An Autoethnography

‘My dear Bilbo! Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that you were.’
—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Hello. It's been a while. It may be strange to hear from a travel blogger years after the last flight, but this is an addendum I feel must be put to print. This is a declaration of war, and this is an apologia. I think I'd better start from the top.

I spent the decade from 2009 to 2019 traveling and teaching in Europe and Asia. This experience shaped both my choice to become an educator and my understanding of the privileges and inequities associated with my constellated identity.

My membership in a dominant social group—White, male, Christian, cisgender, heterosexual, healthy, able, and middle-class—to a large extent facilitated and structured this wanderjahr, and I have often mistaken for intrepidity and assertiveness the underlying racially-ordered assumption that I will be understood, respected, safe, found attractive, and given access. This assumption is rooted in White privilege and a structure of power relations that granted me these things only because people like me had legitimated their forceful seizure with myths of racial supremacy, meritocracy, and a post-racial society. Injustice was not something external, distant, and localized to a system I could engage in combat but something I carry with me. Travel opened my eyes to the reality of an oppressive social order, inspired the activism that drove me to teach, and left me questioning how I might support others in moving past the structures of Whiteness, patriarchy, and colonialism.

The privileges I held by virtue of a racialized status quo allowed me to attend a private college, to graduate debt free, and to save enough to spend the next two years traveling. An United States passport granted access to almost every country on Earth and guaranteed differential treatment. I never faced any scrutiny as to my intentions in entering a country and for the most part was waved across every border with a smile (excepting only a Moldovan official who tried to extort me for Euros, which I was permitted to refuse), not because I was in fact more trustworthy than the next person in line but because the narrative of Whiteness and of American exceptionalism is so pervasive as to convince people in every corner of the Earth that this was the case.

I was made keenly aware of how different my experience is from that of subordinated groups when a friend of a friend—a young Black woman from Trinidad, in love with someone from Finland—spent ten hours being interrogated by Finnish immigration agents on a baseless, racist suspicion that she intended to engage in sex work. She made the decision to reject that border; I do not remember crossing it.

Whiteness also conferred an assumption of safety. As a White cisgender man, I could get stupidly drunk in Odessa’s nightclubs or Osaka’s rooftop bars and not worry about sexual assault or other forms of violence. Once in the mountains north of Lake Ohrid, three men tried to intimidate me into handing over my belongings. I bluffed my way through, in English, and while I felt it somehow my own achievement I could see afterwards that no matter our positionality at the moment, my identity, even alone and transient, made me more powerful than them. My mother would sometimes joke about calling the US Army to rescue me, a joke which conveys the prevailing assumptions about American interventionism, and perhaps the impulse to trust in domestic police. Sarcasm aside, I knew that if I ever found myself in trouble, my parents could wire me money or a plane ticket home.

This power, by design, remained mostly invisible to me, a rot beneath the surface. I could stumble about Myanmar and imagine myself a starving artist because I had taken the cheapest bus from Yangon to Mandalay, when I only had to look left or right to see people much poorer than I would ever be. I profited from their poverty: it made my vagrancy affordable, and in some cases was a reason to attend rural places where I thought I might contact something more human, and spiritual, and prior to the world I inhabited and had been taught to value; to venture to places where people live in small houses of whitewashed cobb and wear traditional clothing until the last tourist bus departs and they can change into T-shirts and bluejeans and turn on their satellite televisions. They demonstrate a premodern livelihood to satisfy Western tourists, like Potemkin villages in reverse. I was a party to this ostensibly postcolonial commodification of culture and the exploitation of workers in the developing world. I held this in the back of my mind, like a health concern, like an old regret.

The difference between myself and the people amongst whom I traveled was privilege, and even a sort of invincibility. When tourism extracted the set of advantages conferred by Whiteness from any sort of social accountability, when it was combined with the exploitative power of the Dollar and Euro, it became enough to drive some into a madness of Dionysian excess followed by an Achillean sulk. I visited bohemian enclaves on the Indian Ocean where Anglophone Whites came to idle half the year, and I fled from the drunken spring break Gomorrahs that lined the Mekong. A Welshman I met on Albania’s Adriatic coast gave me a face to apply to this group: bloodshot with a mop of white hair, dressed in a sweatsuit of crusted gray and persistently drunk, married to a young Albanian woman of whom he complained constantly, along with her people and country, in the most hyperbolic generalities.

I did not want to turn into this, and I believe it was my own instinctive introspection that saved me. My holding back to observe, record, reflect, and structure as narrative my lived experience, which in two years produced a manuscript of 782 printed pages, allowed me to name the nacreous privileges that justified such abominable behavior in people of my own social group. If I could not avoid complicity in oppressive structures, at least I could name my privileges and remain open to the experiences of the oppressed. This initiated a kind of resistance that continues to inform my approach towards personal development and education.

