A friend recently asked me about the beginning of Swirl.

I told her how I started it. And why. She interrupted to clarify – she wanted to know how I felt. What specifically I was experiencing when I came up with the idea, when I took the first steps to incorporate, when it all came to fruition. I had to think about this – after all, it was nearly eleven years ago.
And there wasn’t one feeling, but a pretty good mix of many emotions from the time the idea started to form in my mind, through the very first year of Swirl’s existence.

Hopeful – as I sat down at one of the big wooden tables in the Center for Work and Service on Wellesley College’s campus in April of 1999. The whole world ahead of me as I looked for my first job after college. I knew I wanted to work at an organization that served multiracial people and families.

Confused and disheartened – about ten minutes into my research at the Center for Work and Service as I realized there were no mixed race organizations in New York City to which I could apply and beg for a job.

Curious – as I told one of my closest friends, Nadiyah, that there weren’t any mixed orgs for me to work at, and mulling over her nonchalant, perfect response: “Just start one yourself.”

Scared but determined – when I started to take little step by little step to research and then set up Swirl as an official organization. I was nervous. I knew how to set up organizations at Wellesley, but here in the real world? It felt big and foreign. But I knew that what I was doing was needed. And wanted. I also knew that I couldn’t use the same tactics I used at Wellesley (wink, for those who know what I’m talkin’ about!), so I was determined to figure out this new terrain.

Energized – looking around the table at the first Swirl meeting and seeing a few people grow to about twenty by the time we were ready to begin that afternoon. Twenty people agreeing to be a part of helping to start up New York City’s only multiracial organization in support of mixed individuals, interracial couples, and mixed families. I was so energized that I started to work on Swirl during the evenings and weekends when I wasn’t at my full-time job, helping to prepare homeless men and women for full-time jobs at a welfare-to-work program.

Validated and seen – Admittedly, Swirl also helped me to feel seen in a way that I never had, growing up multiracial myself. For once, I had a community to which I could turn. People who understood me. Others to whom I could relate and with whom I would feel safe. Wrapped up in my hope to build community for others, was my own need to feel a sense of belonging. I knew first-hand how important this was, and what it meant not to have this kind of connection. Community seemed to be something others sometimes took for granted if they had one in which they were fully accepted. Maybe even two. Growing up in the generation in which I grew up, it was common to “have the best of both worlds” (as others called it) yet not feel a part of either. Swirl was for just these people – those who were not fully accepted because they were not enough of any, and too much for the simple check boxes we came to depend upon as a society.

That tingly feeling you get when you are really happy and filled with hope/excitement – You know what I mean? I would get this feeling a lot over the first year and years to come. It’s a feeling that I would get when I saw strangers really connecting before my eyes; when I would get feedback that Swirl mattered; when people thanked me for creating a community for which they searched for the greater part of their lives. The tingliest thing that happened to me was during the holiday party that first year of Swirl. An older multiracial male – in his 50s at the time – came up to me and said, “I feel like I’m finally home.” Tears welled in his eyes as I smiled back at him.

I still get this tingly feeling, especially now, as I return (more fully) to my work with Swirl. The feeling comes on when I imagine a better way of living together – all of us – not in harmony for the sake of harmony, but a harmony that we really understand because we have actually built it and worked very hard for it. Over time, and through authentic relationships. Knowing that it is far away from where we are now, but seeing sparks all the time. On the subway. In classrooms. In the cafe where I am writing this. The possibility that people can come together (across cultures and socially-constructed races) and see one another for who they truly are, rather than what merely appears on the outside. Sometimes I get so excited about what is possible that I can’t sleep. Ideas run through my head and keep me up until I finally give in and let the thoughts flow down my arm, through my pen, and onto paper. Excitement that with effort and energy, we can make positive change and create a new culture of addressing difference in this country.

I appreciate my friend having encouraged me to think about how I felt in the beginning. It’s good to remember why I started doing this work in the first place.

So today, I connect back to the beginning. The same feelings as I had back in 1999 (now accompanied by a bit more maturity and know-how, I’d like to think!). I am hopeful. Determined. Energized. More excited than ever. Eager to move forward with what I envision, which is probably similar to what many of us envision and hope for. Connected, healthy, and strong communities adept at dealing with conflict and difference. Together.

(picture was taken at the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory in 2006 at a SwirlNYC event)

It began when Activist X posted a link to this article about the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival and noted with some irritation that despite the festival’s claims to inclusivity, there were no Latin@s mentioned in the article. X asked: if Latin@ people are the largest group of multiracial people in the Americas and the festival is supposed to be open to everybody, why weren’t Latin@ people included? A few people agreed with X, and some people who had been at the festival said that they thought Heidi Durrow and the festival were great, but that they could see X’s point.

Enter Activist Y: after expressing some trepidation, Y said that the festival was using the term “mixed race” or “multiracial” to refer to people who had parents of two or more different racial categorisations. Activist Y said that if your whole family shared the same ethnic identity, then you were not mixed in the way the festival intended.

Dear Racializens, I am sure you can imagine what happened next: a veritable Facebook wall brawl — albeit one that was highly intellectual and restrained. Most people sided with X (it was X’s wall to begin with) and Y, after making several long attempts to explain themselves, eventually left in a digital huff.

This exchange brought back some of the most difficult writing that I have ever done on Racialicious: where readers challenged my right to call myself, as a mixed race person with parents of two different races, mixed in a separate way from those who are mixed race but share the same identity as their whole family, for e.g. folks who are mestizo, Creole, African American, Metis, Peranakan…

(From here on in I will refer to people who come from mixed lineage as MRs, and people who have parents of two different and separate racial categorisations as MR2s.)

So here is one of the most important things I have learned from all my years of toiling in the anti-racist trenches here at Racialicious: when you are talking about race with anti-racist people of colour, you are speaking from a place of pain, to a place of pain. (Ok obviously we are about more than pain, but pain is always on the table.) Many of us come to anti-racism through struggle. We are used to having things taken away from us, and we turn to anti-racism to try and arm ourselves against the corrosion of racism. We are sensitive, and we come by it honestly.

Both of my parents are – to the best of my knowledge – the first members of generations and generations of their families to marry outside of the race. When I first started writing about mixedness on Racialicious, I had never heard of mixed race being used in any way other than to refer to people who had parents of two different races. I grew up in Canada and Singapore, and while, as a postcolonial nation, there are many MR communities in Singapore, they refer to themselves as Eurasian, Peranakan or Straits-born Chinese, not mixed race. It was never suggested to me that I might have a similar experience to these folks, and neither did the Eurasian friends I had seem interested in me as an identity buddy. More than this, in Singapore the term “mixed race” was restricted not simply to “a person with parents of two different and separate races”: it was used to specifically refer to people who had one white parent, and one parent of colour. (Obviously, this happens not just in Singapore.)

Through some big f-ups (which you may read here and here and here, though I am sorry to say the comments might be missing on some of those), I learned that many Americans of colour — often African Americans and Latin@s — have a problem with “mixed race” being used solely to refer to MR2s.

Using the term “mixed race” in this narrow way is to systematically erase ethnic histories that bear witness to slavery and colonization; or simply, to erase ethnic histories, period. To do so can be read as an act of white supremacy: it covers up the fact that many Americans, regardless of skin colour or the stories elders are willing to tell, have mixed lineages. To do this silences a whole community’s right to express their experience.

