What it means to be biracial
And hope for a post-race world
I’m considered biracial, which means that when I’m asked to mark my race for a survey or form and “Two or more races” isn’t an option, it can get kind of awkward.
Recently, as part of a job application, I was told to mark the one I “most closely identify as.” For the person who designed the form, this was just a way to simplify the matter. For me, it served to confuse me even more, because asking a biracial person which race they’re “closer” to reflects a profound misunderstanding of racial identity.
I often tell the story of how I’ve never fully fit in with either side of my family.
My dad is white, and to his side of the family, I’ve always been something of an anomaly. To them, I’ll never be white. Remember the one-drop rule? We’d like to think that kind of reasoning is behind us, but it isn’t. To them, whiteness is all-or-nothing, and I’m… well, I’m certainly not all, so I must be the other one.
On the other hand, my mom’s side of the family is Filipino. To them, I’ll always be white. And they don’t consider that a bad thing; internalized neocolonial attitudes have caused many Filipinos to consider the white fetishization of themselves a boon, as it creates opportunities for them to escape their plight of poverty and corruption. As in many places, light skin is a status symbol for Filipinos. My mother often mentions how, as a kid, she’d never let her sister stay out in the sun too long. A tan meant you spent your days outside in the heat with the sun beating down on you, which meant that you were poor, resigned to a life of menial labor. She kept her sister’s skin light because she wanted her to have opportunities down the line.
Now, her sister lives in North Carolina, where people frequent the tanning salon. A total reversal of the Filipino mentality — in this country, a tan means you have free time, a luxury afforded only to the affluent. Skin color can mean all sorts of things depending on cultural context.
Both of these two very distinct groups have only ever been cordial with me, but there’s a distance between them and myself, one which isn’t quickly overcome. Racial connections are very real, and if they don’t consider me to be their racial equals, we’ve already lost one possible commonality. That immediate alienation snowballs until we struggle to find anything truly compelling to talk about. Sure, I love them, and sure, we can hold great conversations, but under the surface, there’s an understanding neither of us are quite willing or able to articulate: you don’t look like me.
For a long time, I’d tell people I was half-white and half-Asian, because that made sense to me.
My dad came from one place; my mom, another; and I was their shared progeny, so I must be from both of those places simultaneously.
Except the thing is, I’m really not. My experience with race has been completely different from either of my parents’. I don’t know half of what it’s like to be white. I don’t spend half my time living an Asian experience.
And the effect is one of never quite belonging to any group. I’m deprived, in a sense, of a true racial experience.
Talking to other biracial people, I’ve heard similar things. People saying “You act more white than black.” People commenting on how one side or another is “coming out.” People always asking them if they lean more towards one race or another, never really realizing how little sense that actually makes.
But to illustrate why, we have to talk about the function race serves.
In many ways, humans are cognitive misers, constructing vast arrays of mental categories into which new stimuli can be entered and assigned specific, predetermined attributes for ease of processing. When a toddler learns the word “dog,” they form a concept for a dog, a prototype that is likely informed by the first dog they ever associate it with. Now, let’s say the same toddler sees a cat. They take a look at it, note some of its most salient characteristics — its fur, its tail, its four legs — and conclude that it must be a dog. It doesn’t occur to them that the cat might represent a new category they haven’t created yet; they simply assimilate it into an existing one. They have to be told that a cat is a cat and not a dog before they can begin to — sometimes begrudgingly — develop a new concept from scratch.
The brain does this because it’s efficient. If we spent every waking moment poring over the specific traits of an individual object before deciding what to call it, we’d lose our minds. We just don’t have the mental resources required for it. We need broad concepts to lump new things into, and most of it the time, it works pretty well. It minimizes the effort of parsing down every interaction we have with new objects. If I see something I can identify as a computer, I don’t have to spend hours tinkering with it to figure out what it’s supposed to do. I move the mouse and click a few things, and in three seconds I have access to, you know, the entire wealth of human knowledge, because that’s what a computer does. We crave order because it burns fewer calories.
Race is a tool of conceptualization, and not a particularly unique one. It operates on the same principle as I’ve just described. New stimuli, in the form of people, have to be quickly added to racial concepts in order to fill in ostensibly essentialistic information about them. Identifying someone as a man generates fundamental information about them at a glance. Identifying them as black helps too. I’ve certainly never looked at someone and asked myself, “I wonder if they belong to a race I’m not aware of.” We’re not wired to think like that. Our systems are instantaneous and unconscious.
Race just happens to be a system that resists change; updating one’s set of racial categories can be jarring or even irritating. Imagine being told that there’s a new race you’ve never even known about. You might immediately try to classify it as a subset of another race you’re already familiar with, or ask if it’s closely related to another one. That’s your brain trying to assimilate new information into old information. It’s doing all it can to avoid the prospect that something might be totally unfamiliar to you, like seeing images in the clouds. We often refer to race as a social construct, but like any social construct it starts off as a mental construct, an attempt to make sense out of chaos.
