Me & My Whiteness

As a biracial person I don’t really I identify with my whiteness. There isn’t a point. How does my whiteness serve me? I am not white passing. I was never given the chance to, even if I wanted. My whiteness never really mattered to anyone else. It is almost as if my Asianess cancelled out my whiteness. There is also no radical aspect of claiming my whiteness like there is with being Japanese and Asian. What is there? Yay for the blonde hair and blue eyes that I don’t have. Yay for bland food!? Of course there are definite privileges to being mixed with white but… this is about my personal identity. Growing up in a white society, my Japaneseness, my Asianess is what stood out, what I had to battle with, accept and come to identify with.

I am sure that this was all shaped and reinforced by the area I grew up in. Cultural diversity was barely there, with about 30 people of colour, at most, in a school of over 1000. You can’t expect nuance from a place like that. People though I was cousins with a family that was a Malaysian-Chinese and Swiss mix and also with a family of a Thai and German mix. Although our three families were more culturally diverse than the entire school/tub of mayonnaise, we were all some type of Asian so we all had to be related somehow…I couldn’t expect these people to understand that I was Japanese not Asian let alone that I was also mixed. The amount of times I have had to explain that Asia is a continent and not a county is truly heartbreaking. In the end all that people knew for sure was that I was different to them and that’s how I came to feel too.

However, for the first, in Japan, I am confronting my whiteness. It matters here, it has more currency. It is an uncomfortable experience. It is seen, noticed and many times made apparent to me. I have random people tell me I’m beautiful. That there is no way that I am only Japanese. That my beauty must be explained by somewhere else. It’s supposed to be a compliment but feels more like an insult. It feels like it goes against all of my work towards my self-love. That in the end all that matters is my whiteness. That not even in Japan is my Japaneseness seen and praised. It’s not just my face but also my culture. My cultural whiteness, my manners, my habits set me apart. My choices in the way I present myself often makes the little chance of passing as Japanese completely go out the window. Even to myself, when I look in the mirror. The features that I was so sure made me so different, I am not so sure of anymore, now maybe they are what make me look white. For the first time I can feel white and it is a weird experience that I am still trying to make sense of.