June 2003
Here’s a typical encounter: I walk into a store, or meet someone at a party, and we engage in the usual pleasantries. Then, as though we are now intimate—for it is nothing if not an intimate question—I am asked, “Where do you come from?” I look different, unplaceable. Together my dark hair, aquiline features, dark eyes, and tan skin, combined with my American bearing and fluid English, make me a little weird. I’m at least intriguing enough for complete strangers to barge into my personal history.
I am a half-breed, a mutt, a hybrid. I’m the melding of two human populations that rarely, if ever, breed together. As far as I know, my sister is the only other example of this rare mixture on earth. So the reaction to me is natural. Upon meeting someone new, we unconsciously locate that person in a set of categories that includes gender, race, age, and class. We use these social dimensions to establish our relationships to new people. When people meet me, they get stuck with a question mark in the “race” category.
I belong to a wave of the randomly heritaged, the obscurely mixed—there is no ready name for us—that originated in the cultural and sexual thaw of the 1960s. We’re a multicolored baby boomlet that has grown up in a world whose attitudes towards us have been changing our whole lives. Now, as adults, we’re helping to create a culture of acceptance—because we need to.
Shared Absence
Risa Yanagisawa is another member of the wave. Her father, of Japanese ancestry, and her mother, of Belorussian, met in university in the 1960s and later married. Strongly independent, they bucked both the well-meaning objections of their friends (“The children won’t know what they are!”) and a more malevolent social pressure against miscegenation. Now a filmmaker in Los Angeles, their daughter Risa is working on a documentary exploring the lives of the randomly mixed.
“I decided to do the film when I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area,” she says, “and just walking down the street on any day I would see four or five people of mixed race—people with an interesting look, people who had similar features to me or my brother.” Growing up in Chicago, she had always had a sense of radical racial uniqueness, and finding others similarly outside the established categories intrigued her.
“I put out an ad looking for people of mixed race and got 200 responses in the first week!” Yanagisawa recalls. “I had been thinking primarily about people with mixed Asian ancestry, but I got responses from people who were mixed in ways that had never occurred to me.” Goan-Portuguese-Chinese, Colombian-Sephardic-Punjabi, Lithuanian-Tamil, Japanese-Lebanese-German: A collection of exotic specimens quickly assembled around the project.
I was one of them, and at a meeting Risa held, I found myself finally in a group of people with whom I could discuss my special flavor of outsider identity.
It’s a strange idea, collecting people together because they share an absence of sharing. This negative space leads many of the mixed to reject the very idea of race and the possibility of classifying themselves as part of a group. It was uncanny, at that first meeting, how thoroughly we all felt somehow post-racial, as if being rejected by the mainstream system of racial classification required us to reject the system itself.
Hypodescent
Racial barriers have long been the absolute boundaries of American social life. In the 1960s, the very existence of people like me was therefore a challenge to the fundamental rules of society. As a child, I was constantly asked if I had been adopted. When I said no, even in my tender years I could recognize consternation in people’s voices. I was the living embodiment of their base fears, bringing to mind obscene images of dark and light flesh pressed together in violation of every taboo.
It was a world that actively discouraged miscegenation—race mixing. A 1958 Gallup poll found that 94% of White Americans opposed interracial marriage, which explains why it was illegal in 19 states until 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled the anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. Back then, breaking the taboo against interracial relationships could elicit responses as extreme as mob lynchings.
It’s no secret where this American obsession with race came from. A society based on subjugation and genocide—as the United States certainly was during its formative years—required racist social structures to keep itself going. Today, we’re still living with the historical echoes of a program created two centuries and a dozen generations ago.
As a result, we manifest a race neurosis that finds its fullest expression in our culture’s irrational stance on African ancestry. African blood is somehow a dark stain that eclipses all other heritages; it is the one insoluble drop swirling around in the melting pot.
In the nineteenth century, when the matter of race was first raised in the census, the strictly defined categories derived from the fine shadings of hypodescent (the one-drop rule), with groupings for different types of mulattos based on ratios of African and European ancestry. Quadroons were one-quarter African, for example, and octoroons one-eighth—separated forever from the halls of White American society by a single great-grandparent.