Language, which has always been my sanctuary, is another facet of that oppression. Even in this autoethnography, descriptions of “Dionysian” and “Achillean” reflect and accentuate my education and restrict my writing from those unfamiliar with a prescribed “Western canon,” which the dominant society regards as more imperative than other mythologies. I had learned, not explicitly but through the kind of infectious assumption that props up most hierarchies, that English was the language of international communication, and that this was true by virtue of Anglophonic contributions to the international social, political, and economic order that took shape in the twentieth century. I counted on seeing English words, or at least Roman letters, on menus beneath the local typeface, on museum plaques, on road signs, on train station splitflap boards, on cinema screens, on the bent bookends in hostel libraries, on the yellow-edged paper of hotel guest registries, and on arrival forms at every border crossing.

Knowledge of the English language, imposed by European imperialism and the power structures embedded in globalization, allowed me to go almost anywhere and expect to be understood—and understood more easily than other English language speakers, because mass media and academia had established my Pacific Northwest accent to be “neutral” and “general.” Even in situations where I could not communicate in a common language, when engaging with people off the road most traveled by, in economically disadvantaged rural or urban areas, or in places like Russia or China where another language dominates the cultural landscape, I did not feel the kind of shame inflicted on those who don’t speak an imposed standard of English in public spaces in the United States. My language was the default and the ideal, whereas if I, an American tourist, had spoken Masri, Malayalam, Shan, or Lao in the spaces where those were the languages of public discourse, it would have been seen as an unexpected and commendable achievement.

“Amazing,” strangers often said to me in Osaka, when I spoke a little pidgin Japanese after living in that city for four years. “You speak Japanese extremely well.” I did not, but in the implicit matrix of power relations a native English speaker learning a little Japanese was more remarkable than a native Japanese speaker attaining fluency in English.

Gradually I saw in my travels the rot of colonialism, but also its lure. Colonized societies set the stage for adventures in Kipling, Melville, and pulp fiction authors who exoticized the systematic and inhumane exploitation of colonized peoples by imagining them into stereotyped props for White adventures. Conrad sought to de-romanticize the “city that always makes me think of a whited sepulcher,” but his other books romanticized a colonial setting, all of them revealed an explicit racism, and two of them, Lord Jim and Nostromo, were books that I adored. I came to realize how much my experience was structured around the tropes and values expressed in this literature and sustained by popular culture.

When I started a relationship with a Japanese woman, whom I later married, I asked myself how much colonial tropes played into the attraction: even if I rejected on an intellectual level the disturbing fetishism that associated Asian women with submissiveness or availability, those images remained current in the dominant culture, modeling cross-cultural sexuality for a presumed male viewer. I told myself that my partner defied the type, being assertive, self-sufficient, and highly educated, but the question, and the way people sometimes looked at us, left a noxious taste.

bell hooks wrote about how patriarchy harms men as well (though not as much) as women, because it tells them to value domination and to reject intimacy, emotionality, and vulnerability. If that is true, when my Whiteness also harms me (though not as much), by making me proud, solitary, entitled, and willing to dehumanize and exploit the “other.” Advantages based on my identity as a straight White man leave me with a diminished and etiolated humanity, poisoning the connections between myself and those around me; and the greater the diversity, the sharper the poison.

“When the soul of a man is born in this country,” wrote James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.” I have carried this aspiration with me for years, but only in the context of this autoethnography can I critically interpret what Stephen Dedalus aspired to. He does not wish to give up the power of flight afforded by his status as an educated man of Dublin, but to utilize his resources to avoid the ways in which an oppressive social system seeks to dominate even its privileged elite. It is a self-centered liberation, ignoring all those who do not have the option of flight. You don’t “fly by” a net; you cut it. Cutting a net takes work. It goes strand, by strand, by strand...

If someone had asked me would I consent to abolish all my privileges, I would have agreed from even the earliest period of my maturity, but it took many years of lived experience, many encounters with the “other” that Whiteness is set against, and many thousands of words of self-reflection for that “yes” to mean a direction. I had to realize that it would require work—not just Martin King’s “long arc of justice,” which the dominant discourse treats as inevitable, but active work, on myself first of all.

I began this work after settling in Japan, stretching myself in multiple directions. I embraced meditation and vegetarianism. I made a practice of yielding to others, trying to put myself last, in a process that was necessarily invisible. I learned a new language. I watched how much I spoke, and I asked myself whether my tendency to interrupt others was based on excitement or on an assumption that I ought to be heard. I tried to cultivate humility, to celebrate other stories and voices, and to inhabit the cultural world of my students in order to build better relationships with them.

Now that I am pursuing a more formal route into education, these same practices and the values of tolerance, civility, respect, and solidarity continue to shape my approach. Transformation occurs in the space between, and I hope that my own continued struggle to recognize reality makes room for the journey we must take together.