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Blackanese, Racial Imposter Syndrome, And Being Your Mixed Ass Self W/ Sharmane Fury
27 Plays1 year ago
Sharmane Fury A.K.A. Mixed Girl Mane is a self-identified Blackanese (Black and Asian) podcaster and rising voice in the mixed race community. Sharmane joins Willing to Learn to discuss all things mixed race identity. Sharmane and I talk about what it’s like growing up mixed race, unpack some of the misconceptions about multiracialism, and offer resources for mixed race people and monoracial people who are eager to understand the mixed race experience.
For more information on Sharmane, visit:
- MilitantlyMixed on all social media platforms
- Militantlymixed.com
- GulfCoastCosmos.com
- MasksByMane.com Promo Code: First100 for 10% off
***Read below to access some of Sharmane’s recommended resources from the episode:
- Dr Jenn Noble – https://drjenntherapy.com/
- Sarah Lotus – Life Couch for Mixed people – https://mixedbloomroom.com/
- Swirl Girl: Coming of Race in the US by TaRessa Stovall – https://taressastovall.com/
- Mostly White, Novel – Alison Hart – https://www.torreyhouse.org/mostly-white
FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM: @willingtolearnpodcast @ashddominguez
Contact: [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Willing to Learn podcast, where we believe that when we learn more, we can do more. I'm your host, Ashley Dominguez. Now, today we have a very, very special guest. This person is fierce. They are equity minded. They are a leader in the mixed race community. I give you Charmaine Fury, a.k.a. Mixed Girl Maine.
00:00:21
Speaker
This is willing to learn.
00:00:49
Speaker
On her website, the self-declared, busiest, mixed-race, bisexual, polyamorous, atheist, comic book nerd, cat mom, mask-making, Gulf Coast Cosmos comic book co-owner, Asian American Podcasters Association, Golden Crane Award-winning podcaster.
00:01:07
Speaker
Woo, yes!
Exploring Race and Identity through Podcasting
00:01:09
Speaker
Charmaine has done over 127 episodes on her Militantly Mixed podcast, a podcast about race and identity from the mixed-race perspective. She and her guests wrestle with mixed-race related topics such as identity, phenotype, mental health, discrimination, relationships, and so much more.
00:01:29
Speaker
Now, because today's episode focuses on the experiences of multiracial people, I think I should let it be known that, well, I am one. So I identify as biracial. My father is Puerto Rican and my mother is white. So that makes me being mixed race, you know, my whole life. And being mixed race is interesting.
00:01:53
Speaker
Because growing up, I don't think I had that consciousness and awareness of what that identity meant. But in my recent years of identity formation, especially now being in the PhD program, I've learned how my perspective and specifically the mixed race perspective impacts
00:02:13
Speaker
who I am, my experiences, the way I move through the world, the way people see me, and so much more.
Multiracial Population and Future Demographics
00:02:19
Speaker
Especially in my scholarship and my research, I've learned that perspective is the lens to which I see the world. It's also important to note that multiracial people are the fastest growing population in the United States. And estimates predict that by year 2040, whites will become the minority population due to the rise of interracial marriages and mixed-race children.
00:02:40
Speaker
So how can we prepare for this future America? Well, today Charmaine will be unpacking how. Let's get to some reminders before we jump into today's interview. So if you haven't done so already, please go and like, review and subscribe to the podcast. Hey, I value your feedback.
00:02:57
Speaker
No, like really, if you're listening, if anyone is listening out there, tell me what you want to hear on this podcast. Tell me about potential guests or ideas for topics. Don't hesitate to reach out, get connected. And if you haven't done so already, go follow at Willing to Learn podcast on Instagram.
00:03:13
Speaker
Also, each week I give listeners a call to action. We learn best by doing people, so I want us to be able to reflect on our knowledge and see how we can put it into action in our families, in our communities, and beyond. So be sure to keep listening until the end of today's episode to hear what the call to action is this week.
Charmaine's Heritage and Identity Journey
00:03:34
Speaker
And now to our guest instructor, Charmaine Fury, AKA Mixed Girl Maine.
00:03:42
Speaker
Well, hi, thank you. I'm really so excited that you agreed to be on. I appreciate the invite. I love like whatever the thing is that made somebody make their show. Right. That kind of stuff. And I like the idea of like, I just want to learn something. Right. Reach out to people so I can learn something. Like, I think that's great. I'm excited. I know. Even before I started the podcast, I found your podcast, Militantly Mixed, a couple of months ago.
00:04:11
Speaker
because I identify as biracial, I'm mixed race. My father's Puerto Rican and my mother is white.
00:04:17
Speaker
And in recent years, I would say the past four or five years, it's become a conversation that I've needed to be able to learn more about and to know how to express myself and know who I am and who else has these experiences. And I've known this obviously my whole life, but it wasn't until at the age of 34 that it's become now like, whoa, what does that really mean?
00:04:46
Speaker
What are the implications that has had on my life? How's that impacting the way I'm moving through spaces? And so I found your podcast. Awesome. I'm glad you did. For me, so I lived a super mixed life. My cousins lived with me. We were all mixed. Both of my parents are biracial. So all my aunts, uncles, everybody was mixed. And we lived in military housing. Oh my gosh, me too. Everybody was mixed. And then I went out into the civilian world and
00:05:17
Speaker
We're all the mixed people. I didn't realize that not everybody was interracial. And so I continue to be my little mixed self, but it just got to a point where I was hungry for what I grew up around. I feel like I was really lucky to grow up around so many mixed people. And I wanted to do the show about two years before I actually did it.
00:05:39
Speaker
I had all the handles. I had the domain. I was just sitting on it, but imposter syndrome, blah, blah, blah. And when I finally started it, it was really just a selfish project for me to get a chance to talk to mixed people. And it turned out to be medicine for me and for whoever ended up coming on with me. And now I'm nearly three years in. I don't know why I've got something on my glasses. It's driving me crazy. I'm nearly three years in. I have 127 episodes, 26 episodes up.
00:06:10
Speaker
My life, I don't know how to function without this now. No, that's awesome. I need to have this conversation. So I'm glad you found a show. I'm glad it resonates and I'm happy to help them be supportive to your show too, however I can. Yes, thank you. So for the listeners, introduce yourself, who you are, what you do.
00:06:30
Speaker
I am Charmaine, a.k.a. mixed girl Maine, and I'm afraid that my cat just meowed in the background. No worries. Sorry. I thought they took a session. Sorry. Let me try that again. I'm Charmaine mixed girl Maine, Fury. I am the host of the Militinally Mixed podcast. I also am a co-host of Blurred Comics and By Furious. And I have a very hungry, angry cat sitting right behind me. I do not know what's going on.
00:06:55
Speaker
I do podcasting just because it's the way that I get my life. It's how I get my community-based life. I need to talk about comics. I have my comic book thing. I need to talk about queerness. I got my queerness thing. And with mixedness being a big part of the center of my whole life, given that both of my parents were biracial and my whole family is mixed and I'm mixed, I needed to have and build a community that I could exist in as a mixed person. Right.
00:07:24
Speaker
I'm really sorry. No, don't worry. I need to move this cat because she is not happy. I apologize. He was supposed to take her. I blame them. No, no worries. So will you explain a little bit more about your makeup, biracial makeup, and was there like an impetus that made you want to explore being mixed-race and starting the podcast on mixed-race identity?
00:07:51
Speaker
So my dad is half black American, half Caucasian British, or as I usually say, colonizer British. And my mom is Japanese, half Japanese, and her American white father is like a hybrid of Scottish, British, Appalachian people from West Virginia. They've been here since the 1700s. I think the earliest records of that family is like 1708 or 1718 or something like that. So they were here before
00:08:20
Speaker
the US was formed and both of my grandfathers were GIs and they were stationed in Japan and England during the 50s, married their wives and brought them here. So my mixness comes from the military to a degree colonization in that respect. And I grew up
00:08:40
Speaker
being Japanese in my grandmother's house and black everywhere else. Both of my parents, although they are both half white technically, I did not grow up in whiteness and I didn't grow up around many white people. The only white person I really grew up around was my British grandmother and because she lived with us for a period of time and so I didn't realize there were so many white people.