And another thing: it is grating to hear the term “mixed race” applied solely to MR2s, as if we invented mixedness. Cultural forces (usually — though not always — powered by white folks) that select MR2s as somehow unique, or the antidote to racism, or hybridly vigorous, or exquisitely beautiful, are just pouring salt in the wound. After generations of MR folks being ostracised or having to commit violent contortions to have a peaceful life, being mixed is all of a sudden hot – and this is the very moment that the label is being rescinded from MRs. You don’t even get invited to speak at the damn mixed race festival.

And let us note that a lot of this friction gets even hotter when we are talking about MR2s who have a white parent and a parent of colour, because we are talking about people of colour who also have white privilege and/or light-skin privilege.

There are other reasons why MRs get angry when MR2s say that being MR2 mixed is different from being MR mixed – and you are welcome to chime in in the comments, if you are so inclined – but these are the ones I have come across, time and again.

After my Racialicious education, I tried to be sensitive to the fact that “mixed race” can mean MRs or MR2s. To acknowledge this widening of the category, in a post I was writing about Alicia Keys and her warped presentation of historic racial relations, I referred to Alicia Keys as a first generation mixed race person. To my dismay, this language was deemed just as offensive as my original ignorance. Because, a commenter said, the language of generations is offensive and recalls such awful categories as quadroon and octoroon, and because, why, after everything, did I have to keep on insisting that there was a difference between mixed race people from long lines of mixedness, and mixed race people who were racial anomalies in their families?

It wasn’t, I started to realize, that MRs were solely mad that MR2s and the dominant culture didn’t recognize them as mixed. They were mad that a distinction was even being made between themselves, and MR2s. (Perhaps my very decision to say “MRs” and “MR2s” is aggravating this tension right now.)

When you are dealing with sensitive people who are reeling from cultural rejection, distinctions feel like rejections. Why do MR2s think they are so special that they can’t possibly be in the same club with MRs?

So I will dig deep into my horrible well of childhood pain to explain what this distinction business is about.

I come from a nation of two. There’s me, and there is my sibling. When I was growing up, I had no language to explain my experience. I did not know people who were mixed. And these problems were exacerbated by the fact that I was a TCK in a postcolonial nation that was still dealing with a lot of (justifiable) anger towards Westerners, and I was read as white, and I was given a hard time because of that. This was all without a real knowledge of race or racism, but simply a sinking feeling that I was hopelessly and sometimes offensively different from everyone around me, and that those gaps could never be bridged. Until I was in my mid-20s, this was what being mixed was for me. In my family of origin I  did not know a single person — not my grandparents, cousins, my mother and father, or even my sibling (who, thanks to the genetic lottery, came out looking a different race from me and so had their own experience altogether) — who could understand my ethnocultural identity.

Note: I am not saying that only MR2s understand true isolation. Pulllease. I am just saying that this was my experience, and I am sure, sadly enough, that there are many other roads to that kind of loneliness.

So when I meet MRs who come from long and often proud lines of family members who share the same ethnocultural experience as them, I can’t imagine that they could have shared my particular brand of racial isolation. It is not about thinking myself better or even, as some people have alleged, more authentically and mixedly mixed than folks who share a more complete heritage with their family. It is simply that I can’t imagine they could have had the same experience.

Part of this has to be the emo-as-heck tragic mixie inside of me who is too terrified to hope that, after all this time, my nation of two is a nation of millions. I swear, that stupid Blind Melon video where the weird little bee finally finds all the other little bees gets me every time.

I know I could be wrong that there is a yawning distance between MRs and MR2s; but we can never get past the front door of fighting over what I should call myself and what I should call them, to find out. Like I said at the beginning, I’m a sensitive brotherpucker.

Like so many other things, some of this is about the amount of space the dominant culture is willing to allot the people it has marginalized: we are fighting for table scraps because we know the right to tell our own stories is in slight supply. It both frustrates and saddens me that my attempt to assert my identity causes pain to other people who are just trying to do the same thing.

We become possessive over our suffering. There is something that MRs and MR2s definitely have in common: we are fighting over the right to this label and the right to make distinctions, because any concession feels like giving up the history that we fought so hard to survive. I can only wonder at the experience of mixed race people who are both MRs and MR2s. Again, chime in from the comments if you’d like to weigh in.

I guess what I am giving you here is my thought process so far. I have no conclusions when it comes to this fight. Do I think that folks who come from a mixed lineage are mixed? Of course I do. Do I think that they should have the right to call themselves mixed, without qualification? Definitely. Do I believe that we are mixed in the same way? This is something I still struggle with. Do I want to be allies? Do I want to search for kinship where I never thought to look before? Do I want to have a mixed race festival and invite everyone?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Reader Nancy L sent in an article from the New York Times with an opening that made even this jaded activist do a double take:

RESTINGA SÊCA, Brazil — Before setting out in a pink S.U.V. to comb the schoolyards and shopping malls of southern Brazil, Alisson Chornak studies books, maps and Web sites to understand how the towns were colonized and how European their residents might look today.

The goal, he and other model scouts say, is to find the right genetic cocktail of German and Italian ancestry, perhaps with some Russian or other Slavic blood thrown in. Such a mix, they say, helps produce the tall, thin girls with straight hair, fair skin and light eyes that Brazil exports to the runways of New York, Milan and Paris with stunning success.

So this is how we’re going now? What is this, the hybrid vigor myth on speed?

The smartly-written article takes an interesting turn – while the models associated with Brazil are overwhelmingly white, the country is beginning to embrace nonwhite women who fit their standards of beauty. And yet…

Despite those shifts, more than half of Brazil’s models continue to be found here among the tiny farms of Rio Grande do Sul, a state that has only one-twentieth of the nation’s population and was colonized predominantly by Germans and Italians.

Brazilians are equally perplexed:

The pattern creates a disconnect between what many Brazilians consider beautiful and the beauty they export overseas. While darker-skinned actresses like Juliana Paes and Camila Pitanga are considered among Brazil’s sexiest, it is Ms. Bündchen and her fellow southerners who win fame abroad.

“I was always perplexed that Brazil was never able to export a Naomi Campbell, and it is definitely not because of a lack of pretty women,” said Erika Palomino, a fashion consultant in São Paulo. “It is embarrassing.”

The article is interesting, both for its look into the fashion industry and the strange focus on sites of colonization as portals for beauty scouting. But the whole situation does make me wonder who is responsible for upholding white standards of beauty. This article, I believe, makes a strong case for those who control the images of beauty, and how their preferences can dictate the idea of what is sellable. However, they always throw their decision at the feet of consumers – but who conditions what consumers see as beautiful?

Alicia Keys loves drama – and no, I am not referring to her current lovelife (you’ll have to read a different kind of blog to get that gossip, unfortch), I’m referring to her music videos.  When it comes to star-crossed histrionics, both Keys’ music and videos always deliver the goods. Which I kind of like, most of the time; woman’s got a good set of lungs and a nice scrunchy crying-for-the-camera face.

But her latest video just gets on my nerves.  ”Unthinkable” stars Chad Michael Murray as Keys’ white lover, and shows reincarnations of the same interracial couple across several different decades, suggesting that from the 40′s up to today interracial relationships still face prejudice.

While I appreciate the way Keys uses time to show parallels between the racism of the past and the racism of the present, there are a few things about this video that strike me as deeply dishonest.  Broken down for your reading convenience, here are my issues:

1. Only black people hate interracial relationships!

Okay Ms Keys, why do you only have black people showing prejudice in this video?  From the 50′s to 70′s to the 80′s to the 00′s, all we see are black faces looking on at the Murray/Keys pairing with fury and even violence.  Oh no wait, we get a split second of a white cashier looking at black/white flirtation with disgust…and then it’s back to black folks.