All that Apply
In the past few decades, however, this established order has been in rapid flux. New faces on the American scene, and a new concept of justice stressing the inherent equality among individuals, have opened a multitude of ways to entertain the notion of “race.” In 1950, the US Census gave only three options: White, Black, and Other. By 1990, it featured sixteen choices, with ten in the “Asian and Pacific Islander” division. And in 2000, we saw a radically new option: “Check all that apply.”
Having moved on from the rigidly defined categories of the past, today’s system, with its multiplicity of options, supplies no guidance on how to interpret race. As a census-taker, it’s your call.
This refusal to define race as anything other than what the Census Bureau calls a “socio-political construct” is not only in tune with laissez faire postmodernism, but is also consistent with the nature of the census. The language it uses—from octoroon to all that apply—encodes the ideas of race that we all carry. As these ideas change, so changes the census.
“All that apply” simply reflects the inevitable. How could a nation of immigrants from around the world (the majority nonwhite after 1965) undergo a sexual and cultural revolution without a lot of miscegenation? A generation of mutts, of metissage, has emerged as a result, and old notions of race just don’t work anymore.
Many mixed race people therefore see the latest census as the next step toward abolishing the very notion of racial identity.
Advocates of this abolition exchange ideas in the Interracial Voice (www.interracialvoice.com), an online journal that views race mixing as the key to a better America, as a way to move from “the race-obsessed present [to] an ideal future of racelessness.” In his Declaration of Racial Independence, Interracial Voice contributor Nathan Douglas, a multiracial activist who testified before Congress about census categories, systematically rejects every facet of race. He declares that “racial loyalties are a threat to human rights,” and he denies the objective existence of “race.” Also writing in the Interracial Voice, Liam Martin classifies racial identities as “belief systems” that are a form of personal expression, rather than an inalienable aspect of one’s being.
This turns the tables on race in America: Instead of forcing the mixed-race to conform to outmoded notions of race (something we cannot do without a measure of self-loathing), we must force America’s notion of race to reflect the modern face of the nation.
For the first time, the generation of the randomly mixed born in the 1960s and 1970s feels a fierce pride in its diversity of heritages. Prior to the cultural awakening of the 1960s—the very awakening that made it possible for many of our parents to create families—mixed race heritage had been a source of shame and denial. It was called a pathology, unhealthy for the children of such unions. Ah, the children, poor things! Inviolate racial boundaries were all for their sake.
Well, here we are, all grown up and inexplicably well adjusted. We’re the living embodiment of an ongoing cultural sea change in the way America thinks about race, and we’re not going away. Our parents were the revolutionaries; they made the conscious decision to break down racial barriers. All we’re doing is living, but in so doing we’re making our parents’ revolutionary vision the American reality.
Hapa Nation
A wholesale rejection of race is only one reaction to a life of mixed heritage. Instead of abolishing racial categories, the Hapa movement proposes a new one. If the Interracial Voice followers are the mutts, cavorting outside the dog show of racial politics, the Hapa movement is the upstart new breed.
The movement takes its name from a native Hawai’ian word meaning, generically, “half.” Japanese workers in Hawai’i adopted the term “Hapa Haole” in the nineteenth century as a derogatory term for people of mixed Japanese and European ancestry—hypodescent again. This was the meaning when it came to the mainland as part of the Japanese American argot. But now hapa is evolving into a term of pride for people of part Asian or Pacific Islander ancestry.
This movement is radically inclusive within a rigidly defined societal space. Wei Ming Dariotis, a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, and herself of mixed ancestry, describes Hapa as “Anyone with a mixed heritage that includes Asian or Pacific Islander ancestry.” That’s a lot of diverse cultures and histories, ranging from Arabian to Fijian and Singhalese to Kazakh. Somehow, the Hapa movement sees this as a workable definition in the context of the American race construct.