00:09:01
Speaker
in the world until I left my family. And we're like, environment. It's like, wow, there's a lot of you out here. Where did y'all come from? Where did y'all come from? Because I grew up in Long Beach and in Sacramento too, but in Long Beach is where my personalities formed. And so we were, it was a very black and Mexican area that I grew up in. So yeah, I didn't know there was so many white people around, but they're out there. And even though I'm halfway, I don't really, I mention it, I don't identify.
00:09:28
Speaker
Okay. That way, because I don't have access, I think, really. Right. Yeah. So I like to say that, you know, even like this side, my logo is like a military style badge because my grandfather's military and without them, I wouldn't be mixed the way that I am. And then I represent my whole self in it, the Japanese rising sun, the black power
00:09:49
Speaker
Fifth fist because I do think of myself as more of a black liberation black militant type of personality And the peace sign because that works for every of my cultures japanese always do the victory sign You know americans do it too and the british use it to say fuck you. So I have my whole a whole thing So you mentioned a little bit about?
00:10:09
Speaker
maybe not always feeling like seen or accepted in certain spaces. Was that part of the reason that you wanted to start the podcast in the first place? Well, my problem was is that until I always knew I was mixed, my parents were different colors. My family was different colors, but I was black. I was black as hell. Like I was a 1990s militant black kid and I did not know that I was not perceived as black outside of my neighborhood or outside of blackness in general.
00:10:39
Speaker
Because even now I can wander through an area of black people that I've never met before and I get the nod and I get the hey little sis and stuff like that. I'm seen
Debunking Myths and Stereotypes
00:10:48
Speaker
in blackness even though I look Dominican. So I never felt uncomfortable except for when I tried to be Asian.
00:10:57
Speaker
Okay. You know, when I tried to try to be Asian, I would find like for Japanese, it's really they don't like mixing. So for them, it's like, you're not Japanese because you're not from Japan. And even my grandmother who's from Japan, but moved to America, she left us. She's not Japanese anymore either. And I didn't understand that. I didn't know how to grasp
00:11:19
Speaker
nationalism versus ethnic identify. And so I would try to be like super Japanese and just not accept it. And then I tried to fit into places like general Asian-ness because I actually don't identify as Asian, identify as Japanese. Asian is a concept that happens here.
00:11:40
Speaker
when you're in Asia, you're not Asian, you're wherever you're from. So I was like, okay, well, let me try to be Asian then. And so I moved in spaces like Asian American class affinity groups in college and stuff like that. And there wasn't a place for me there either, partly because
00:11:56
Speaker
it was already a difficult space for Japanese people to be in, in general, because Japanese assimilate where they go. So none of us knew the language or things like that. Whereas Chinese knew the language, Vietnamese, other than Koreans, like all the South Asians know their language, even if they grew up here and any stations except for Japanese as well. So that was a level of removal. And then on top of it, I'm mixed.
00:12:20
Speaker
another level of removal and on top of it i'm black the worst possible thing to be mixed with from a lot of asian cultures and so that was another layer and i just couldn't feel asian enough and so i found myself realizing like okay if i'm out in the world and there's not black people around i'm mixed i have to be mixed i look like my face but if i'm around black people i get to be black
00:12:45
Speaker
So I had to figure out how to change from being a black girl who happens to be mixed into a mixed girl who happens to be black and try to maneuver the world that way. Now that I do the show and I get to have such a wide range of conversations about mixness on a regular basis,
00:13:04
Speaker
the things that hemmed me up in the beginning that got me to want to talk about this stuff, that got me to want to do this show. I'm releasing now because I'm like, well, my identity is mine. I choose it. And since we're the kind of creature that needs outside validation to make us believe in something about ourselves individually, which is very strange,
00:13:25
Speaker
I needed to pull in right now. That's crazy, right? She's coming for me in my house. I gotta have conversations with someone else and be like, hey, do you approve of my identity, of my choice for myself? Great, now let's keep going. So yeah, what motivates me to do the show, to have done the show and to continue doing the show, is understanding that identity is fluid and that sometimes when I'm not feeling black enough, I'm gonna really need some black
00:13:55
Speaker
I'm going to need black up. When I'm not feeling Asian enough, I'm going to need to figure out what is my access point that is comfortable for me to sit in. And oddly enough right now, it's legitimately just the Asian American podcast. I don't have a third goal other than that.
00:14:12
Speaker
or any of the Asian guests that I've had on the show too. And in whiteness, I don't need it. I didn't grow up around it, so I really don't need it. I have been shot down. But you just share that part. You don't hide it. I don't hide it.
00:14:27
Speaker
I have some things from my British culture that are very much obvious and I have my obsession with tea and how I drink my tea and how I will judge others for how they drink their tea incorrectly because you all do. That kind of stuff, whoever you are, I don't care who you are. Right. I can appreciate that because
00:14:48
Speaker
Even if you might lean to, you know, or feel like you want to identify as one race or you want to identify as two or you want to identify as three based on your familial upbringing, your culture, that is a right that you have as a mixed race individual.
00:15:04
Speaker
Now, I want us to move on to the first section, which is basically dispelling some of the myths. Yes, I'm ready for this. Let's go for the misconceptions. What is the bad information that people have about mixed race people? So that is one of them, right? This idea that you have to choose, you can only be one. Tell me your thoughts.
00:15:25
Speaker
the worst affront for me when it comes to people's perception of mixedness, whether you're mixed or not, is best of both worlds. There is not a phrase under mixedness that I hate more than best of both worlds. And I understand that there are mixed people out there who identify this way and I'm not taking away from their own
00:15:48
Speaker
identity and access point, but for me, what bothers me about this is what's the best of anything that we're mixed with? Like of any monoracial or mono-ethnic situation, what would be the best thing? Okay, I'm black and Japanese. Is the best of both worlds in my case that I might have fast twitch muscles and therefore could be a really good athlete?
00:16:11
Speaker
Well, what if I didn't get that? Okay, then what's the next thing that's black people are really good for? Is it that like you could sit there and do and you end up going down a really possibly disgusting racist direction. I'm not a math Asian like that kind of like there's things like that that that people expect that I've had people come up to me literally asking me, can I run fast?
00:16:35
Speaker
And am I good at math because I'm black and Asian? No, I can't do either one of those things. And now you've almost tried to make me feel bad because I don't fit into the box or the archetype of what you expect me to be. Now I have failed you. And that's such a weight for me to carry because if I have to account for what you're going to think is the best thing of any racial thing,
00:17:02
Speaker
If I have to include my Britishness, what do I think the British are best at? Colonization? I don't want to be the best at that. You know what I'm saying? So there's like so many things that you could end up going down that could be really problematic. And so that's one of the things that I wrote down like right away. No question.
00:17:18
Speaker
best about this idea that mixed people would be the cutest baby. That's actually a different one on my list, but same kind of thing. Only mixed people make good babies. At a genetic level, do you want ethnic and racial mixing? Yes, you do, because that does actually, on a genetic level, help strengthen
00:17:38
Speaker
babies. Are we the cutest babies just because we're mixed? Not necessarily. My baby brother was ugly when he was born. I was so cute. And I tell him every day, but like he grew up cute and that was great. Um, you know, but that's a, that's an important point that from babies, mixed people are objectified, fetishized and treated as an exotic because of being mixed.
00:18:04
Speaker
Right. And so anything that leads into that direction, whether it is the best of both worlds, whether it is exoticizing, I mean, literally the question, where are you from or what are you, for me, always starts with you're so exotic looking. Where are you from?
00:18:21
Speaker
I rarely get the question by itself. It always is prefaced by my exoticism or by them exoticizing me. And what's exotic? Literally everything exotic. My grandmother, my Japanese grandmother named my mother Nancy.