A video doesn’t just pop out organically from the brain of its creator: someone makes very specific choices and then very specific casting calls to mark race in a video.  So why did Keys and her team choose to only show black people getting mad about the interracial love in this video?

This seems particularly problematic and dishonest in the “50′s” section of the video, where the optics, if you really look at them, are disquieting: a group of angry, bloodthirsty black men circle a defenseless white man with a puppy dog face.

So not only do we get a very racist portrayal of black people as aggressive and irrational in contrast to a lover-not-a-fighter white man, we get a profoundly skewed version of history.  Anyone with a 101 knowledge of Black History Month knows that in the 50′s it was black men, not white men, whose lives were in danger if they so much as looked at white women.  For some of our readers this will be well-trod ground, but let’s do a refresher just in case: Emmet Till was a 14 year-old black boy who was tortured and murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman.  And his story was not an anomaly; this happened to many black men.  So much so that an all-white jury took all of 67 minutes to acquit both Till’s accused murderers.  This didn’t happen in 1897, it happened in 1955.

I imagine that at some point in the 50′s, there were white men who were given a split lip by black men for dating black women. (And then, considering the way the justice system works, those black men were probably sentenced to life in prison.) But when you note the systemic power behind the violence visited upon black people by the white dominant culture, that other violence pales in comparison.

Either Keys is appallingly ignorant of American history, or is intentionally toying with historical representations to solely present black people as the violent objectors to interracial relationships. Maybe just to get a rise? To step with the “but black people/POCs are the most racist!” crowd? I just don’t know.

Undoubtedly there are people of any ethnic group who have issues with IRs, causing their friends and family members misery.  So why did Keys make the conscious decision to show only one half of the haters, especially when you think of the state’s force behind white distaste for IRs?

2. Let’s hump our way to a racism-free world!

I know that interracial couples continue to face prejudice today. Just last year we heard about a Louisiana judge who refused to grant a black/white couple a marriage license, for the sake of their (future) children.

Yet reactions to IRs are immensely complex: sometimes the forces of racism actually encourage interracial relationships, where people of colour are boiled down into dehumanising sexual stereotypes to be collected. Meanwhile, Keys’ presentation of IR reactions seem to fall into only one category: people are hateful towards mixed race pairings because they are mean racists; anyone who accepts or encourages an IR therefore, is an enlightened anti-racist.  (Just take a look at responses to “Unthinkable”: Vibe calls Keys “socially conscious” for advocating for black/white relationships.)

This kind of black and white (haha) telling of an interracial affair runs dangerously close to the “let’s hump to end racism” campaign.  Hands up if you’ve ever had the misfortune of hearing someone say “Everyone should date out of their race, because the more we mix, the less racism there will be.”

The idea that interracial relationships are anti-racist, and having a mixed race family will fix racism is not only naive; it may even go hand in hand with racial fetish.  A few weeks ago I met a freshman college student – a good-looking black guy with a bright future – who told me that he doesn’t want to date black women because he has a thing for mixed race girls*, specifically ones that look like Alicia Keys. (So of course I emailed him CVT’s article about how mixed race people on the whole may actually *not* be that hot.)  When I suggested that his racial dating preference was messed up, he said that the bad balanced out the good, because isn’t dating outside of your race a way to end racism? The more we mix up, he reasoned, the less there will be reason for people to hate.

Please! Yuck! No. Date someone because you like them inside and out, not because a) you have a racial preference or b) you think that dating out will end racism when you have little beige babies. That’s just asking for parental trouble when your beige babies have their own consciousness and their own desires, and don’t want to be poster kids for your personal crusade. And anyways, racism is not truly about racial phenotypes; it’s a social campaign to assign power based on ethnocultural group.  There will always be ways to demarcate ethnocultural group, even when people are “all mixed up.”

I guess I shouldn’t be too shocked that this is coming from Keys – she is after all, the co-founder of the Keep A Child Alive campaign, which created this sorry set of ads a few years back:

So maybe her racial politics have always been a little bit obtuse.

3. Mixed Race Masquerading

The cherry topping on this mixed race mess comes in the final scene of the video, when Keys’ family watches as Murray pulls up in his car.  You see her black brother (a familiar face, but I can’t find the actor’s name anywhere) and her black mom, played by Adina Porter, her black father is silhouetted in the foreground.  In other words, Keys’ character does not have immediate family members who are white.

Why does this matter? Even though Keys herself has a white momma, usually I would have no problem with a first gen mixed race person playing someone who is not first gen mixed race. Hey, more power to them.  But considering the interracial content of this video, and its grossly simplistic presentation, it puts me off that Keys chooses to simplify even her own genealogy at the end.

Drake, who is also black/white wrote “Unthinkable” and provides back-up vocals. Some fans have asked why Drake is not in the video, saying he should’ve been cast as her brother – is it because having a light-skinned black and white man in the video would throw off Keys’ wall of hate-filled blackness?  A real life mixed race person would apparently complicate the coarse racial dynamics of this video; Keys hides both Drake and her own mixed roots in the video.

Which I suppose brings me to my personal beef with this video: as the mixed race product of an interracial relationship watching a song/video made by two other mixed race products of interracial relationships, I am really irritated that Keys is presenting these unions as so wholly pure, good and anti-racist.

This is obviously an irrational personal projection, but I often hope (expect? sigh) that mixed race celebrities have a more nuanced understanding race and racism**.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think they are going to end racism just by being a manifestation of love across racial lines.  Rather I assume that if you live at the intersection of race and love, as many mixed families do,  you’ll have insight into just how complicated that intersection is.  You might have a sense that interracial relationships, like any relationships, are muddy, confused things that are not wholly good, bad or anything.

You might know how people confuse fetishes with love. You might know that love is not always strong enough to end racism; maybe you have family members who love you, and still have effed up racist ideas.  You might know that people take offense at mixed race pairings sometimes out of real, understandable pain, not just hate.

Yet instead Keys chooses to give a painfully simple drawing of a mixed relationship that lets racist stereotypes about her own people stand, presumably so as to cash in on that socially conscious rep from a mainstream media that just likes anything shiny.***

Fail Alicia – this lets a lot of us down.

–

*By “mixed race” I assume he meant someone with one white parent and one parent of colour.

** I don’t mean a more nuanced understanding than other people of colour, just more nuanced than the white establishment around them.

***Hey, there’s cache in the safe socially conscious, just ask multimillionaire Bono.

Mod Note - If you’re new to Racialicious, read the comment moderation policy before attempting to comment. – LDP

It seems we don’t talk a lot about it, but to be sure, there are distinct pains, complexities and privileges associated with mixed heritage people. And I’m realizing that these distinctions can be quite fruitful to discussions of race and gender. For I realized that mixed heritage families are a perfect example of “families on the fault lines.” In other words, mixed families undergo a unique experience that may reflect and deify notions of privilege and hierarchy. At the same time, they hold vast potential to resist narratives of the normalized body.

