Sweet Home: Writing from a Known Space

ABSTRACT

In the thick litany of yet more disasters, epidemics, and catastrophes that have taken place during and since the 2021 ASA conference, Cathy Schlund-Vials's presidential address offers us a strange, if not queer, clearing in the woods—a "Black mark” made from "poured gasoline . . . in the shape of a cross” burning in the night on the lawn of an eight-year-old mixed-race Cambodian American adoptee with a white father and Japanese mother in Valdosta, Georgia. The image of a "black mark” in the shape of a cross in front of a mixed-race Cambodian American adoptee counters many preconceived notions of who the traditional targets of antiblack racism are, but it is also the strangeness of Schlund-Vials's rememory of that incident that also opens up a space for us to ask how our distance or estrangement from that experience might produce intimacy. I have met Cathy Schlund-Vials once, probably too brief of a moment for her to remember, and I have never had gasoline poured on my lawn in the shape of a cross or my family's car keyed with phrases telling us that "God hates mongrels.” And yet, there is something about the isolation she describes that makes that burnt patch of grass familiar to me even if distant. It is not the charred earth we share but all the everyday forms of social distancing imposed on her and her family that gives meaning to a mutual sense of already knowing isolation long before coronavirus (and its now multiple variants) made loneliness and the melancholy it engenders a national mental health crisis. In other words, without diminishing the seriousness of the epidemic, her address highlights the multiple ways the virus has exacerbated the processes of "social distancing” already in play long before this pandemic began.