00:18:37
Speaker
And her other sisters, Dorothy and Joyce, because those names were exotic to my Japanese grandmother. Meanwhile, Nancy, Dorothy and Joyce are over here going like, God damn it, I got the stupidest name here in America possible. They hated their names. Yeah. But my grandma viewed it as exotic because movie stars had names like that when she was growing up. So literally everything is exotic to somebody. There's really no good
00:19:04
Speaker
that comes from somebody deciding to exoticize somebody. And so I, oh man, there's no, like when I try to tell people that story about my Japanese grandmother naming my mom and her sisters the way that she did, it messes people up because they can't imagine how they're so centered in whiteness and stuff like that, that they can't imagine that white could be exotic outside. Or else. Exactly. Yeah.
00:19:30
Speaker
So that's one of the, well, that's two I've highlighted, but they're based around the same thing of this, this idea that there is something extra special about us. And yet we're still incapable of owning any part. Like I can't just be black. I can't just be Japanese. I have to exist in mixedness for whoever is on the outside of me. And you know what? When I was in Long Beach, you couldn't tell me I wasn't black.
00:19:56
Speaker
You still can't tell me I'm not black. You know what I'm saying? But I needed to be taught that over time and removal from situations that allowed me to step back and when a person would try to put their versions of my identity on me, I could stop that. So that's a really big one. Yeah, that is. What about the term the tragic mulatto?
00:20:21
Speaker
And for those who aren't sure, mulatto is an old school term to represent someone who is mixed. And I think originally it was black and white, but now it's really just any mixed race person. People use that term. But what that does, it makes the mixed person, in a sense, it makes them have this feeling that any identity struggle you face is a mixed race person, irrelevant.
Societal Perceptions and Identity Challenges
00:20:44
Speaker
We don't want to hear about it. In fact, oh, you think you have it worse?
00:20:48
Speaker
than us or worse than people of color. And I think that's where a lot of misconceptions is I'm not trying to position myself.
00:20:57
Speaker
as being oppressed over a person of color. But what I'm saying is there are identity struggles that mixed race people face that other people who are monoracial do not understand. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the myths that I was going to bring to the table was basically something to that degree, which the tragic little auto falls in on is that just because we're mixed doesn't mean we have something better than whatever the most oppressed thing that we are mixed with is.
00:21:27
Speaker
Okay, if I walked side by side down the street with a dark-skinned black person and I am the way that I look and the way I am, will we be treated differently? Absolutely. Am I still going to experience some form of racism? Yes. Is it potentially as violent or as detrimental as the racism that my darker skin counterpart is going to spread? Probably not. Because I'm not going to sit in the shoes of that darker skin person because I can't live that person's life,
00:21:54
Speaker
whatever bad I get is going to feel bad too. So what I can't do, what mixed people don't have the magic to do is to not feel the effects of racism, to not feel the effects of systemic oppression and things like that. We're feeling a different tier, but we're still feeling it. And so to say, oh, it's not that bad for you because
00:22:23
Speaker
Well, I don't know that though. Like I'm not dismissing that's possible, but what I'm saying is my lived experience doesn't tell me that I shouldn't feel any pain. My experience is telling me, this sucks for both of us, but it sucks differently for you than it just sucks for me.
00:22:39
Speaker
And then for the white appearing, or depending on which word and time period you want to use it, white passing, white presenting, white assuming, white appearing, for that mixed person, their entire identity could be pulled away from them just because this random thing that happened in your genetics where you decided to come out looking white and I decided to come out looking brown. It takes things that we have no power over, our presentation, our mixedness, whatever, and makes it our responsibility
00:23:08
Speaker
the tragic modalato or any of those kind of like sad little mixed person situations that directly erases whether or not my issues are legitimate at all. And I have no say in that if someone decides that for me. So I do think that is
00:23:27
Speaker
Somebody needs to learn. Somebody needs to learn to stop doing it. And that's why I really, I hope people also learn, don't ask like, well, what are you more of? Or like, are you sure you're this? Don't deny someone's race or identity. Don't invalidate it. Yeah. Like, I don't think they realize how hurtful that really is.
00:23:49
Speaker
Especially, I mean, yes. Are there people that try to pose in somebody else's racial identity? Absolutely. We have, and I don't name her because I cannot stand her, but everybody knows what I'm talking about. I do. I do. Someone like her causes a lot of problems for mixed people, even though she's not mixed.
00:24:07
Speaker
But because she has adopted a culture and basically performing blackness that isn't authentic to her, that isn't part of her upbringing or anything like that, people like to equate her to us as if somehow we are posing within this. Like if I'm in a room and I'm speaking to a lot of other people who grew up in the hood like I did,
00:24:27
Speaker
and my accent changes, that's not performative. That's the accent that I grew up with. The accent that I'm speaking with now is a code switch that I had to learn because my aunt forced me to correct and quotation fingers my pronunciation so that I could get a job and all that kind of stuff that she was worried about back then. It was well-meaning, but it was harmful because it erased something about me.
00:24:49
Speaker
So if now I'm speaking and hood speak to somebody and I'm being told I'm posing, you're just now erasing my situation. Or if you equate me to that person who performs blackness, you're saying that she and I are the same. Where I am a legitimate mixed black girl with a black father who grew up in a black space. Exactly. The only thing that makes me different from a darker skin person is the fact that my skin color turned out the way that it did.
00:25:19
Speaker
So I think that idea of you don't have it as tough or if you look white, oh, it's fine. You're great. You don't have any problems because you get to be white. It's wonderful. You can still be kind of like down when we're over here, but when you go over there, you get to do whatever you want. This puts mixed people in this really weird, powerless situation where we don't even have ownership over who we get to be or what spaces we're allowed to maneuver.
00:25:47
Speaker
Right. Cause it feels like that power has been taken and it's being dictated by other people. And so we're constantly looking to the outs to outsiders saying, who, you know, who am I to you? And I've learned that is so dangerous. There's this quote that I like, it's like, you better learn who you are real quick. Because if you don't, you're going to believe what anyone tells you you are. Yeah, absolutely. And it is a danger because you could possibly
00:26:14
Speaker
Erase yourself so far that by the time you know, i'm talking to people on the show from all age ranges There's somebody who could be 68 72 75 who are struggling just as hard with their identity as someone who's 21 or 16 or
00:26:30
Speaker
40 right now, right? Like I'm not some kind of mixed expert or guru or anything like that. I understand my situation. And so to have these conversations with other mixed folks, wherever they're at, one thing that I learned the most of is
00:26:45
Speaker
Oh, shit, we're all going through this. It doesn't matter what age we are. And so the most important thing is for us to be our mixed-ass selves, whatever that means, whatever level, whatever access point we have. If you're a white-appearing black girl, then you do whatever it is. You let people know or don't. Like, do whatever, like, however you need to do it, however you need to be it. That's where, like, it's about you, that we give too much power
00:27:13
Speaker
to other people to decide for us. And my knees hurt and my back hurts. I'm not doing it anymore. You know what I'm saying? Like I've earned arthritis on this mission and I'm not doing it anymore. So what I try to do at least is empower people to own their own identity. So in that respect, if me being a mixed race podcaster is the reason why someone now feels encouraged to speak on their own behalf, I'll take that. That's great.
00:27:43
Speaker
Don't call me and ask me to tell you what it's okay for you to be. Cause I'm going to tell you to be what your mixed essay. Whatever that is for you is the right answer. Yeah. It's a spectrum. It's everybody is different. It's multi-dimensional. There's not a formula and every mixed race person is not going to be the same depending on our differences and the different ways that we were raised and our phenotype and whatnot. Okay. I have another one that I wanted to ask you about.