In my case, I’ve experienced both privilege and oppression with my identity and family background. For instance, while folks in the Filipino community might easily classify me as one of them, this isn’t the case for those outside this community. Filipinos are so underrepresented in the media and other forms of public representation that people don’t seem to understand what it means to be a dark-skinned Asian. They seem to only think of East Asia when they hear “Asian” (as if the region of Southeast Asia doesn’t exist!). I’ve gotten Latino, Chinese, Indian–you name it. (And to be fair, I’ve inherited some of my father’s bi-racial characteristics which further confounds people.) There’s a sort of erasure and concomitant exotification that occurs just by virtue of being Filipino or any other underrepresented ethnic group.

On the other hand, there is a distancing from this Otherness that happens through my last name. I’m clearly not white, but my name–Anna Sterling–sure does sound white. It never fails as a conversation starter; by rote I explain that my paternal grandfather was an American soldier stationed in the Philippines during WWII. My father was bi-racial, hence the last name. I know for a fact that this last name has conferred privileges onto me throughout time–everywhere from fitting in with my white suburban friends a little bit more than those with more traditional names like Magpantay or Danganan to perhaps having eyes linger on my resume in job searches a few seconds longer.

Then again, I’m brought back to my physical appearance and the significance of it. My father married a full-blooded Filipina woman when he got to the states and as my mom says: “he fell in love with my native Filipina beauty!” My light-skinned father and “native-looking” mother (read: dark!) created a rainbow-colored spectrum of children. My other two sisters obtained my father’s light skin while I inherited my mother’s dark skin. It’s really sad to think about the policing I went through as a child: my own sisters would say I was dirty and that I needed to shower; family friends had the audacity to ask immediately upon seeing me “Did you just come from the pool? Why you so dark?!”; I’ve had people “compliment” me with, “You’d be so pretty if you weren’t so dark!” Even more, if you flipped your TV over to the Filipino channel, you’d be shocked at the total whiteness of those given space in the media. No matter how many times I watch Filipino TV, the almost geisha-whiteness of the actors and personalities continues to astound me. It’s made strikingly clear– whiteness is beautiful. (In fact, so many of the most popular actors are half-white that I’m beginning to think it’s a prerequisite!) I absolutely hated my skin color growing up (and no wonder!). Another dark skinned friend of mine would literally wear turtlenecks in the blazing summer heat. And I’ll never forget the time I bitterly told my mom through clenched teeth, “I hate you for giving me this dark skin.” My mom wasn’t defensive and angry, but instead replied in the most gentlest way, conveying sadness and deep disappointment. Thinking of that breaks my heart.

—by Anna, excerpted from “Dark Skinned White Girls.” Read the rest at Feministing.

I identify as Filipina and black. I do this to give honor to the struggles both my Filipina mother and my black father have had to endure. I give respect by learning both heritages and never denying one or the other. My identity is heavily influenced by both society and my parents. Both influences intersect to make me who I am. I feel that both my parents have endured a great deal due to society’s conscious and unconscious views on race and class. The way society works has developed my parents into hard working people that took the only paths offered to them. For my father, it was entering the military and escaping the harsh life of Jacksonville, Alabama. For my mother in the Philippines, it was working at an Air Force base. Their paths would cross and they would marry and have four children of which I am the youngest.

My parents are still together and talk openly about racial issues that they have to deal with. The funny thing is that they do not connect their struggles. My father understands about black oppression, but not about Asian and Pacific Islander struggles and vice versa for my mother. While my mother is coming to a certain consciousness about not wanting to be called “Oriental,” my father has to be gently reminded that the term is rather offensive.

—by Lulu, published in “Blended Nation: Portraits and Interviews of Mixed Race America.” Read the rest at Filipinas Magazine.

(Image Credit: Lulu Carpenter, Filipinas Magazine)

I grew up a happy, well loved child. I spent my summers resisting shoes and with water-logged skin, insisting I wasn’t cold, even when my lips were purple. My world was a moose’s walk from Canada where I straddled two worlds, never knowing it because I was blissfully unaware until I was much older that I was any different than the other people around me.

One world was that of my Mother’s family. Just off of a Reservation, humid and sweltering in the summer and man-high piles of snow and ice in the winter. We built houses with doors on the second floor, and two mailboxes to make sure you could reach one in the winter. A Northern Michigan Tribe with roots shared in Southern Canada’s First Nations, we were just emerging from that place where it was embarrassing to be ‘injun’. A Native fishing family, we were not exactly well off, but we had floors in our houses and indoor plumbing in an area where owning your own septic system was a sign of great privilege. My grandparents were well respected in our community for being fair and honest, if my Grandfather had a bit of a reputation for a temper if you were trying to be unfair to someone less fortunate than he was.

My mom met my dad when they were very young, and the stories varied depending on who did the telling – and I can’t ask him anymore since he’s been passed away ten years, but I know that my mom was about ten or so. She was about thirteen when they snuck smokes together, and I don’t know how old they were when they realized that they were dating. I do know that they spent about a year apart after my mom graduated high school, and when she showed up with me in her arms, my dad didn’t flinch, and adopted me straight away. Biological or adopted, I was fathered by a white man of European descent.

My Dad’s family was another world. His parents were first generation immigrants — depending on who did the defining — with my grandfather an unexpected surprise to his parents who had just immigrated from Italy, and my grandmother of Dutch parentage. My dad grew up in a privileged white world to a smart businessman of a father who ran a fair business in beer distribution. Every one owed my grandfather,or Papa Joe, a favor at one point or another, even if he had a bit of a temper if you were trying to be unfair. This family loved and doted on me, and I never knew that I was not of their blood until I was a much older child in need of a full medical history. My grandfather even created a unique nickname for me: wopajo.

You won’t find a proper definition if you look it up. It might actually stump the Google Gods. I didn’t even know that it was a racial epithet until I had the luck to say it in front of a nice Jersey Girl, to which she responded “Wha-wha-wha?”. I had never even heard anyone refer to people of Italian ancestry as “wops” so I was surprised, apologizing profusely. To me it was a term of affection, as every one I had known growing up had laughed whenever someone used it in reference to me. I had never heard it any other way, and wow, was I embarrassed. I know that no one ever meant me any malice, but to form a child’s memories around a racial slur…I look back now and wonder just how accepted I was among the adopted half of my family (yeah, that, too). But isn’t it cute now, an “Italian Indian” (get it? wop-ajo)?

But it sums up my life perfectly: Too white to be Native and too Native to be white. And that is only the surface of my racial conundrum. Always on the edge of two identities and never quite belonging to either. I don’t look like anyone else in my family; I am lighter and my hair brown, not the silky black that you see in some popular movies, and is sometimes a little curly, and my eyes are partially green. I don’t look like my own family, and when I tell someone that I am in fact not White, I get the sympathetic “oh, yes, I see it now, you do have remarkably high cheek bones!” stamp of approval.

Feminist circles were difficult to figure out for me when I began navigating conversations on race, because race didn’t make sense to me for the longest time, and this was the first place that I was even allowed to have race discussions, but they were always about someone else’s race. I didn’t fit into racial discussions because I wasn’t really White. I knew that, and yet, I had heard my whole life that I had to accept that I was. I wasn’t Black, and Blackness was the crux of racial discussion in the feminist blogosphere (there are very good reasons for this, don’t misunderstand me), or so it seemed to me. Discussion on race on most big feminist blogs seem to be a binary; Black or White and little else. About the only thing I was picking up was that mainstream feminism was focused on talking about race, but not really to anyone for whom it was actually about, and certainly not anyone outside that binary.