“It is because the word comes from Hawai’i, with the islands’ association of pan-ethnic acceptance,” says Dariotis, “that it has been adopted so readily. Words like ‘Eurasian’ carry too much baggage to ever be meaningful to us.” Indeed, Hapa is not about part white at all anymore: Now it’s about being part Asian, as in the continent. While that doesn’t encompass all people of mixed race, it does include quite a lot. I could be Hapa. Talking to Dariotis I sense that she wants me to be Hapa.
Perhaps the greatest appeal of Hapa identity to my generation is that it lets us participate in a group identity that many of us feel we have been lacking. Those “children who won’t know what they are” can now tell the world: We’re Hapa.
“I like having a word to use for my identity,” Dariotis told me. “When I was growing up, I’d be constantly asked ‘what I was’ and would answer ‘oh, Chinese/Greek/Swedish, et cetera.’ We’ve always been asked to list the sum of our parts, but I’m more than that. That’s not an identity.”
She is facilitator and co-founder of the San Francisco Hapa Issues Forum. (There are seven chapters throughout California.) HIF began a decade ago at UC Berkeley in response to a speaker’s assertion that race blending was destroying the Japanese American community (30% mixed at present). “Our response was to say that we are part of the community,” says Dariotis. “HIF’s mission is to create communities that value diversity rather than excluding the mixed.”
Like resistance to the adoption of “all that apply” in the census, this fear of mixing comes from groups that use race to define themselves within the American body politic. And it’s understandable why they feel threatened. Over half of Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos marry people who define themselves as belonging to different groups. In some areas, particularly California cities, a fifth of all marriages are across these boundaries; and in Hawai’i, which is a special case, the rate is between 50 and 60 percent. Even though nationwide the rate is under three percent, there are already nearly seven million people in the United States who reported mixed racial heritage on the last census, and the number is growing.
The Mobile Paradox
The Hapa movement, by demonstrating that people can define a new racial identity for themselves, is a group manifestation of a phenomenon sociologist Minelle Mahtani calls the “mobile paradoxical space.” This fancy grad-school lingo means that people like me can redefine ourselves in each new social situation.
When someone apparently belonging to one of the well-known racial categories (anyone who can fill out the census race question in just a few seconds) walks into a room full of people, he or she enters a confining social space constructed by everyone else already there. When I walk in, I’ve got more room. It’s up to me to define, at least in the racial dimension, the boundaries of my social existence. Think of it: I can be Lakota on Tuesday and Arab on Wednesday. Both are bald-faced lies, but I can get away with it—radically altering the way people see me just by presenting myself differently—because of the enigmatic space I occupy.
While the Lakota/Arab example is extreme, and in practice rarely if ever do we (or certainly do I) indulge in such manipulative fiction, people of mixed race do have extremely fluid identities. We can adjust them in subtle and diverse ways, either at our own impetus or in response to changing social spaces around us. We can identify with one of our parental cultures at a time, or both, or neither, or other cultures as the situation permits (or even be Hapa while working towards a post-racial world).
We all inhabit this playground of identity to some extent, but it is most expansive for those of cryptically mixed race. Indeed, the obscurely mixed must often occupy this space in order to participate in culture at large. This, and the awareness that comes from being part of more than one ancestral culture, allows some unique and telling vantage points.
Masking Other Barriers
Mahtani—one of the few academics to explore the social environment of obscurely mixed race and herself of Iranian and Indian extraction—suggests that this ability, even requirement, to see racial identity as fluid allows us to view other social dimensions the same way. She writes of her study subjects: “Their ability to cross over the demarcation of racial divides made it easier to transcend other social cleavages.” The practical result-a tolerance that stems from our indeterminate position in one social dimension-extends to all the ways in which we look at human beings. It’s very hard for us to be bigots–an unnatural contortion for us to see a category as standing for the individual.