00:28:12
Speaker
You talked about the best of both worlds. Like there's this idea, I think sometimes that you, if you're mixed, you are more included and that you can cross spaces a little bit easier, but that's a misconception too, because actually we can be excluded from one of our
00:28:29
Speaker
like race identity groups that we- Or all of them. Or all of them. Or all of them on the same day. We don't belong anywhere. It is a weird thing. I do count my own situation as somewhat lucky in that I was embraced by at least one of my groups
00:28:47
Speaker
wholeheartedly. I have very few situations in my life where I was legitimately told you're not black or you're not black enough. I do have some, and it did go into my identity spiral in crisis when I was younger, but
00:29:03
Speaker
very few compared to how much I have that on the white side or the Japanese side. But I can be told by my grandmother, my Japanese grandmother, you're not Japanese, but she doesn't have the context to explain to me Japanese nationalism. So when I'm little, I'm confused because all I know is I come from that lady, that lady's Japanese, but I'm not Japanese.
00:29:25
Speaker
Am I not good enough to be Japanese? You know, so that you go down the spiral, right? And that can happen across the board. If I'm not black enough and not Japanese enough, let's see if the white people will have me. No, because I'm brown, so it's not going to happen. You know, so like this kind of stuff can be really damaging for people. And if all we're supposed to be is how we look, like what our phenotype is, tell me where someone that looks like me fits.
00:29:53
Speaker
Am I black? Am I white? What am I? So now you're telling me I have no place. I understand now, it was a hard-learn lesson, but I understand now that I actually don't have a race category. But I had to learn that because I thought race and ethnicity were the same thing for a long time. Then I understood what words mean and I started to figure out my deal. I understand that I mixed ethnicity, I am not mixed race.
00:30:21
Speaker
necessarily. I have parents that were different races and they have obvious racial categories, but I do not. And that's also another important point that you're hitting is that sometimes multiracial children can feel excluded from their own parents because their parents could be monoracial or they can be biracial and have different races just like you. If you don't look like the people you come from,
00:30:48
Speaker
you're gonna have one struggle. That's gonna be a pretty big struggle. Where do I belong if I don't look like anybody I come from?
00:30:55
Speaker
then you have to take it outside. I don't look like anybody in my neighborhood. And my neighborhood is predominantly fill in the blank. All right. Okay. So I don't belong here, too. So, like, mixed people can really feel excluded. You can feel excluded just walking down the street whether or not someone is actively excluding you because the visual is telling you don't belong here. Once you actually get people to tell you that, which is more often than you are one of us, that is why I am more comfortable in blackness because I get you are one of us more than I don't.
Community and Belonging for Mixed-Race Individuals
00:31:25
Speaker
Thanks for watching
00:31:26
Speaker
I have only gotten you or one of us in an Asian space one time. My whole life, 43 years, and I know exactly what had happened because it had never happened before. And that was at the Asian American Podcasts Award Ceremony, where I tell my story about being mixed and not feeling Asian enough to be Asian. So it was really hard for me to decide to participate in Asian American Podcasts. And then the chat thing filled in with you're one of us, you're Asian enough for me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:31:56
Speaker
And I didn't know that I could have something like that in an Asian environment because I had never had it before. So, yeah, I think children of mixedness, of mixed and families can feel excluded actively and passively all the time. There's very rare instances in which I would say that we would feel included actively and passively all the time.
00:32:23
Speaker
No, and I can speak to that too because my mother, her family was in Alabama, so very white farm kind of country folk. And then my father, my grandparents, they live in Puerto Rico to this day.
00:32:38
Speaker
And even when we would do family trips for holidays, it's like, okay, like this is my family, but like, I don't really, like, we don't vibe like that. Like we're different. Like, okay, I'm half white, but they're white. And I know I'm not that type of white. So, okay. So then I get on a plane, go to Puerto Rico, spend time with them. I'm like, they're speaking Spanish, there's this and that one. I'm like, woo, like what's going on here? Because I don't really sit in here either.
00:33:05
Speaker
It leaves you feeling a little confused. You do have to find, and that's something that with Mel, it's something big that I discovered.
00:33:11
Speaker
I had to create my own community to find the place that I belonged. I found that regardless of what we're mixed with, we tend to have a lot more in common with each other as mixed people than we do with necessarily any of our ethnic groups that we actually come from. Does that mean across the board? No. Are we a monolith? That's another myth. No, we're not all the same. Also, mixed does not just mean black and white. It means all of the things, which would be another myth.
00:33:37
Speaker
Yeah. Check, check, check. But this idea of not belonging from the people we come from because they're both different from each other and then they made us and we're different from them, both of them,
00:33:52
Speaker
We have to find people that get it. And sometimes you can't talk to your siblings. My brother and I can't talk about race. Oh, really? Can't talk about our family race. We can't. I will talk about it till the cows come home. He didn't want to.
00:34:07
Speaker
It gave us a distance between us. So I couldn't go to the only person in the world I knew who was mixed the exact same way as I was. I couldn't go to that person to have these conversations. I had to take it out into the wild. And in doing that, I found and built a community that allows me to have these conversations. And in doing that, I now understand myself and my identity a lot more because I hear somebody else say something. And if I can go, oh my gosh, me too, boom. Yeah, it's freeing. It's freeing. Yeah. And very healing.
00:34:37
Speaker
Okay, so now let's talk about what is true. Like, what do people need to know about mixed race identity? You talked about this earlier, this idea of racial imposter syndrome. This idea that it's hard to belong, whether it's real or it's imagined in our minds, but we have those feelings of exclusion within our communities and that it can make us question who we are and where we belong all the time. So can you talk a little bit about
00:35:05
Speaker
R-I-S or racial impostor syndrome. Oh man. Like how much time you got? How much time you got? I mean imagine being monoracial and not fitting the category that people consider like the stereotypical representation of that race, right? Like if you're not hood, you're not black, right? That happens to monoracial black people that are grew up in the suburbs or whatever.
00:35:31
Speaker
If you're not good at math and you're an Asian, what kind of Asian are you? Stuff like that, right? So we all have these stereotypes that everybody understands. Some of them come from something, some of them don't. Some of them come from a very little thing, but it get exploded across the whole group. Now try to be multiple of those things and not look like any of the things that you come from.
00:35:55
Speaker
How am I supposed to, like, I grew up with pictures of Angela Davis on my wall. I grew up being like a hardcore pro-black, pan-African, like, downward-whitey, all-power-to-the-people kind of person. I look like this. How am I gonna lead the charge? I can't do that. I can't. I may want to, but I can't, or I may have wanted to when I didn't know enough.
00:36:22
Speaker
but I can't do that. So if I can't be the blackest person in the room, who am I? Cause I grew up thinking I was the blackest person in the room. If I also have to say that about the Japanese side, you know, like my behaviors are certain things that I have on the Japanese side. If that doesn't validate my Japanese-ness to an outside Japanese, then who am I? So you're sitting there just like, I literally cannot be enough of anything, which is why I think,
00:36:50
Speaker
as a community, this is where the one little things that I will grant monolithic ideas to. We have all at some time felt not enough, which is so bizarre when you think of it, because we're mixed with so many different things. We're literally more than a monoracial person, but we feel not enough of. We're seeing the half or the quarters. We're not seeing the whole, which is made up of all this extra stuff. So racial and foster syndrome,
00:37:20
Speaker
If you don't look enough like one of your groups, that's a level of removal. If you do look like one of your groups, but you don't code enough like that, you're not behaving correctly, that's a level of removal. So by the time we're all said and done, I'm tri-racial. I got three different people I can't belong to.
00:37:39
Speaker
Or I have three different people that they're going to see me as part of them, whether they like it or not. These are my choices. And it's really hard to get to that point where your back straightens up and you were like, you are going to accept me as one of you. That's tough because you're being.
00:37:56
Speaker
faced with an entire population of people that won't necessarily view you as enough. So yeah, racial and positive central. I mean, try to get over it. Like try to get over it. I try. No, I'm going to fill it sometimes.
00:38:12
Speaker
Right. And actually, there's this study that I was reading. It came out of the University of Utah from Jasmine Norman and Jacqueline Gin. And they surveyed 354 multiracial people in two different studies. And they were asking them about the strength and importance of their multiracial identity and how others perceive their racial identity from their appearance. Like, how often do you racially identify differently than strangers expect you to identify?
