"fucking magic"

in lieu of our previous blog post, here's a clip from the get down (R.I.P. to one of the most bold and creative shows we've seen). it was encouraging to see justice smith, who is mixed, play a character who is also mixed on screen. zeke, his character, being mixed wasn't merely descriptive...it was positive. the diversity he embodied enabled him to see differently, to do more and be more than the pervasive monoracial zeitgeist would otherwise allow.

i can't stress this enough. he wasn't a character who also just so happened to be mixed; he was a character who drew his strength from it, not in spite of it. as his character raps, "from the outside looking inside at my bonafides, one could say I'm duality personified". but he continues on to clarify that this is not so. only from a monoracial perspective would a mixed person seem 'split', or not whole, internally conflicted between dualities. as his rap continues, he shifts from zeke-the-person, to zeke-the-place (which is only a formal difference for sake of argument here, since person/place are intertwined); ultimately, expressing how who he is, "is fucking magic."

this was the first time we had seen a major lead character be self-identified as mixed. we were thrilled...and ultimately, felt empowered. and we thought, hey, maybe we can actually do this mxdflz thing. and here we are.

for sure, not many will understand that this isn't simply about 'representation'. to think of 'mixed' as just another label that can be slapped onto a character description is to misunderstand it entirely, not to mention perpetuating a monoracial worldview. representation is a disembodying concept that conflates image/appearance with complexity– it’s fundamentally reductive, and an abstraction that plays into identity politics (we’ll flesh this out in a later post eventually).

rather, what we're about is expression.* and an expression is always an affect of the an embodied subject– it is a manifestation of a body’s capacity/power to express itself, free of coercive forces (mind, identity, other). one who is mixed and/or [mxd] is someone who is affected in a great number of ways that are more complex than those who index their identity relative to pre-established tribes and territories (which would be merely ‘complicated’, not complex). all of the great number of ways in which [mxd] subjects are affected, each affect is another story, a remix, that has yet to be told. subjects who fluidly move between points of established differences, who are a mix of these, express a complexity of things once considered disparate. they are creating new norms, or ways of being, that eschew the prevailing binary order. is this not "fucking magic"?

*being able to parse the difference between representation and expression is important to us, but more on that for another time.