn’t really understand and so the way that People treated you or the kind of Assumptions that People made about you had to do with how they ~ when they looked at you or they heard your name ~ tried to fit you into this, kind of, Black and White tension that was going on in the City, at the time, and that really had a Big impact on how I thought about myself and who I was in the World.
I think because I wasn’t really White, but wasn’t really Black, and because People had a very difficult time figuring out who I was and how they wanted to place me and, sometimes, it had to do with Assumptions that they made, I think it made me very sensitive to how People got defined, in those circumstances, and how they were treated because of the way they got defined and I think that made me feel a real affinity towards different Women of Color, so that my involvement tended to be, sort of, social and community involvement with groups that had to do with, spacifically, Women of Color:
