Biracial and Multiracial Americans

"No mom, you're more Indian than I am" was my retort every time my mom reminded me I was half Indian.  I really didn't need a reminder of what is like to be brown in white supremacist society but I also thought as far as Indian culture and religion were concerned, my white mother was an expert on all things Indian.  I often wondered why she was so invested in my embrace of Indian culture. She only saw advantages to having beautiful brown skin, while I felt it was a marker of difference or otherness.  

In a recent article called Choose Your Own Identity in the New York Times Magazine author Bonnie Tsui reflected on the experiences of biracial and multiracial children.  She is a mother of two half-Chinese and half-white children of English, Dutch and Irish descent.  She recounts her difficulties trying to explain the concept of racial identity to her son.  When she asked her son if he was Chinese, he replied, "Your Chinese, but I am not."  His mother assumes he is more readily identifying with his white heritage than he is with his Asian heritage citing a Pew Research Report that says multiracial Asians were more likely to identify as being White than Asian.  (That same research report also points out that the majority of multiracial Americans have also been subjected to racial slurs and discrimination so identifying as white and having white privilege is not the same thing.)  However, the author concludes that in our post racial world that has seen an increase in mixed race Americans, her sons would be freer, than previous generations, to choose their own racial identity.

Sharon Chang believes Bonnie Tsui, the author of the "Choose Your Own Identity" piece, has jumped onto the post-racial bandwagon in her response entitled Multiracial Asian Families.  She points out that buried deep in the comments section of the NY times "Choose Your Own Identity" piece is a response from a mixed raced adult who is tired of hearing about monoracial adults (mainly mothers of biracial or mixed race children) speaking for them (or referring to the entire category as primarily children in the first place) when there has been a plethora of scholarly work by biracial and multiracial adults on this very topic. However, Chang's main critique of the NY Times piece was that it failed to address white supremacy, racism, and discrimination that continue to exist in our social institutions today and are not just a relic from the past.  This is an exceeding relevant critique.  The idea that everyone can choose their own racial identity is part of the subterfuge that is behind the declaration that the US is a color blind post-racial society.

What color-blindness does is it masks white privilege and the structural inequities that perpetuate racism.  The ideology behind this perspective is that the US is a level playing field because segregation and discrimination are thought to no longer affect the life chances of its citizens of color.  This color-blind ideology acknowledges race but disregards racial hierarchy in US social institutions.  Race is then reduced to symbols and culture that can be commodified, purchased, and shared.   Through popular TV shows and films racial harmony is depicted as "the norm" making white privilege largely invisible or by delineating it as arising from individual merit and not from years and years of institutional inequality. 

There is a big difference between choosing your race and having it imposed on you that not everyone understands.  Most white Americans experience ethnicity as a largely symbolic choice.  Symbolic ethnicity poses no real social cost to the individual who voluntarily chooses to construct their identity that way.  Symbolic identifications of ethnicity often involve leisure time activities that serve to reinforce the enjoyable aspects of being ethnic.  White people can maintain symbolic ethnicities like identifying with the Irish.  They don’t live in or work in Irish neighborhoods or marry other Irish people.  Being Irish doesn’t influence their lives in any other way unless they want it to.  In contrast a socially imposed racial or ethnic identity has a social cost in that affects your life chances for success in American society.  In this situation members of racial minorities have their ethnicity designated by others largely based on perceptions of their race or national origin regardless of whether they choose to identify themselves with their ancestors of color.

My experiences of being Indian American are largely predicated on my experiences within US social structures that uphold white supremacy and much less about having a choice to identify as Asian. It is not that I haven't embraced my Asian and white heritage it just that the world refuses to see me.

Mom and me at the Indian ashram (Siddha Yoga) in Los Angeles in the late 1970's.