Mental Health and Identity Issues
00:38:40
Speaker
And the results show that the strength of a person's multiracial identity was strongly tied to others comments about their appearance. Yeah, I absolutely believe that. So that kind of like goes into the fact of like, if you already are feeling racial imposter syndrome, and then you're going into places and that's being reinforced, like, oh, well, you're not black enough, or you're not Latina enough, or you're not Asian enough.
00:39:02
Speaker
You internalize that. And then you start to question, well, but I am this. But like, but am I not performing it to the way that they think that is worthy or? And then add in something that also happens to mixed race people, because I don't know, it does not matter. Whatever combination of mixed race you are, somehow we all look Dominican or Puerto Rican. Some of you all are lucky enough to be Puerto Rican. But for those of us who aren't,
00:39:31
Speaker
We also get aggressively accepted into something that we're not, like I have had yelling matches with Dominicans in New York for me not being proud of my Dominican character. Like they thought you were trying to hide in the making they were coming for you.
00:39:50
Speaker
Yeah, but it happens here too. So on the west coast, I'm Mexican or Filipino. On the east coast, I'm Dominican or Puerto Rican. So growing up here, having crunchy curly hair in the 90s and stuff like that, you know, the vata style hairdo, Mexicans were like, aren't you proud? And I'm like, but I'm not Mexican. And they're like, but you look like us. You should be proud of that. Well, how do I have ethnic pride and cultural pride about a culture I do not come from or belong to?
00:40:17
Speaker
And then I go to New York and I get yelled at because they're like, Dominican, Dominican. And I'm like, I'm not though. And they're like, you should be proud of it. I'm like, yo, if I could just be Dominican right now, given the amount of acceptance that I have received, aggressive screaming in my face acceptance, I'll flip that switch.
00:40:35
Speaker
But I don't speak Spanish either, so I'm gonna work this out. You know, it is this weird thing, like you get imposter syndrome from what you are. And then you got Dominicans yelling at you like, you're, you will, it looks like the sweetest, most accepted thing ever. And I would be really surprised if I don't end up retiring.
00:40:59
Speaker
I'm older because I am accepted amongst Dominicans and it's just because I'm yellow brown with black features that I look so much like Dominicans. But yeah, imagine like you have to add that to imposter syndrome conversation too is that you can be accepted by people that you don't belong to and they could be really mad at you for not having the same amount of pride as they do.
00:41:22
Speaker
Right. So with that, you have to imagine like there's anxiety, there's stress, you're feeling like an imposter, you're feeling excluded, lacking a sense of belonging. Obviously mixed identity can also affect mental health. Yes. So what are your thoughts on that?
00:41:38
Speaker
Well, I like to openly talk about mental health on my show because I suffer from a couple different forms of depression. I have chronic persistent depression, which is the chemical level. I'm always going to be depressed. Nothing I can do about it. Medication, whatever fine, but no, it's not going to change. And then I have had some pretty significant bouts of major depression, some that have taken a few months to get through, some that have taken a few years to get through.
00:42:03
Speaker
And identity is a part of that too. Like that very much happens. I also have a lot of social anxiety that has bubbled up over the last five or so years that I didn't have before. And I noticed that even as I've grown more confident in my mixed identity,
00:42:21
Speaker
there are random, the smallest, weirdest things that can throw me into a tailspin, which could potentially throw me into a depression spiral. And that could be I had a weird incident. I've talked about this, I think, on my show, but maybe someone else's show. But I was wearing a superhero Black Lives Matter t-shirt. So I had Storm and Bishop and Misty and Luke Cage and like all these blacks in Black Lives Matter, all these black superheroes of Black Lives Matter. And then I was wearing an African print mask because I make masks and I have some African prints.
00:42:50
Speaker
OK, cool. And normally when I walk down the street, black people see me and I'm black and I don't have to worry about it. But during covid, I have to wear a mask. And so when I wear a mask, my blackness disappears. OK. That's actually that's messing with me a little bit because I can't be my black ass stuff on the streets. If you feel like you're not it's not visible enough. Yeah, it's not visible anymore. And and so I'm walking down the street and this girl gives me this look of like she's not OK with me dressed like that.
00:43:18
Speaker
And so I go into my little mailbox place, because I was at my business mailbox place, and I go to grab myself, and as I'm walking back out, she comments, like, why are you wearing that? You're some kind of ally or something like that. And I'm like, no, I was like, I'm black. Like, that's what I did. I was just like, I don't know, I'm black. And she's like, you're black. And so I basically risked COVID by taking my mask off. And she goes, oh.
00:43:45
Speaker
And then I put my mask back on and it was like, carry on. We didn't need any additional conversation. I just took my face mask off and she could see my face and then she accepted my blackness, carry on, put my mask back on. But if she had COVID or anything like that, I now just exposed myself to this virus because I needed to prove.
00:44:06
Speaker
that I was black. Your blackness. And that set was me for days. Were you thinking like, why did I feel like I had to show? Like, I'm mixed girl Maine. I have militantly mixed. I am confident in my mixed-based behavior. Why did I have to show her?
00:44:22
Speaker
improve her a stranger. Why did I have to do this to this random stranger on the street? And so we're talking about mental health that starts to eat away at you all day. And so you might be doing something else and then suddenly I would just think of her and I'd be like, why did I need to prove it to her? And then I'd go back about what I was doing, making my little spaghetti. Why did I need to do that? So that kind of stuff like really chips away at you. That was probably one that was a little bit more of a significant situation, but there's smaller little microaggressions that happened too that
00:44:53
Speaker
it gets in there and it's that little voice that tells you you're not enough or that little voice that tells you like how dare you try to claim.
00:45:02
Speaker
this thing that you're not enough of, you don't have the rights to. And so there's this, I think the aspects of mental health that become important to pay attention to when you're already too old for like developmental shifts is turning that voice off, reminding yourself that it's fine. Whatever you are is fine. It's just what it is. You can't do anything about it. You just have to live with it.
00:45:26
Speaker
Whether it's learning to live with it or accepting yourself or whatever, you just have to do it and hopefully that helps you get through your worst identity situations without deteriorating and adding to your depression anxiety. For that situation, my anxiety was really high because I felt the need to be black enough for her acceptance, right?
00:45:46
Speaker
The other thing is, monoracial parents raising mixed-race children and raising the fact that those mixed-race children are dealing with anything different than either of the parents' experience. And so now I think mental health being a focus on how do you raise
00:46:02
Speaker
solid mixed race kids, I think this stuff needs to happen at a really young age. I think parents, interracial couples need to be in therapy and counseling so that they know how to identify their biases, so that they're not putting that on their kids, so that by the time their kids are going through their identity crisis at 13, they at least know that race doesn't have to be one of their identity crisis. I mean, it can't be.
00:46:24
Speaker
but hopefully they'll know that they can be comfortable in whatever their deal is. Because those conversations happen young on the playground. Yeah. Children are naming, oh, you're brown, you're black, I'm white. It's, you know, it starts there. And then as you grow up, you start being able to fill out your own documents and being able to check a box.
Race Selection on Census Forms
00:46:45
Speaker
You wouldn't think that the smallest little thing of just filling out paperwork,
00:46:50
Speaker
could create a roadblock or stress or anxiety in your day of like, wait, yeah, still to this day. When I look at that thing, I have to make decisions that are both political and internally good for my mental health. If you check a two or more box on a medical thing, that's important because they need to know what kind of things you might deal with as a black and Japanese person. There's things that I deal with on the black side, potentially things that I deal with on the Japanese side, potentially that can be informing my health, my actual physical health.
00:47:20
Speaker
But on a census, even though they have the mixed race category, you don't want to check that because that's going to default funds towards whiteness.
