Raise Your Hand If You've Ever Been Asked "What Are You?"

Pictured above: Richard Hajarizadeh,  Ai McGrew-Sakamoto, Sarah Nicole Donaldson, Andréa Franke.

If you identify as multiracial, I bet you one decaf soy salted caramel latte that you’ve been asked, “What are you?” in reference to your racial identity. In my case, I’m the child of a first-generation Chinese-Indonesian mother and father whose roots mostly span across the European continent, although he spent his childhood in rural Louisiana. When filling out paperwork, I check the boxes for “white” and “Asian” under race. This information is relatively straightforward, right?

But it seems that everyone has their own ideas about who, or rather, what I am. Just last June, I found myself in the awkward position of arguing with a friend over my right to define myself as Asian-American. “What’s your skin color?” she asked repeatedly. “Shockingly pale,” I tried to divert. “In major need of a tan.” She didn’t allow me to walk away from the conversation until I said the words, “I am white.”

(By this logic, we’d need a new racial category on the census for orange spray-tanned people).

In 1993, TIME Magazine released its special issue on “The New Face of America,” or the multiracial population. Twenty years later, in 2013, National Geographic published an article entitled “The Changing Face of America,” accompanied by photographs of multiracial individuals by Martin Schoeller. It’s no coincidence that both articles make use of the word “face” in their titles, as if multiraciality can be read through the composition of one’s face, the juxtaposition of that hair texture with that eye color, that skin tone with that nose.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to see the topic of multiraciality brought up in the media. But I think it’s time for us to move beyond this skin-deep conversation and really consider what it means to be multicultural in today’s world.

Setting out to try to answer this question, I produced a short documentary film on the multiracial and multiethnic identities, “What Are You?” Aired on Oregon Public Broadcast in August 2015, it features a cast of six multiracial and multiethnic individuals as they grapple with their past experiences facing racial discrimination. Through interviews with Ai McGrew-Sakamoto, Andréa Franke, Candace Avalos, Sarah Kutten, Richard Hajarizadeh, and Dalena Ha, as well as Dr. Yves Labissiere of Portland State University, I came to two realizations about the multiracial identity:

1. The multiracial or multicultural experience is by no means a homogenous one.

While some individuals struggle to “fit in,” others find they can fluidly navigate their multiple cultural backgrounds. Many of us face racial discrimination on a daily basis, while others “pass” as white. During the film, Ai describes her experience interviewing for jobs at Japanese companies. Although she extensively prepared for the interviews, she divulges in her interview for the film, “They [the job interviewers] were like, ‘Oh, you’re not Japanese’ sort of type of thing. And...out of all those twelve interviews that I had, not one talked about the job with me.” Conversely, Andréa remembers feeling “really confused about [her] racial identity” as a child, attending a predominately white school where she and her sister were “the only students representing any Latino population.” She recalls one day in particular, “when my sister and I were really little...and we were looking at ourselves in the mirror. I asked her, I was like, ‘Olivia, do you ever feel like you look different from our friends?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, I feel that way all the time.’”

2. Multiracial individuals deserve the right to define their own racial and cultural identities.

There are countless articles dedicated to parsing out the multiracial experience, such as Thought Catalog’s “19 Signs You Are Multiracial,” which lists criteria such as, “You’ve lied about your ethnicity in the past just for the hell of it, or to avoid conversation.” While written in a nonchalant tone, this kind of dialogue is damaging to multiracial individuals as it suggests that there is only one way for them to express their multiraciality.

Instead of typecasting multiracial individuals based on their skin color, surname, or other superficial markers of identity, why don’t we accept these individuals as whole people? Dalena says it best: “Sometimes we think that our race separates us, but honestly we’re just the same type. We’re all people. We’re all human.”

Sarah Nicole Donaldson is a documentary filmmaker and scholar of Indonesian folklore.

References:

(1993, November 18). The New Face of America. TIME. Retrieved from http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19931118,00.html

Funderburg, Lise. (2013, October). The Changing Face of America. National Geographic. Retrieved from http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/10/changing-faces/funderburg-text

Ontell, Sarah. (2012, December 2). 19 Signs You Are Multiracial. Thought Calendar. Retrieved from http://thoughtcatalog.com/sarah-ontell/2012/12/19-signs-you-are-multiracial/

Donaldson, S. N. (Producer, Director, and Writer). (2015). What Are You? [Short documentary film].