So, where did a body like mine fit? I wasn’t Black or White. Did I even exist? Or was I supposed to sit down and shut up and just nod when people told me I was White? Didn’t I get to decide how I identified? Except that growing up near a Reservation you learn early on that the White community doesn’t really want you either, so where do you go? From what I understand, people of mixed race heritage who present as Black and are not of White ancestry have this same conundrum. I could be wrong, though, because that is not my experience on which to speak.

It only got worse the more I delved in. I quickly became frustrated in discussions that were meant to privilege bodies that were neither White nor Black. The discussion always seemed to be railroaded back to one or the other, leading me to conclude that if you weren’t one or the other, or at least passing for one or looking like the other, then you had best pass in your Person of Color Status Card, because your voice was not welcomed. If you identify as Non-White, everyone assumes you must be Black. Even Brown is a start, such as South Asian or Latin@… but you had best be prepared to assert your Brownness at every opportunity lest anyone forget that you are that Strange Other. The part of me that is Native begins to disappear as I try to engage. I find no comfort in non-U.S.ian communities, such as trying to find camaraderie with Indigenous people from Down Under, and instead find that my allies are further alienated by assumptions that they must be not only Black or White, but from the U.S. as well. Yes, even in numbers we find that the world must be centered on the U.S. and its center of the Universe complex.

My own blog isn’t safe, either, as anyone who reads my words feel free to tell me that I am expecting too much of others, that I must just accept that the perceptions of the world are the truth. That I am 90% European and that I must get over it. I say that I have a right to grasp ahold of my heritage and cling tightly. I am not ready to tell my family that we are all doing it wrong. (Well, maybe about the nickname…)

The world isn’t full of dichotomies and binaries, no matter how much we want to shove everything into an either/or container. Girl/boy, male/female, Black/White, gay/straight… life just doesn’t fit that easily into checked boxes. People are designed on a spectrum, literally and figuratively, with variances and individualities. The color of my skin or eyes doesn’t give away my racial identity, at least not in a stereotypical way. A photograph of me isn’t telling, and I would argue that this is true of many people, bi-racial, mixed-race and otherwise. My hair and features, unusual for even a Northern tribe, lighter than most commonly iconic tribes, other me from almost every one I know. I don’t know where I fit. I don’t know how to talk about race, because I have never been allowed to fit into one.

(Image Credit: Suave)

Alongside the tragic mulatto myth, the idea that being mixed is somehow “futuristic” or modern, and the idea that mixed people will be better, faster, and stronger (also called the “hybrid vigor” myth), one of the enduring features about discussions of mixed race individuals is that “hotness” always surfaces.

Allure serves up a double dose of stereotypes, weaving hotness and hybrid vigor into one creepy, objectifying article  called “Faces of the Future.”  In their November 2009 issue, writer Rebecca Mead fawns over biracial superbabies and more specifically, the wonderful aesthetic of mixed race people. After starting off with statistics about the 6.8 million Americans who self-identified as mixed on the last census, the article launches right into dehumanization:

Take, for example, Alicia Thacker, a 27-year-old public-school teacher whom Marilyn Minter has been photographing for nearly a decade, ever since Thacker completed a painting class that Minter was teaching in New York City. Thacker, who has pale skin, freckles, full lips, and a vast cloud of curly hair, is part Barbadian, part German, part Irish, part Creole, part Scottish, part African American, and part Blackfoot. (People usually think she is Hispanic, the one thing she isn’t.) In short, it didn’t take a melting pot to create Thacker – more like a full scale chemistry laboratory.

A chem lab? Really? She’s a human being, not a compound. And I’m not sure that sex counts as biological tinkering.

The photographer, Minter (who also provided the photos to Allure to accompany the article) also shares some of the fetish-based zeal as the writer:

Minter thinks women like Thacker “are more interesting looking humans – they are extraordinary-looking, and so much more beautiful than the flawless blue eyed blonds,” [...]

That was revealing. Minter adds a double reinforcement of the ultimate beauty standard – blue eyed blonds are “flawless” but mixed people are “interesting.” I stopped that quote early, but Mead picks up with:

[...] says the photographer, whose other subjects in the portfolio include Victoria Brito, who is Brazilian and Austrian – and looks as blonde as an Alpine maiden and at the same time as sultry as the girl from Ipanema; Melissa Kurland, who is part German and part Filipina; and green-eyed Nell Robinson, whose name is English sounding but whose heritage is also Jamican, Portuguese, and Hispanic.

After spending a few paragraphs trumpeting the soon to be dominance of the mixed-race aesthetic, Mead ends, saying:

Perhaps a time will arrive when faces such as hers are seen not so much as beautifully extraordinary, but simply as extraordinarily beautiful.

I know it seems a little counter-intuitive to be upset about an article that highlights a type of beauty outside of mainstream ideal, but the overemphasis on mixed race beauty is both a fetish and a positive stereotype.

Also, the tone of the article starts to become a bit more sinister when you like at what type of beauty is highlighted. Almost all of the models featured would easily pass the paper bag test (Victoria Brito is a possible exception), and most boast small noses and full lips, and lots of hair (both curly and straightened), things that still fit into standard beauty ideals. A while ago, Carmen and I discussed body image and race on ATR, and Carmen mentioned something that always stuck with me. She said that one of the things she noticed growing up mixed race in Hong Kong was that many of the compliments given to her were based on her features that were closer to white. In many ways, this article reinforces that idea, especially given the common misconception that mixed race equals white plus other. Not only does Mead erase mixed race people who do not fit these paradigms of beauty, but also feeds the idea that mixed race people are apolitical beings whose main contribution to society is their appearance.

I don’t think its too much to ask to work toward a beauty standard that is inclusive of all types of beauty – not a half-assed acceptance based on fetishes and stereotypes.

(Pictured: Melissa Kurland)

More Myths About Mixed Race People, from the Mixed Media Watch Vault

20/20 Gimme a Break (Tragic Mulatto Myth)
ATR 5 (Carmen’s Rant on the Tragic Mulatto Myth)
Exotic: Nicole Scherzinger (On the overuse of the word exotic)
When mixed race identity is used to further racism (How our discussions about race are inadequate)
What’s black and white and sad all over? (Tragic Mulatto Myth)
Are we all going to be latte? (Representations)
Zadie Smith is ‘not that multicultural’ (Zadie Smith confronts stereotypes)
Cashing in on a mixed kid’s fair skin (Colorism)
“Mixed” = advantageous (On assumptions that mixed people are trying to deny their “dark side”)
Mixed people will fix racism, right?
“Real people” = mixed people? (on ideas of representation)
Half Asian is the new white? (Hybrid Vigor)
Hyphen takes a look at “the Multiracial Dream”
Hybrid vigor in Sports Illustrated
Scientifically beautiful!? (Using “science” to promote positive stereotypes)

And Carmen’s talk, Cute But Confused: Myths and Realities About Mixed Race Identity:

Just a few weeks ago I was flipping through the pages of a fashion mag with a friend.

An editorial featuring an obviously biracial black/white model sporting a huge curly ‘fro caught our eye and that I have to say – I just loved the style.

I have been natural most of my life (not necessarily out of conviction but due to the chronic and persisting shortage of German hairstylists who can deal with wild biracial hair more on the afro side-or with any kind of biracial or black hair) save a few relaxed spells every few years after which I desperately longed for my kinks and curls to come back.

Anyway, my style of the moment is natural and the model’s medium-length curls were something I really considered desirable. The hairstyle did strike a chord with me, but my friend Jen, who has two African parents, is many a shade darker than I am and has shiny and fantastically healthy-looking relaxed tresses (which I have never managed to obtain) was a lot less enthusiastic about the model’s look.