00:47:28
Speaker
it's designed that way. They didn't mean to when they fought for it, but that's how- So explain that. A default funds towards whiteners. So basically the way people select their race on the census decides what the greater population of the area is and therefore funds are distributed according to that. The problem is that a lot of mixed people and or immigrants that might have a
00:47:52
Speaker
unclear status of documentation might check something that they're not or check something that they think is a safer bet because they're concerned about the political and or legal repercussions that can happen on them. So if they check white
00:48:08
Speaker
Like if they're a black white biracial person, if they check white, they're allowing whiteness to dominate that area. If they're an undocumented immigrant and they're afraid to be marked, they may check white, which ends up taking funds away from Mexican communities. For a mixed race person, you don't count like
00:48:28
Speaker
That fucking sucks to say, because I'm a mixed person who was like, you're going to count me. But literally on the census, you do not count. So anything that doesn't count, reverts to the dominant population. The dominant population is white. Boom. I'm in a part of West LA that is predominantly Asian. Well, it's a mix between white and Asian. In that case, I have the opportunity to check Asian.
00:48:54
Speaker
so that funds are more heavily routed towards the Asian as a dominant population. But because I identify more as Black, I might want to click Black because
00:49:04
Speaker
I also want black people to get funds sent down. So that box means a lot of different things. Why can't I speak? A lot of different things to me, depending on what the circumstance. If I'm in a health situation, check all the boxes. If I'm in a political or potentially legal situation, check the most oppressed because that's the thing that is going to help that community or help that area over time.
00:49:30
Speaker
But literally, if you are mixed on a census and you check mixed, you have erased your count. Oh my goodness, I have never heard that. I learned this from one of the people who actually fought to get the mixed box on the census who has now realized what happened to the system and decided she never checks it now. And I've done some more research since then and it was like, oh, they don't mess around. If it's unclear or they can't figure it out,
00:49:59
Speaker
You become white. Good to know. Good to know. Please don't have a sound bite of me mixed romaine saying mixed people don't count on a sentence. I must include me. Please count me.
00:50:22
Speaker
Yeah. Oh my goodness. Okay. So because we're getting towards the end, let's play a little game before I let you go called in my expert
Language, Labels, and Identity
00:50:30
Speaker
opinion. So basically I'm going to list off some topics and I want you to give your opinion, your hot take your reaction to the matter. This could be, this is good because, or I disagree with this, or this is bad. Please stop everyone. Like right now, stop. Okay. Number one, using food as a metaphor for race. So like the coconut, the banana, Oreo, apple, et cetera.
00:50:52
Speaker
I am so mixed on this topic. Oh, you're mixed on his topic. My whole deal is mixed. I know. I want to say, please stop doing this, everybody, because it reduces us into like these stupid inhumane categories.
00:51:07
Speaker
And I don't often find white ways, besides vanilla, I don't often find white ways in which food is used for them in a way that affects. But I think this plays into the exoticizing and eroticizing of brown and yellow bodies. If we're caramel,
00:51:23
Speaker
if we're chocolate, you know, if we're mocha. Why are you gonna say like that? Well, cause usually it's kind of sexual, right? Like people are like my cinnamon queen and stuff like that, right? So like there's aspects of it that are cute, right? Like what? Put those same words in a white mouth.
00:51:43
Speaker
And now it becomes disenfranchising. So I want to say that mostly don't do this. That being said, I have a couple of friends that we refer to each other like that. And so it's one of those things of like,
00:51:58
Speaker
You know, then it's okay, but flip it over to the Asian side and it gets way worse for me because you're either a jungle Asian, a banana, Southeast Asian, or you're, I don't really know what they use for, oh, I think lemon can be an option, but various things with yellow become an issue with Asianness that isn't an issue in blackness. I personally don't mind being
00:52:25
Speaker
yellow if I call myself that. So if I say I'm black and yellow or if I rock black and yellow because I'm repping for my people, that doesn't bother me. But put that in a white mouth and suddenly it feels gross. And it feels different. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, um, yeah, I'm going to say, please stop doing this. I'm also going to say that when the door is closed, if someone's a sexy caramel, there's sexy caramel. I feel terrible.
00:52:53
Speaker
Okay next the term racially ambiguous is this problematic or not? I don't think it's problematic and it's one that I'm comfortable in using because I think for me that is the case. I think I am racially ambiguous and I think somebody wants to refer to me as a race and can't
00:53:11
Speaker
then that's the best way for them to say it without them really pissing me off. Because most of the time they're gonna hit something like, you look like a, and then it'll be something terrible, like a diet coke-like.
00:53:27
Speaker
You know what I'm saying? Like you're not black enough or whatever. So I think if I allow for racially ambiguous, that removes the temptation from somebody to try to come up with their own thing. What you don't want to do is allow monoracial people from a dominant culture in your area to decide for you what to call you.
00:53:48
Speaker
So yeah, I think I'm okay with it. I think a lot of us, or maybe not, it depends on how we look, but those of us who are in the ambiguity part of mixedness, we really struggle with like confidence and placement and stuff like that. So if we name the problem is that we are ambiguous, I think it helps us deal with, it's calling it what it is. Like I'm not,
00:54:13
Speaker
Rather than telling somebody I'm not enough of, if I tell them I'm ambiguous, it gives me a little bit more power back. Okay. Next, let's see what we got here. Using fractions to describe racial identity. That's part of the journey, but it's not where you end usually.
00:54:37
Speaker
It's definitely part of the journey. I went for a very long time referring to myself as a quarter this, a quarter that, an eighth this, an eighth that. And the problem with that is that my ethnic fractions don't match my identity. I may be technically a quarter black, but I'm predominantly black because of the way I was raised and the people that I grew up around. I'm technically half white,
00:55:03
Speaker
you couldn't plot me in anywhere in Whitedom and I would feel comfortable. I would always be aware of my brownness. So I think while it is a part of the early stages of you figuring out who you are and your identity, percentages and fractions do start giving you a little bit of power in the beginning, but as you keep going, it starts to reduce your power depending on how you identify or who you identify with the most. And this is where like a DNA test or something like that might be also very damaging in that like,
00:55:32
Speaker
if you're mixed with black, you might find out your black is really small because rapists and slavers and stuff like that. And in those cases, I think it's just okay to be like, who did you grow up around? Where do you feel comfortable?
00:55:51
Speaker
that's bigger than your percentage. That's more important. Okay. So you might originally start using that like, Oh, I'm half and half or whatever. But eventually you're saying you try to move away from that and just maybe talk about your, what your mother is and what your father is.
00:56:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think the way that you can get away from it where it doesn't cause any more pain but actually gives you a little bit of empowerment is when you come up with the name that represents what you are. Like me, we've called ourselves Black and E since before Chris Tucker did it in Rush Hour. Also,
00:56:24
Speaker
Chinese people that are mixed with Black wouldn't be Blackanese, they would be Blasian. Black un-nese, un-nese, Japanese, we're the only one that has an un-nese, so that's why. It works for me, it gives me a little bit of power, it gives me a place to create my own category that I have power in. And I agree because there's a wholeness, there's a togetherness. There's a wholeness in it.
00:56:44
Speaker
It takes your pluses and puts it into one thing. And I love when I find out what people's hybrid terms are. Philoblino, bluish, neblu, wayshen. Whatever the thing is, it actually does give people a sense of, I'm this thing. So that if you meet somebody else that is also that thing, yay, we're this thing. Yeah. And I think there's a little bit more power in a hybrid term than referring to yourself as a percentage.
00:57:14
Speaker
Right. That being said, 100% part of the journey, go through that shit and work your way out of it. Okay. It was similar to fractions though. There's the term half breed. Oh, okay. I need everybody to stop this.
00:57:28
Speaker
In my expert opinion as a mixed race podcaster, I need everybody to stop this abruptly. Why? Because it puts us in the same, it allows for the mentality of people that are stuck in the idea that chattel slavery was an okay thing, it puts us back there. Because literally they read
00:57:50
Speaker
they partnered people together to create the best specimens that would do the best work in different places, like the field or the thing, whatever, right? So they were literally breeding people, which is why that even after only 400 years, you have differences in the Black bodies in America than Black bodies in Africa, you know, because they actively put
00:58:13
Speaker
taller, bigger, stronger, faster, twist muscles together in one people. And then they kind of stopped breeding the people that didn't fit those categories. Half breed is an extension of that. It puts us in an other. It just automatically others us in a way that I don't think mix does. And I know that some people feel a kind of way about mix. I don't, it gives me power, but breed tells me you don't think of me as human. Any of those terms,
00:58:40
Speaker
Mulatto, I feel the same about that because it's about, it comes from mule. Mule is a hybrid of two animals and it can reproduce. I know that there are people, and I'm friends with people who have power in mulatto. I also know that in parts of South America, mulatto is the term. And so I'm not going to try to take that away from anybody because if that's the term, but that kind of word does the same thing to me. Hathread, mongrel, mulatto, anything that does that separates you from human.