This very natural, very human process of categorization was legitimized by Enlightenment thinkers, who claimed that race was a scientific physical reality when, in fact, more genetic diversity can occur between members of the same race than between members of different races — but, you know, science. They treated race as an observable phenomenon (confusing it, perhaps, with ethnicity), and developed genealogical trees to map out the races and their relationships with one another, thus creating the dismaying institution of scientific racism, which allowed race legal definitions in addition to scientific ones.
But to talk about the relatedness of races is totally out of step with how we normally treat race.
Race is categorical. It doesn’t occur on a gradient, because its whole purpose is to delineate clear-cut characteristics at a first glance. Whether those characteristics are valid or accurate is beside the point; a person just doesn’t really fall into multiple racial categories.
Except, they kind of do. Our intuition about so-called multiracial people isn’t wrong, per se. It’s just inconsistent with how we normally see and talk about race. And while we could spend forever talking about whether a social construct like race actually “exists” in any meaningful sense of the word, race has a very real macro-effect on pretty much every person on the planet, so it’s important that we know what we’re talking about when we talk about race, and maintain consistent definitions about what it entails.
But multiracial people present somewhat of a dilemma. We defy categorization because of race’s absolute nature. The term “multiracial,” by some accounts, is downright nonsensical. A person might be able to present themselves as different races in different contexts, but that ability is contrary to the role of race as a conceptual tool. And as the mixing of races becomes more common, more people exist who defy it, or at least revolutionize it.
As usual, multiracial people are over here complicating things.
So what does this mean for the future of race? Do multiracial people simply add to the number of possible races with each permutation, forming their own new categories wherever they go?
I don’t think so. In fact, I’d say it’s almost the opposite. The growing incidence of multiracial people represents a drastic change: we are dismantling race, marching steadily towards what might be called a post-racial world.
Think about it: the usefulness of race as a means of categorization diminishes each time an adorable little mixed-race baby comes out screaming into the world. Eventually, we won’t be able to develop specific multiracial demographics because there will simply be too many of them for it to be worth doing. A friend of mine is a quarter Chinese, a quarter Jamaican, and half-white. Will she be getting her own entertainment channel on network TV? Will her ethnic makeup be an option on the SAT Scantron? Will companies marketing their products try to appeal to her whiteness, or her blackness, or her Asianness?
Or will they only be able to appeal to her experience as a multiracial individual? In her lifetime, will the prevalence of multiracial people become so great that we’re forced to use our mutual experience of a culture in flux to relate to one another, rather than racial flag-markers that often manifest themselves as offensive stereotypes?
I’m not discounting the power of race or the beautiful things it’s capable of producing. I’m not advocating race-blindness. As Trevor Noah said in his recent interview with Tomi Lahren, “There’s nothing wrong with seeing color, it’s how you treat color that’s more important.” He was absolutely right. Ignoring racial realities is a disservice, not a solution. But I think the racial reality we’re seeing now is one of fundamental change. Sure, race relations are in a pretty sorry state at the moment, but as different marginalized groups reach out to one another to discuss their experiences of subjugation and strength, they’re fomenting a sense of racial pride while contributing to the dissolution of the institution of race in the process. It seems like an inherent contradiction, but then, race is full of those.
Another thing to consider is that the number of races has always been in decline.
Skin color has always been used to stratify social categorization, but the phenomenon of race was only articulated during the Transatlantic slave trade to justify… well… the Transatlantic slave trade. For a very long time, Anglo-Saxons were the only people belonging to the racial group we now know as white. Teutonic peoples eventually joined them, forming a coalition of Nordic people who were seen as white. Remember those Enlightenment thinkers from earlier? During the 18th century, Carl Linnaeus categorized the world into four different, objective subspecies — Black, Asian, Indian, and European — but many Europeans remained firmly removed from whiteness until much later.
The Irish are one notorious example of a relatively new addition to whiteness. Secretary of Agriculture for the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce said, in 1939, “There are only three races in the world whom civilization has not touched — the Scotch, the Indian (and the Mexican is an Indian), and the Irish.” It wasn’t until, by some accounts, the late 19th century that the Irish were accepted into the fold. At some point along the way, Greeks, Italians, Jews, and countless others were thrown in, despite previous legalistic distinctions between them. Races have a way of congealing, and they do it often, but very rarely do they separate.
The way I see it, this all points to a post-racial world. Where I once considered myself biracial, I’m starting to see myself as more non-racial, a person defying classical categorization in favor of something new. It’s not my particular racial makeup that defines me. It’s the fact that I have such an unusual (historically, at least) racial makeup, bringing me closer to other multi-ethnic people in ways that aren’t present in my relationships with monoracial people. And if that interconnectedness can’t be explained by race as we currently conceive of it, well, maybe race is losing its utility. In a rapidly globalizing world, maybe it’s only the past that keeps racial identity intact, while the future can only ever blur the lines until they’re nothing more than a whisper from a time long gone.
It might sound like wishful thinking, this post-racial world I’m talking about, but my attitude towards it is more one of curiosity than of eagerness. It’s a paradigmatic change in the way we understand the differences between people, and if history is any indication, it’ll probably just be replaced with other, potentially uglier divisions. But with any luck, it’ll have a nurturing effect on humanity, easing the rifts that have come at such a high cost to so many. If that’s the case, I’m ready for it.
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