One of the things we can see from this place outside the racial fray is that race doesn’t exist in America. It is a figment of our collective imagination, a discriminatory cultural construct that has no basis in either the biological or moral spheres in which others claim it operates. Worse, the entire idea is obviously a hallucinatory—and very effective—means of divide-and-conquer social control derived from the supremacist philosophies of an expansionist, colonialist Europe half a millennium past.
From the Aryan Nation to the New Black Panther Party, the people most invested in the idea of race—and those most hysterically offended by the existence of half-breeds—are those most devoted to preserving clearly defined racial boundaries. Class-consciousness in particular is hobbled by the racial idea. The NBPP members, for example, reject Marxism and socialism not because they disagree with the philosophy, but simply because they “do not believe that black people should put themselves under the label of any white man.”
This all leads one to question how much the nation’s racial divisions are happy coincidence for the ruling elites and how much they are cynically and actively perpetuated by those elites. Is it an accident that class-consciousness is most stunted in the nation with the most obsessive race consciousness?
With five hundred years of racist history, can we expect to effortlessly step into a raceless world? The past half-century has seen some major, often rapid, changes; but some have been embarrassingly late. In 2000—the year that “check all that apply” appeared on the census—a ballot initiative in Alabama finally struck down the state’s law against miscegenation. That’s progress, I suppose; but then nearly three-quarters of a million people—forty percent of the voters—wanted to keep it.
We mutts are not immune to racism, or even to our own forms of supremacism. Onerous talk of “hybrid vigor”—the assumption, drawn from plant breeding, that we embody only the best of our heritages—can easily slide into a looking-glass endorsement of eugenics. (Hey, at least we know we’re not inbred). Nonetheless, we’ve been equipped with a racial radar and a vantage point from a parallel universe that lets us step outside of the race trap more easily.
So What Are You?
As a group, the mixed-race generation is the very epitome of multicultural diversity; and we have just one thing in common. When Risa Yanagisawa was interviewing dozens of obscure blends, everyone reported the experience of having people ask “What are you?”
It’s a curious question, and the exchange usually goes like this:
Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker: “What are you?”
Obscure Human Mutt: “What do you mean?”
BBC: “I mean where are you from?”
OHM: “Oh, I’m from Los Angeles.” (Or New York or Chicago or Montreal.)
BBC: “I mean before that.”
OHM: “Before that? I was born there.”
BBC: “Well, where are your parents from?”
OHM: “They’re from the East Coast.”
BBC: “But where did they come from?”
As Risa Yanagisawa puts it, “They want to ask you what race you are, but they can’t. Why don’t they just come out and say it—what race are you?”
Mixed parentage opens up all sorts of questions, particularly since many of our parents grew up in countries or colonies that no longer exist, and that hosted polyglot communities that simply do not fit in the reductivist American map of the world. If your father is Portuguese-from-India and your mother is Chinese-from-Peru, how do you fit into a world of Black and White?
It means you’re impossibly exotic, and you get your very own racial category—a category of one. It means you don’t compute, and people need to think about things a bit more than they may be accustomed to. It means people might feel embarrassed by asking a question with an answer that is itself a question.
Some of the mixed grow tired of this questioning—this ongoing implication that we don’t fit and don’t belong. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons Wei Ming Dariotis calls herself Hapa. But I prefer to feel honored by the questioning, to see it as a chance to reach out and help people learn about the world.
Perhaps it’s just the particular indefinable phenotype I project, but as often as not, once I’ve finally revealed the answers to this little mystery, my questioner says “Oh, I thought you were Italian”—or Palestinian, or Brazilian, or Pakistani, or Native American, or Peruvian. Not surprisingly, the Italians ask me if I am Italian, and the Palestinians think I am Palestinian. People want to identify with one another. “White” people are perpetually telling me about their Native American ancestry. (But rarely do they mention any African ancestry, although it is surely at least as common. A genetic study conducted at Penn State University found that thirty percent of Americans have some African ancestry.)
Read this way, the question “What are you?” is the joyful human impulse to reach out and connect, awkwardly stuttered through social barriers designed to keep us apart. That is the element of hope: My fellow humans don’t just want to put me in my place, they want my place to be their place.