00:59:10
Speaker
Okay, so no more half-breed for all of you out there. Do not use that term. It's definitely, yeah, it's a deficit perspective. It hurts. And I use it when I'm describing what happened to my family. So like when the military tells my Japanese grandma, don't teach your children Japanese because it's already bad enough they're half-breeds, direct quote.
00:59:29
Speaker
Right. Or at least if not direct crew, that was what they meant. But I won't use it to describe any of us. Okay, next. Gatekeepers to race identity. So this, for those who are listening, this could be someone who is monoracial, but essentially they're trying to protect their certain race identity. And they're basically telling people who is or who is not.
00:59:52
Speaker
Yes. Again, everybody needs to stop this right now because that puts us back into the idea that we're monolith. And if you can't recognize the diversity across even monoracial groups or monocultural groups, you're missing a lot of stuff, right? So, oh gosh. And there's one that's happening in a group that I've been right now that I'm not going to put on blast, but it's a whole thing of
01:00:18
Speaker
Who am I to be the person that decides for the rest of us what we are allowed to claim? Where I think that's okay is if it's in uplifting and empowering things. If I say, be your mixed-ass self, and that means whatever your comfort level is with your mixedness is right,
01:00:37
Speaker
I'm not gay, I'm not telling you what you're allowed to identify. I'm telling you free yourself to identify that. That's open, right? If I'm saying you're not black unless you XYZ, I'm deciding for the rest of us what gets to be black and that's not okay. Who are you to decide that? Like if we have a committee meeting that is large enough of the population that we all agree, I'll be down for that.
01:01:06
Speaker
There's some things that I think you run the risk of allowing for a lot of colorism in there. You run the risk of allowing for potentially sexism and ageism and ableism. There's all kinds of isms that can open up as a result of deciding for the population what it is. The other part is just, why is it so important if a mixed person identifies a certain way if a monoracial person is saying, we don't really like that? Why is that important to that monoracial person to keep us from talking?
01:01:35
Speaker
Right. I actually, yeah, I saw a thread today talking about Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, the tennis players and how basically that it's like, well, I want someone who's all black to win or to represent and, you know,
01:01:52
Speaker
Like it dilutes it in some way,
Public Figures and Mixed Identity
01:01:54
Speaker
shape or form. Well, I'm going to tell you what, with someone like Osaka, she has dealt with this in a big public way on all sides of her heritage. Japanese are very exclusive people. So they're not comfortable with her being the champion for them. And they'll say things like, not all of them, of course, but I've been on a thread about this where someone says, well, I don't think of her as Japanese anyway.
01:02:19
Speaker
She literally chose to represent Japan in her sport versus representing Haiti or America or anything like that. But someone decides that just because she's a little bit browner than the average Japanese that she doesn't get to be Japanese enough. And then on the flip side, you're going to put her up against a black queen like Serena and not go for Serena, then you must hate black people. That's not a thing either. For me,
01:02:44
Speaker
I'm seeing two athletes at the height of their skill and talent and honestly don't care which way that goes because they are both amazingly talented. One's kind of the past and one is the future but they're both contemporary. It's important to get a chance to see that. I'm also super excited that I'm getting to see two brown ladies
01:03:05
Speaker
on a grand state in a historically white sport well in a historically white sport the fact that Serena will crip rock when she does good and she's from Compton which is the neighboring neighborhood neighboring city to where i grew up in i'm all about that shit the fact that there's also a black and e's out there which represents me i'm all about that i'm winning
01:03:26
Speaker
No matter what. Yeah, that's how I would see it. It's winning on either side. But then there's this, that inter-racism, right? Or these gatekeepers of like, oh, you're not enough of this or enough of that. If you feel like you have to settle for the win of like, all right, fine, the half one, you know, one. Yeah, it's still Brown. I don't know what to do about that for a person. Like that's going to be your thing. Fine, go ahead and be that. But that's not okay. Just so you know, type of thing. But for me,
01:03:55
Speaker
And I don't mean this in an anti-white way. I mean this in a pro-people in general way. The more times I get to see multiple brown people doing something, that is when my TV screens and my magazines and my movie screens and all this stuff has been filled with multiple white people always doing stuff together, that's how I'm going to start feeling some normalcy.
01:04:20
Speaker
I don't care if the entire US open was all black, yellow, and brown people and not a stitch of white people, because that is what my world looked like growing up. You know what I'm saying? So we see all this whiteness on TV and we see all this stuff and we think that's real, but then you walk outside of your own neighborhood and that might not be how it is for you. I didn't see white people regularly when I was growing up.
01:04:44
Speaker
And when I saw them, it was a shock. It was like, oh my God, I was lying in the neighborhood. That was my reality. So TV didn't connect. It didn't make sense to me. TV didn't reflect my reality. So yeah, people need to just nod and be excited that you're looking at two brown people on the stage, on a grand global stage at the same time, both being excellent. Right. Okay. Amen. Last one.
01:05:12
Speaker
Our new Madam Vice President Kamala Harris, she is black and she is South Asian. But there seems to be some identity erasure going on or people only wanting to talk about one side. Thoughts? I'm also mixed on this because I get it. I get that that's gonna be it. I would be equally excited to see South Asians claim her as much as black people claim her. And I would accept both of those things happening.
01:05:42
Speaker
But I think we're going with Kamala, what we're dealing with mostly is who she identifies with the most. I do think she probably similarly to me is she's black in the world and Asian at home or Asian at a particular side of her family's home. Because I was Japanese when I got to go to my grandma's house, but I was black all the other times.
01:06:02
Speaker
So I think people need to accept her as a mixed race woman because that is what she is. And the fact that she represents and talks about both of her sides, I think is something we should pay attention to. Again, allowing us to decide for us what our identity is.
01:06:18
Speaker
That being said, she reps blackness in a way that is a little bit more obvious and a little bit stronger than the way she reps for her South Asianness. She was a member of a sorority. She went to Howard. She wears chucks. She's from Oakland.
01:06:35
Speaker
Trust that she understands what her black identity is, even though her family is her father is from Jamaica. She grew up in the U.S. And so her blackness is going to be determined by the dominant black culture around her. You know, if she rocks a sorry, I need people to shut the fuck up and let her rock the damn sorry.
01:06:55
Speaker
Like, I don't care. I don't care if she rocks a sard with chucks. Leave her the fuck alone. That is what she is, you know? And that's the unfortunate thing is you do see rhetoric that leans in either direction of either like, oh, this is great. We have our first black vice president or we have our first Southeast Asian vice president. But then you also kind of like, well, she ain't all black. Yeah.
01:07:20
Speaker
You're going to get that too. I felt this way about Obama as well. That's true. That's a good point. I'll say two different things. With Obama, my problem was that he literally was a biracial African American. I am not an African American. I am a black American. The difference is I didn't have a gateway or a bridge to Africa.
01:07:42
Speaker
I don't know how long my arm is back home. I know where my family descends from, but that's all I know. I know that we're from Gabon. That's all that I know. I don't know when my last relative stepped foot on that land. So I am black. Obama was African-American. He also was not raised black. He was raised by a white family in Hawaii and in Indonesia.
01:08:07
Speaker
So he does not represent blackness for me, even though he looks black, red, biracial. He is a biracial African-American. The only person that literally for me deserves African-American as a title because he had an African father and an American mother.