“That’s something mixed girls get away with” she said, “They can get their hair to look like that – I couldn’t. I feel that curls are something like the latest fetish – it’s like there are black girls with great curls all around, advertisement, movies, magazines. And lately it has become a bit like what straight hair used to be-you’ve got to have it.”

It had never occurred to me, but speaking to Jen, I realised that she might be right. Over the next weeks everywhere I looked, be it the streets of my city or most of he few female black German TV-presenters – it really seemed that nowadays the fly mixed or black girl hast to have curls. Generous, semi-loose curls that is, tight enough to give you the volume but loose enough to be considered beautiful in a more mainstream way.

Suddenly I noticed that there were other mixed women like myself sporting curls and curly fros, short or big hair and that black girls with curls really seemed a growing trend in German cities. I also realised that hardly any women with tightly coiled hair, like Jen’s, wore their hair out or natural.

“That’s because of the pressure to have hair that at least gets near the look of ‘typical’ mixed race curls,” Jen complained and I feel that she definitely has a point.

The new trend that I and many other women of color have happily embraced seems to have it’s downside.

Obtaining a certain look hair seems to be almost as pressurising as it was to have bone straight hair back in the day. Only now curly hair is the new straight hair.

In Germany, the politics of (black) hair have been very different from the US. Up to this day, unlike the US, multigenerational mixed black people are almost non-existent in Germany. That is one reason why the “biracial” and “black” hair divide may be sharper than in the US. Though the first multigenerationally mixed families are only just emerging, most black Germans are still of direct African origin, be it through one parent or both.

The small “black” population after the second world war up until the 1960s was made up mainly by the biracial children of white German mothers and African American soldiers stationed in the country. From the mid-1960s onwards the fathers were mainly Africans who came to Germany from their newly independent countries to pursue their studies.

The “traditional” hairstyle for the majority of biracial Germans pre-1990s was to wear their hair natural, not necessarily because you liked it that way, but because there were no hairdresser or product options around.

In the olden days most of us had German mothers totally clueless of how to handle their offspring’s biracial hair. Bless them, I would be quite at a loss myself if I had to care for a child with bone straight European hair, and let us not forget – those were the days before the internet made black hair care tips and mail ordering stuff from the States widely accessible.

I remember that as late as the 80s the hairstyles worn by the Huxtable women in the “Cosby Show”or in MTV music clips were unobtainable for most black women in Germany. It was only in the early 1990s that the increasing number of new African immigrants led to the emergence of the African hair stylist in Germany.

Getting your hair relaxed soon became a sought after option, but even today there is a lack of well-qualified stylists and very often they are likely to be more skilled in doing braids and extensions than in relaxing biracial hair.

Following the new curly trend after many years of experimenting with relaxers, the number of German women of color wearing their curls in a natural state has increased, even if – as my friend made me aware – mostly amongst the mixed girls and women .

I went on to do my research on the internet and many a web community in which I expected women of color to celebrate the diversity of their natural hair was full of product-, money- and time-consuming tips how to obtain the perfect curl. To be fair, there are a few great sites out there catering to the needs of a diverse curl community and doing a fantastic job giving positive appreciation to our diverse hair. The positive examples I have in mind were those sites that actually gave style advice that kept in mind that you do need a certain hair type to start with – to be able to obtain a certain natural look without killing yourself for it. However my overall impression was that there seemed to be almost an obsession with obtaining a certain type of curly hair –and I wonder if Jen is right and right now society is just blatantly more accepting of the seemingly effortless shake-and-go curls or maybe a curly fro than of a tightly curled Afro? And that women whose hair just will not curl that way are left out of the new beauty standard? Once again?

It seems that what could be a liberating and long awaited expansion of a narrow beauty ideal has a flipside after all and that ultimately we should trust our hair, not the trend. Curls are great and we love them – but don’t stress yourself about them too much. Keep in mind that well treated hair is always beautiful, be it relaxed, curly or a straightforward Afro!

(Pictured: German celebrity Annabelle Mandeng)

I said it once and I’ll say it again, I love Mariah Carey.

I rarely try to justify this rabid adoration when I’m talking politics. Sometimes radical folks think that just because they like something, it must be radical. I’ve seen many bloggers look foolish this way. So I try to sidestep any probing questions as to why an incredibly serious and intellectual person like me (ahem) owns a Mariah wall calendar and tends to squeal deliriously when “Heartbreaker” plays over the supermarket PA system.

Usually when people ask why I so celebrate Mariah, I say “We’re both mixed race, and we’ve both experienced heartbreak. Obviiiiiously.”

But about a week ago, while discussing Nick Cannon’s accusations that the Mariah-inspired Eminem song “Bagpipes from Baghdad” was racist and sexist, the discussion that fell out of the post made me wonder if, after all, there was some need to untangle my Mariah love and its distant political underpinnings.

A little recap of the post and discussion: in trying to defend his wife against Eminem, Cannon proclaimed that Carey was a BLACK woman (the caps are his) and that it was time enough that white men like Eminem disrespected women of colour like Carey. He went on to compare Carey to Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey, as examples of black queens that the black community should not allow to be disrespected. A lot of commenters said, “Right on, Nick!”

But a bunch said “Mariah Carey is black?” There were attempts to prove that she was not that black, by probing her bio and discussing her ethnic heritage in sixths and eights. Some suggested that she played both sides, emphasising her whiteness or her blackness according to which could sell more records, and that she was only black when it benefitted her. Some took offense at Cannon comparing Carey (who if half-white) to Obama and Winfrey (who are not half-white), frustrated by the fact that there was no recognition that Carey being light-skinned meant all sorts of light-skinned privilege, including more mainstream success than if she was darker-skinned.

I was taken aback. Truth be told I was unsure how Mariah herself identified. So I went back through the dusty internet archives, back to when Racialicious was Mixed Media Watch, to the first post I ever read on this site: Essence on Mariah Carey’s struggles with mixed race identity.

The post was interesting, but the comments were shocking. Commenters were incensed that Essence had identified Carey as a black woman. They were dismissive about Carey’s struggles with biraciality. Mostly the consensus was that Carey was a stupid rich poptart and that Essence was full of self-loathing idiots. Then again, I only read about the first 20 comments; it started to get too upsetting. The entire post garnered a whopping 240 comments: this was on a post that had very little analysis and was mostly just excerpts from the Essence article. My own post from last week was similar; it had very little of my own thoughts in it, but it managed 70 comments (as of this writing).

(I would like to note that the Essence post harkens back to a time before we had Latoya and Arturo tirelessly moderating comments and perhaps more importantly, commenters who take the time to thoughtfully and carefully state their argument…which is nothing to cough at.)

And then I found another post on Mariah Carey from about a year ago. This one was simply a post announcing that Carey and Cannon had married. But again, the conversation veered into Mariah Carey’s ethnic heritage. From commenter mariah_omg:

Let’s talk about how Mariah’s “black” father is Venezuelan and she doesn’t consider herself Hispanic but “African-American,” and only when it’s convenient!!! What happens when a celebrity who has been known to milk the “tragic-mulatto” stereotype in the past (again, when it’s convenient) marries a dark skinned black man. Will they have children? Will they be as tragic as she?

I almost couldn’t read the comments that insinuated Mariah was the worst kind of race traitor, a person who played up her blackness, her whiteness and her mixedness whenever she liked, in order to make millions to finance her Hello Kitty Castle.

