What Racial Ambiguity Means to Me

In academia, people often speak in very conceptual terms that are not welcoming to folks who don’t use that common language. It stifles conversations or ends it completely before it has a chance to begin.

I think about being multiracial often because of my own identity. I think about it in terms of how I’ve benefited and been harmed because of that very specific identity.

I think about making more space for biracial folks while centering Black folks in an anti-black society and how all of that ought to co-exist in the world when the biracial person is also Black.

I think about who I have access to in the dating field and how I come off professionally.

I think about the term racially ambiguous and the privilege within the term itself. It means one doesn’t look Black-Black. It means there is some other race entwined in there that enhances the beauty, as though the beauty needed to be enhanced.

The National Geographic issue where everyone is racially ambiguous in the near future reinforces that idea that being simply Black is not what we want our future to look like. That idea is wildly harmful.

The idea too that biracial people are harmed by Black people who don’t accept them as part of the Black community is also outdated and somewhat ridiculous. Anti-blackness is systemic so the outcasting of biracial children if it does happen, often comes from family members in their non-Black lineage.

What one tells themselves and what their communities actually says can be different. The Asian stereotypes of quiet and quaint were not made up by Asians but by white folks. Both my mom and grandmother are outspoken and opinionated so I can’t point the blame at them when men or bosses expect me to be more docile than I am. It’s not a narrative the Asian-American community created.

Similarly, when Black people with light skin or biracial folks say “I’m not accepted by the Black community.” or “I never felt part of the Black community,” it strikes me as placing blame on folks who are likely just fine with who they are and are not likely harming you. Those internal feelings likely come from the fact that white culture says that you’re more proximal to whiteness and therefore somehow different from dark-skinned folks, but not that different since you're still othered. We have to reanalyze that thought.

The internal struggle of thinking you’re not fully this or that is a valid and often painful one to reconcile but that doesn’t mean that some of it isn’t a projection of blame onto folks more marginal than you.

Feelings and experiences about different identities are real and if we always play oppression Olympics, those feelings can be silenced and put aside if we only have enough brain space to talk about the most oppressed of people. While attempting not to do in a manner that gaslights and “all lives matter” race in this moment, I still aim to highlight and make space for multiracial identity in a country that is obsessed with labels and boxes, and hence obsessed with erasure.

Biracial people outside of the Black/ White dichotomy also exists and we deal with an entirely different dynamic. Depending on what races make up an individual, the experiences are entirely unique but it’s particularly murky in biracial people who are not part white. Non-white biracial people navigate how to uplift different cultures while not being understood by greater society as conventionally what one ought to be like or look like. Further, those who are mixed with Asian and Latino roots often still deal with xenophobia and the contempt for immigrants even as they navigate their own belonging. And (lastly), they have to navigate how the desirability politics and values from the different parts of their identity can not only co-exist but have a conversation with each other in their body. Their body being the place of both otherness and privilege, a place of colonization and power. It’s a lot that we don’t talk about.

As I write this, I recognize that I’m throwing around words like desirability politics, otherness,  and racial ambiguity to talk about a concept that is actually just visceral. We get highlighted when and if we tell our stories. Our stories bring up questions and if there are no stories, we don’t exist in the cultural imagination except in a way that continues to be defined for us by things outside of us. That isn’t right.

That’s where the fetishization and the tendency towards exoticism comes in. I am racially ambiguous because of our education system and the stories Americans see and hear or more accurately, the stories they don't see and don't hear. I exist outside of the norm. But I am not racially ambiguous. I know what I am. Vietnamese and Black and the fact that I am both, just like millions of other multi-racial individuals, deserves space for dialogue, accountability, and mere existence. 

 Anyways, I am working on a multiracial project and I am speaking it into existence.