01:08:24
Speaker
Right. So when he would code switch into his southern drawl thing, that is so inauthentic to me because he didn't have access to American blackness until he was in college. That was when it started to happen for him. So it feels really inauthentic for him. Does it make me dislike him? No. I got good things about him and I got bad things about him like I do with any person. If it's Obama, Bush, Clinton, it's Harris.
01:08:53
Speaker
We always do this. We say Hillary instead of Clinton. We say Kamala instead of Harris. We need to, if it's less names, it's less names. Okay. I need to start doing this. So yeah, with Obama, because I would never think to call him a Brock. With Obama, that was the feelings that I had for Obama. With Harris, she is from Oakland, which is a blackity black city.
01:09:13
Speaker
It's very similar to the city that I grew up in, Long Beach. She grew up in a predominantly Black space, and even though her family's Jamaican, her identity would be closer to Black American. So she might incorporate her South Asian heritage in a lot of her things the same way that I do my Japanese stuff. But her dominant culture, her dominant heritage is Black, which is why I think it is okay for us to accept her in that way, and at the same time continuing to acknowledge that she's a biracial, Asian woman.
01:09:41
Speaker
And so for me, if South Asians want to say she's South Asian, dope. Black people want to say she's black, dope. People want to say she's mixed, double dope, because that's more accurate. But I don't think we should try to make her feel bad or put her in a box of like, you need to... I mean, imagine us having to rep both sides at all times, or both sides at all times. Your head was spent.
01:10:03
Speaker
You code switched throughout the day. So I might wake up Black, but I'll eat lunch Japanese, and I'll drink tea British, and then I'll go back to being Black. You know what I'm saying? So I think it's okay to give each community the opportunity to claim her as long as they don't say, I don't see her as whatever the opposite side is. Right. Yeah, acknowledge all of her. Yeah, that's all we want. That's all we want. We just want to be seen for what we are. That's it.
01:10:32
Speaker
Okay, well, do you have any resources that you want to share? Books, music articles, anything that you think listeners who are mixed race or who maybe want to learn more about mixed race identity, where they can go?
Resources for Understanding Mixed Identity
01:10:43
Speaker
Absolutely. We talked a little bit about mental health. So I, and I talk about like the reports of raising mixed race kids as a resource for that. There is Dr. Jen Noble, who is, I think her website is dr. Jen psych.com. She has a program for teens right now for mixed race teens, where she's, you know, assisting mixed race teens with their identity. She also has, I believe she does some work with interracial families and so like that in terms of how to.
01:11:09
Speaker
guard the mental health of your mixed race teens. There's also a life coach, Sarah Lotus, who has a program called the mixed blown room, where she has two programs, once for interracial families, raising mixed race kids. And she also has a mixed race confidence thing, which is about an eight to 10 week program that you go through where you work both with her solo and with a cohort to deal with whatever identity things you might have going on.
01:11:34
Speaker
I did participate in that program. I piloted her mixed race confidence thing. And let me tell you, messed me up because I did not realize I was dealing with a particular problem that I was addressing in that group. And when it came to light, I basically
01:11:50
Speaker
Like I had to go through it. I had to really suffer for a few weeks while I worked my way through it. And I called on a second. I thought I was helping you out. You know what I'm saying? Exactly those feelings. But my cohort also had some things that were aligning with my issue. And so we were really like supporting and helping each other.
01:12:08
Speaker
through it. So that is also a good program. And then in terms of books, I say both, I'll say a memoir and a novel. Teresa Stovall's memoir, Swirl Girl, Coming of Race in the USA is a memoir about her growing up from the civil rights era to now and dealing with what it was like to be black, but mixed and now mixed, but black.
01:12:32
Speaker
So that is an important one. You can go to Teresa Stowell dot com to get that book. And then a novel. The reason why I'm saying a novel is because we also need fiction in our lives, too. And there's a book called Mostly White, written by Alison Hart, which is about four generations of mixed race women, black, indigenous and Irish heritage. It's a fictionalization of what she believes her family history to be based off of what research she could do. She's filling in gaps.
01:13:00
Speaker
fictionally with what she has been able to find. And let me tell you, that was the very first time I got to read a book where I knew mixedness was the center of the story. So I knew going in, I wasn't just surprised, like, oh, random mixed-race character. Right. Yeah. The whole thing was about that. And it was a real emotional experience getting a chance to just get to like, oh, shit, that's, I have this.
01:13:21
Speaker
like this there's a character in a book that that yes exactly like we need that kind of representation too so a fictional book a memoir the life coaching situation and the mental health resources those are the four things that i think um
01:13:35
Speaker
Well, amazing. Thank you. I'll be sure to put those in the show notes and people can have access to that. But tell listeners where they can find you all about you self-plug. So, thank you. All right. How much time you got? No. Militarily makes the podcast about race and identity from the mixed race perspective. We're on all of the podcatchers, Stitcher, iTunes, Google, everything. You can also follow me on all of the socials at
01:13:58
Speaker
Militantly mixed I have the handle across Facebook Instagram and Twitter my other shows blurred comics is a comic book and nerd perspective from mixed black blurs and then also bi-furious because I'm an angry bisexual And it's on hiatus on at the moment, but it is gonna come back But we did have a couple of really good episodes before I went on hiatus and you can also purchase comic books and graphic novels from my comic book store Gulf Coast cosmos and
01:14:27
Speaker
dot com. What doesn't she do? I do all kinds of shit. But but yeah, you can do that. You can go there for comics or graphic novels. We are black owned. We're Asian owned. We're queer owned. And we're going to be based in Houston, Texas. But at the moment, we're just online until the Rona lets us go outside to play. And then if you want to buy cloth masks, you can go to masks by Maine dot com. Enter the promo code first 100 and get 10 percent off on any cloth masks. Look at that. I am giving deals. I love it.
01:14:58
Speaker
Well, thank you so much. I really do appreciate you giving so much wisdom today. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It was fun. And hopefully we can do this again soon. Yeah, you can come on my show next. Yeah, that'd be fun. Okay, thank you. One problem. Whoa, y'all, that was fire. Wait, do people say fire anymore?
01:15:20
Speaker
Hashtag millennial, hashtag side part for life. Okay, okay, okay. Here are my three quick takeaways for the audience for this week. Number one, words hit differently depending on whose mouth they come out of.
01:15:35
Speaker
Choose your words carefully and appropriately based on your own cultural and ethnic identity. Not everyone can get away with saying the same things. Acknowledge it, respect it, embrace it. With that being said, it brings me to my number two takeaway for this week.
01:15:52
Speaker
eliminate deficit language from your vocabulary. Words like half breed, food metaphors, tragic mulatto, not okay. In fact, they're dehumanizing and they perpetuate a deficit perspective about mixed race people and their existence.
01:16:09
Speaker
A half breed is referring to an animal. Food metaphor is talking about food. Number three, and this one is for all the racial gatekeepers out there. Again, when you are, in your mind, attempting to protect or be selective of who has membership to a certain ethnic identity, what you're really doing is narrowing the margins for what that identity entails. This also promotes damaging narratives and hurtful stereotypes.
01:16:35
Speaker
Everyone is not the same. It goes back to this level of enoughness. We are not a monolith. No, we have many identities. And while we may experience significant overlap with others of similar backgrounds, we still present them uniquely, no matter what. This is a strength, not a weakness.
01:16:56
Speaker
For more information and resources on the subject matter, look at the show notes for today's episode. Please share your own resources in the comments, and if you haven't done so already, please go like and subscribe to the podcast to stay in the know and help grow our willing to learn community. The call to action this week is a free choice. Say what?
01:17:17
Speaker
Yes, a free choice means you get to choose. Go check out one of the resources to learn more about the mixed race experience. Don't be afraid to bring it up in conversation with someone you know and share what you learn.
01:17:29
Speaker
Also, post about it. That's right. Use the hashtag willing to learn podcast and tag our IG handle so I can follow all your good work out there. Hey, we're not here to be stingy intellectuals. No, no, no, no. Let's assume a collective responsibility and share the knowledge with others. This too is a way to help change the world. And remember, when we learn more, we do more and can be more for ourselves and others. See you guys.