Reading these threads, the feeling I had was similar to reading criticism of myself; it was as if I had written a post that was really badly received. But this is some high level cognitive mash-up: my beloved Racialicious community was talking about Mariah, not me.

The strange part of it is, what irked some commenters on the Cannon/Eminem thread the most, was that they felt MC played up some kind of tragic mulatto myth, and that she (or her husband) seemed unwilling to recognise how much white privilege had benefitted MC’s career. Strange, because that’s often the beef I have myself with mixed race folks.

When the Racialicious team converses about mixed race issues, often it is my fellows like Latoya and Andrea who express sympathy and patience towards mixed race folks’ complaints that they have been ostracised by their communities of colour for a lack of authenticity. It’s usually me who yells “Suck it up baby! What about that white privilege you got??” I quickly lose patience with any story about a community of colour terrorising half-whiteys — if that story doesn’t also include the mixed race person admitting the privilege that comes with the pain.

Yet I have never felt that Mariah plays up any part of her ethnic heritage, except to patiently attempt to explain, again and again, who her people are, and to mention in a very low-drama way, that her experience of biraciality has been a painful one.

Sometimes, the reason why we are smitten with celebrities is because we see facets of our own struggles in their lives. Or perhaps more accurately, we project our own troubles onto the vague details of celebrity lives, and then imagine that just the two of us are secret allies in the war of life.

(Sidebar: this also explains why people are still torn up over Jennifer Aniston and Brangelina: I’ll bet you that at least half the people who follow the (non) scandal breathlessly have either been left by a partner for another person, or left a partner for another person.)

In the early to mid 90′s when I was growing up in Singapore, the radio stations seemed to play a Mariah hit every half hour. We were inundated with stories of her divaishness (for example, how she refuses to have the left side of her face photographed). Every magazine seemed to feature her frolicking in denim cut-offs. I didn’t pay much attention to her, but she was still, simply by flooding the airwaves, the soundtrack to my adolescence. Even now I know every single lyric to the sicktatingly sweet MC/Boyz II Men duet “One Sweet Day,” often bursting out in unison with the radio, usually against my will.

As I sludged into my late teens, I made a big show of only listening to Fiona Apple and Ani Difranco. But I secretly knew all the words to “Always Be My Baby.” And then I moved to Canada, launched myself into the white indie rock hipster scene, and promptly forgot Mimi.

I’m Singaporean-Chinese and English-Irish, and growing up in Singapore everyone always told me I was white. Due to Singapore’s justifiable post-colonial hangover, I was often mocked for my whiteness. So when I moved to Canada it seemed only natural that I only hang out with white kids. And so when I got political, I got political alongside my white friends; I become a pseudo-vegan eco-feminist, and protested the way they protested.

But the problem for me with white radical culture, is that it is a response generally to a middle-class suburban experience. In protesting the system in the way that my white friends protested the system, I was responding to an experience I had never had. (See Latoya’s explanation for why she doesn’t relate to Liz Phair.) I felt myself slipping further and further away from who I was, until by the time I was in my mid-20s I really wasn’t sure who I was at all.

And then in a hail of pink feathers and high ‘C’s, Mariah showed me the way. In 2005 with her massive comeback, she was all over the radio once again – enough even to reach me, who never listened to commercial radio at that point. Part of the magic of Mimi is her sheer global reach: sure I could’ve been inspired by a more serious mixed cultural figure, like Grace Lee Boggs, but growing up I had no access to someone like that.

This is how Mariah found me: on a boat ride from the remote island in the Pacific where my partner was learning organic biodynamic farming techniques, a friend helped us pass the time by playing “We Belong Together” (with zero irony) on her ukulele. I was amazed by the genuine sorrow and depth of emotion in the lyrics.

A few months earlier, I had read that article on Mixed Media Watch (evidently I skipped the comments). In spite of the fact that Mariah had been crooning to me all those years, I never realised that she was one of my people. In other words, reading MMW, I realised for the first time that just like me, Mariah was mixed race.

I was hooked on Mimi. I became fascinated by her journey across racial lines; how she had essentially gone from being the female Barry Manilow to making international booty-shaking hits with ODB. As I started to reconnect with myself and finally found friends of colour who understood my ethno-culturally fractured experience, I started to think about how white-washed Mariah had been as a young woman. And how, in spite of that, she had eventually reached a point where she made music that expressed both sides of her; music that was still ABBA-esque in its ridiculous, mind-numbing poppiness, but which recalled the best traditions of mainstream hip hop and R&B.

I would never insist that Carey’s oeuvre is high art. But apart from the fact that she makes perfect R&B music, there is also something very profound in the expression of emotion in her music. Her sad songs go to the deepest places of loss and grief, and her happy songs reach such ecstatic levels of joy; she can even take a phrase like “love you long time” with all its despicable history, and turn it into a force for pure, pop-driven bliss (well, at least according to my somewhat questionable tastes).

As I began to learn that I didn’t have to be either white or Asian, as I was learning that it was ok to just be everything that I am, I listened to The Emancipation of Mimi on loop.

My confusion about my racial identity was entangled in my confusion about my gender identity. I’d taken up a kind of feminism that involved convincing myself any kind of grooming made me a tool of the patriarchy. Many women feel liberated when they put down their razors. And that was partly how I felt. But on another level I felt divorced from who I was. I grew up in Singapore, for pete’s sake, one of the most exquisitely-coiffed places you will ever visit.

I could only come back to my roots and embrace being a femme once I started to think of it as a choice, as a performance; as something I did to express my own unique sexuality, not because I had to. And who better to model the performance of high femmeness than Mariah? Where some commenters make fun of Mariah’s stiletto stilettos and satiny pink everything, I can’t get enough of her completely over-the-top version of one kind of female sexuality, her buoyant embrace of her own vision of beauty, no matter how tacky and bubble-gummy.

Via the strangest route possible Mimi really did show me that I didn’t have to be afraid of what I am. Mariah became an example of a mixed race girl who got sucked into whiteness, but fought back.

Passing is a privilege. And as I’ve said before, if you’re a middle-class mixed race person of colour, the cultural pressure is to be white. (and I do think that this pressure to be white extends to any person of colour who has a modicum of privilege, like education or money) Where historical racism worked by excluding people, contemporary racism works by including people of colour; and then white-washing them.

It is difficult to explain the angst that goes with being able to pass, without sounding like a sucky baby; because that light-skinned privilege that so many of us mixies possess comes laden with superior benefits. I’m aware of this all the time. At the same time, many mixed people who try to disassociate from their other heritages wind up with a panicked and deeply unpeaceful sense of self.

I guess some would say that that fractalised sense of self is a small price to pay for the benefits of white privilege. When I look at my life and think about all the immense privilege I have, this seems reasonable. Yet I think it’s very important to remember that acting white is not always a conscious choice: considering that cultural pressure to act white, it sometimes feels like a daily battle to assert our complete selves. I’m not sure that it is always right to criticise any person of colour who allows themselves to be white-washed.

I think this is why I look at Mariah’s early career and see her white-ification as something she eventually escaped from, rather than ran towards. She’s the symbol of the mixed race girl who asserted all aspects of her ethnicity and self, and after many label changes, failed relationships, public breakdowns and flops, finally won the battle. If anything the publicness of her failures makes me love her more; even when everyone knew her business, she never gave up trying to be Mariah.

