Hybrids are difficult. Perhaps, even impossible.
Take, for instance, President Barack Obama. He is a white man and a black man. But to his detractors on the far right, he is all Black – indeed, the grossest caricature of an African-American, an exotic African from the distant past.
Because President Obama is quite literally neither black nor white, a mere photograph of his face is already a challenge to long-standing racial hierarchies. More disturbing still for the many Americans coddled by the previous administration’s mania for black and white absolutes, President Obama’s politics are also, well, complicated.
As the comedian Jon Stewart observed in describing the president’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: “Obama forcing us to live in area between absolutes. Brain hurts! Complicated!”
The fear of the in-between, of that which is neither one nor the other, is both ancient and universal because it is essential to the way our brains make sense of the world.
On Friday, the Pew Hispanic Center released a report that confirms just how entrenched the fear of a hybrid identity is, even among the hybrid:
“The melting pot is dead. Long live the salad bowl,” when it comes to how young Latinos and others perceive their place in America.
When asked how they first described themselves, 52 percent said their preference was for their family’s country of origin — Dominican, Mexican, Cuban, etc. — over American, which 24 percent favored. Even fewer, 20 percent, responded Hispanic or Latino.
More than three in four say they are “some other race” or identify Hispanic or Latino, even though, according to the Census Bureau, that is an ethnic designation. Sixteen percent of young Latinos identify themselves as white, compared with 30 percent of adult Latinos.
We experience cognitive dissonance – say, the paradox of being both one thing and another – as painful. We seek refuge from ambiguity in categories that are perceived to be whole (e.g., “Dominican, Mexican, Cuban”), and even in categories that are as ill-defined as “some other race.”
That last possibility strikes me as the most pregnant: it’s a placeholder. It implies: “we don’t know yet, we’ll figure it out later.”
The Riddle of the Sphinx reminds us that our identity is fluid: what creature walks on four legs, then two legs and finally three legs? As we mature, who we are and, more importantly, how we perceive ourselves changes.
If there is any one trait that applies to hybrids at any point in their process of emerging, it’s just that: they are defined by their becoming. They are always what they will be.
postscript
It’s a wonderful coincidence that the only character in Blade Runner who knows the protagonist’s true identity is played by Edward James Olmos. And that his tell is an origami unicorn.