Do you find yourself too “white-nized” to be fully non-white, but too non-white to be white?
Too “Americanized” to be foreign, but always too foreign to be “American”?
Do you sometimes feel like you’re excluded from your heritage because you don’t fluently speak a certain language or practice a specific religion and/or culture?
Have you been called any of the following: Banana, Twinkie, Oreo, Apple, Coconut, or some other food related metaphor to insinuate that you’re a person of color on the outside, but white on the inside, simply because you don’t completely look and/or act the way your stereotype is supposed to look/act?
Do you often wrestle with which heritage you feel closest to? With which part of yourself feels the most like “you”?
Well, you just might be Mixed™!
Common symptoms of being Mixed™ often include (but are not limited to): *
- Never feeling like you completely belong in any one place.
- Always feeling like you somewhat belong in almost every place.
- Consistently receiving the question of “So, what are you… really?” from a string of various people. Possibly followed up with a proclamation about how much they love and/or hate your native food/culture. Even if you don’t eat/practice said food/culture.
- If you mention that you’re from Hawai’i, you might be met with an, “Ohh, that explains why you look like *insert broad gesture as they scramble to grasp the correct words* you know…? Ha!” To which you might simply laugh along and exclaim in an equally lighthearted tone, “Yeah, I guess!”
- When met with the arbitrary “Fill in your ethnicity or racial background” section of bubbles on a form, you may pause. Which bubble do you bubble in? Which bubble are you? Can you bubble in multiple bubbles? If so, you may breathe a sigh of relief while a gnawing guilt consumes you because now you have to use more lead and more time to bubble in every bubble that makes up who you are and oh, why can’t you be a simple one-bubble-kind-of-person? But if you can only pick one bubble, you may panic again. By now, you may have trained yourself to fill in a certain bubble when told to only bubble in one bubble, even though you can’t shake the insidious feeling that you’re only filling in half of yourself.
- You may find that nostalgia resides in different forms of music. For example, the image of your mother dancing in a spot of sunlight to Eydie Gormé, or the tender plucks of a Hawaiian ukulele as you watch the sun shimmer out on a muggy evening. It may reside in Jazz standards your grandfather hums without realizing, little Japanese songs you can’t help but remember, and Liszt or Chopin pieces your fingers are able to tap out without hesitation. And you may realize that any form of dementia will be up against a concoction of the best therapy: music.
- As a child, the cultures you may have practiced and the traditions you upheld might have taken you worldwide. For example, rice or mochi on New Years for good luck; soba or udon noodles on your birthday to inspire long life; maybe a Hanukkah or two, complete with latkes and chocolate gelt; always a Christmas, but with holy water from a stucco church in Santa Fe and a prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe; a red envelope stuffed with money for every Lunar New Years; a traditional hula dance for every Lei Day.
- You may be asked which ethnicity you feel closest to, which part of yourself feels most like yourself. You may conclude that it depends on the day. Perhaps also on the time.
- If you talk about being Japanese, a full-blooded Japanese person may comment, “Well, you’re not completely Japanese. Not really.” This may also happen with your Hispanic/Indigenous side and your confusing (yet valid) Ukrainian Jewish side. And you may feel that with every pointed word, they are erasing an outline of you. Because if you’re not enough of any one of these things, then what are you?
- Simply put, you may come to feel that to be both means to be neither.
- You may be asked what it’s like to be in an interracial relationship and find that, huh, every relationship would technically be an interracial one to some extent.
- You might feel a sense of disorienting homesickness wherever you go. “Disorienting” because “home” is a feeling that may occasionally elude you. You may find yourself asking: Is this home?
- When you unravel the mess that is your convoluted strands of DNA, you might be left with an unfinished map. One with too many threads that lead to too many places, and one that also leads no place in particular.
- You might realize how vast the world is, and how you’ve seen only a sliver of it. And then you may wonder how you’ve thought of a place as “home” when you’ve never stepped foot in it.
- When someone tells you to, “Go back to your own home!” You might find yourself honestly replying, “Which home exactly?” Or more simply, “Where?”
- You may be delighted at National Geographic’s prediction of a waffle-colored world, complete with “khaki and empty-toilet roll colored people,” as a friend may detail. This friend may puncture his text with exuberance and an emoji wearing a party hat to really emphasize his joy. You may share in that glee for a moment, before ruminating over the prospect of a world filled with more equally confused and lonely people, who come from everywhere and nowhere. And you may feel very sad about the fate of your unborn child, as you imagine them trying desperately to unravel their even more tangled strands of DNA, knotted like spools of yarn. You might even need a drink (or two (or three)) after contemplating all that existential stuff.
- You may find that most people feel as tangled and exposed, for their own equally confusing and lonely reasons. You may find solace in that realization. You may find grief.
- On some days, you may love yourself more for the complexities that make up your identity. On others, you may love yourself less. Both are, well, not the easiest. But that is okay. That’s what makes you Mixed™.
*Note: Mixed™ is both an affliction and a cure. Symptoms may vary.