But I understand that other people see her as a symbol of the way our culture idealises some kinds of beauty and flays others, the way it remembers and celebrates light-skinned women, and the way it buries and ignores dark-skinned women. The little firestorm of controversy that MC stirs up every time she is mentioned on this site is clear evidence that the fluidity of her race — which to me appears as a joyful overcoming — appears reprehensible to others. I realise now, after reading the comments from all the Mariah posts on Racialicious, that people despise her for the very reason I love her: the fact that she’s been packaged both as white and black. I see it as the fact that its never too late to be the person you wanted to be; others view it as an obscene kind of inconsistency, as someone who will use people and cultures to their own end, and then throw them away.

In truth none of these interpretations of Mariah have anything to do with Mariah Carey herself. Reports of how she identifies are oddly conflicting and murky; if you are curious and have time on your hands, page through all those comments on past Mariah posts. You’ll find a panoply of reader-supplied links that all seem to contradict each other. (Though she did say this very nice thing about her success scoring one for the ladies and people of colour.) The only concrete thing seems to be what Mariah symbolises, and perhaps unsurprisingly she symbolises opposite things to different people.

As much as I don’t want to admit it, I have to say that I see in her what I need to see: a very public figure whose sense of self was buffeted from all sides, but who came out intact. That’s a total projection; there’s no proof that she herself sees her life that way.

Some of the kinship that I feel with Carmen has to do with Carmen’s Keanu love. Whether or not this is why Carmen gets starry-eyed over Keanu, I know lots of mixies who will stubbornly defend Keanu, despite his truly awful acting — because he was one of the first of our people to make it big, really the only public representation of myself that I got to see growing up. (Do you have a celebrity secret ally? Dish!)

For me, Mariah will always be a reminder that you don’t have to be half of anything. She’s still my secret ally in the battle to maintain my sense of self, a figure who tells me to eff all those other people who don’t respect who I am, and just go my own way: things will work out in the end.

As the song says in all its nauseating glory:

And then a hero comes along
With the strength to carry on
And you cast your fears aside
And you know you can survive.

–
Photo doctoring compliments of illustrator Elisha Lim.

When I went to college at the University of Utah, there was no box for me to check. There was no “Middle Eastern” and there was definitely no “bi- or multi-racial.” I’d like to think that the U of U has since updated their ethnicity data, but I can’t be sure.

When I applied to graduate school, I practically wet my pants when I saw “Middle Eastern” on the online application. I was overjoyed to think that my regional ethnicity was included. I happily checked “Middle Eastern”, ignoring the line for “Other,” where I could have specified “bi-racial.”

Currently, if you fill out an application on the Oregon State University’s website, there is a drop-down box of ethnicities, with an almost exhaustive list. They divided “Middle Eastern” and “North African” to make sure all ethnicities within these groups were covered, and the lists were fairly inclusive. Hazaras, Maronites, Baluchis, and other under-represented Middle Easterners were under “Middle Eastern.”

However, there is still no option for multi- or bi-racial.

Last March, several Middle Eastern UCLA student groups began a lobby to expand the University of California application ethnicity check boxes to include ethnicities such as Arab, Persian, Afghan, etc. It’s mind-boggling that the UC system would still not have up-to-date ethnicity representation on its applications, especially since California has high concentrations of West Asian diasporas in California (they don’t call it “Tehrangeles” for nothing).

The University of California system updated its ethnicity check boxes in 2007, when the Asian Pacific American Coalition (APAC) started the “Count Me In!” campaign, intended to break down the different groups pushed together under the category “Asian/Pacific Islander.” The campaign successfully put 23 new ethnicities on the application, including Samoan, Pakistani, and Hmong, and aims to improve census and research data on these specific groups’ college attendance patterns, financial aid packages, and student representation.

The first thing I thought when I read about the previous campaign was, “Lots of West Asian ethnicities are technically Asian because regionally they are on Asian continent. Why weren’t any of them included in this campaign?” Erin Pangilinan, a member of the APC  campaign, stated that the campaign’s ethnicity representations were based off California Assembly Bill 295 (which included a call for “state entities that currently collect demographic data regarding the ancestry or ethnic origin of Californians to also make a separate category and tabulation for specified Asian and Chamorro, Indonesian, Malaysian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Taiwanese, Thai, and Tongan”) and the 2000 U.S. Census, which stated that the aforementioned specific ethnicities have the largest populations in the United States. She stated that the campaign “was not intended to be exclusive, instead it is starting point to have a more inclusive and comprehensive admissions policy.”

The second issue that arose was that many of the “ethnicities” on the list were not actually ethnicities, but nationalities (Pakistani, Taiwanese, etc). Pangilinan explained that the campaign focused on ethnicities provided by the Census, which brings up more questions about ethnic representation in governmental processes. Constructing nationalities as synonymous with ethnicities creates troubling deficiencies in ethnic representation within nations, erringly homogenizing the ethnic populace.

This led me to question the inclusivity and strategy of the current campaign. I spoke with Faisal Attrache from UCLA’s United Arab Society. He said that the campaign is not aiming for a “Middle Eastern” designation: “We are attempting to gain representation of Middle Eastern minorities, but we do not want it to be under the heading of ‘Middle Eastern’ for many reasons.  It is a term with an unclear meaning and sometimes excludes several groups that we would like to include in the campaign. Ideally, we would like all the categories to standalone and not be grouped under ‘Middle Eastern’ or ‘Near Eastern’, because after all, the region we represent stretches from Central Asia to Western Africa.”

The campaign’s aim at a designation other than “Middle Eastern” is a relief: “Middle Eastern” is a term that’s left over from the colonial period, and is fairly misleading ethnically. “West Asian” includes much of the Middle East, including Arabs, but leaves out North Africa, a region which is heavily ethnically Arab. But I do have a fair skepticism at the stand-alone designations: if every other group has overarching categories, these ethnicities will most likely have one, too.

While I’m overjoyed that we (meaning underrepresented West Asian groups) might finally be included on the applications, I still worry about all those who aren’t being represented, and won’t be unless they lobby (or someone lobbies for them). Attrache mentioned that student groups at UCLA representing these ethnicities coordinate the campaign, and so Arab, Persian, Afghan, Armenian, and Assyrian students will be included. But no conclusive list has been agreed upon at this time, and so it’s difficult to say whether ethnicities that don’t have a large student presence on campus will be represented accurately or at all, especially if they are a significant minority in their home region. Because of the numerous and varied ethnicities in these regions, it’s almost certain that someone will get left out, which feels wrong in the current “We’re here, we’re [insert ethnicity], get used to us!” climate.

There’s also the fact that the box system itself is flawed, not just because of any possible lacks in representation, but because it historically leaves out bi- and multi-racial individuals. While the bi- or multi-racial designation could appear with a line for clarification, universities that use a drop-down box format have no way of collecting data about bi- or multi-racial students because the students cannot specify their racial makeup.

A blank line would illustrate better how people define themselves through their ethnicities and would be less likely to pigeonhole respondents into a group they don’t feel they identify with. It would also be welcoming for bi- or multi-racial students (much better than check all that apply).

The difficult logistics aside, this is an important campaign, just like it was two years ago. Not only will it give university statisticians and financial aid operators a better idea of the population indicators, but it can help the community at large gauge where it is on the local university scale in terms of representation, participation, and inclusion. It may also lead to an overall overhaul of the ethnicity system, recognizing differences among ethnicities under other categories previously bunched together (“Hispanic”, anyone?) and inaccurately represented.