No matter where you are in the world, you will find those who connect themselves with the concept of ‘mixed race’.
It will mean different things in different places
It will mean the same thing in different places
It will be mean different things in the same places
It will mean something unique to each individual person in each individual life.
For me, as a Chinese 'mixed race' woman, I identify heavily with using 'mixed race' as a linguistic home for myself. I have a Chinese mother, born in Indonesia, raised in Nigeria, and a white father born and raised in the UK. Given the erasure of a lot of our Chinese identity in the 'ethnic cleansing' in Indonesia in the 1960s, and my British cultural upbringing, it is hard to claim a Chinese identity without recognition of the white, both optically and culturally, therefore 'mixed race' works well for me. I am also 'white passing' in some spaces, giving me a different experience from those mixed identities either not associated with whiteness or optically different from the 'majority' ethnicity or race.
This is what makes the 'study' and entanglement of 'race' so complex. What I say is my reality in the UK, won't be the reality of another 'mixed race' woman of the same ethnic and cultural heritage. What I say is my reality in the UK might not even translate across the globe.
If you haven’t heard already, race is a social construct. It was designed by colonial, Western minds to deem themselves superior over the wrongfully deemed 'savage', 'inhumankind' we now call racialised.
What always baffled me is that many people find this concept difficult to grasp, but when you look at it through a global mixed race, it represents how powerful the imagination of race continues to be.
For example, there are many contentions with the term 'mixed race' in the UK alone. Using 'race' can imply a biological element to racialised identities, so I place 'mixed race' in quotations to amplify it as an imagination. Other people can use terms like mixed heritage, dual heritage, mixed ethnicity, mixed parentage, biracial etc. The choice is usually up to the individual person.
When you travel globally, this also changes. In the Caribbean, 'mixed race' is called the dougla, a linguistic invention made through the contact between peoples brought to the Caribbean to build plantation economies. It refers specifically to African and Indo mixed Caribbeans, mostly meaning 'biracial'. It associates Blackness with purity, with its own unique perceptions of beauty, attractiveness, and belonging. In Korea, depending on cultural associations the term changes. For example, Honhyol refers to those of 'mixed blood', but if you are American Asian you are Amerasian and often marginalised as an other in Korean society. If you are half Korean and half 'other' Asian, you are a Kosian. In these cultural contexts, these marginalisations prevent you from getting employment and education opportunities. Travel to countries that inhabit a caste system and you will find 'race' or racial categorisation less prevalent but caste hierarchies in its place. Cross-regional brides are exposed as 'dhabba' or stain, which is passed on throughout family lineage.
For me, this amplifies the significance of listening to lived experience, and considering positionality in research. We will never understand a homogeneous 'mixed race' experience as it simply does not exist, but we can listen to the diverse voices of 'mixed race' people globally to interrogate whiteness, racial constructions, and hierarchy. It promotes the importance of qualitative, social science research that engages intersectional feminist approaches of positionality and lived experience as knowledge (as in this case, lived experience is literally the only way of gaining this knowledge).
What we can also do is ensure those deemed 'mixed' do not feel like their existence is a problem, but educate on the social constructions around them that cause that internal and external narrative.
Lived experience in 'mixed race' research
When people attempt to summarise this in research without reference to the inherent messy nature of mixed identities, it always feels wrong. It feels like something is missing,
I’ve found a lot of power in mixed race research, such as Mahtani (2002, Tricking the Border Guards: Performing Race, Song and Hashem (2010) What Does “White” Mean? Interpreting the Choice of “Race” by Mixed Race Young People in Britain, and Trevor Noah (2017) Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. What they all did wonderfully is not just promote amazing research, but encompassed the mixed lived experience within their own contexts, and revealed the messiness of mixed identities.
For me, 'mixed race' or identity-based research should not just contribute to knowledge, but validate mixedness and mixed identities in the process.
But there is research out there that does not do this, and continues to commodify mixedness into a research topic and nothing more.
I have had these experiences, they are real, that changed my perception of how 'mixed race' research should be conducted.
When I work on a project moulded by mixedness, viewed from lived experience and formed from emotional passion, it represents my academic mind, but also shares a part of who I am.
My creativity, my work, my ideas, have been changed by other researchers, interested in the mixed experience but not the mixed soul.
Stolen by the whiteness who ensured me its safety.
Stolen by the white hands who pretended to care.
Stolen and modified to fit the needs of the white people who colonised it.
Once you take the mixed lived experience from the research you take its essence. The research can go from this bright beacon of love and power, to a grey mass of text that means nothing. Transformed into something lifeless. Transformed it into a research that inherently serves a methodological cause, not one of social justice.
In my experience, it felt like a part of me was being torn away,
Like whiteness had overcast it’s socially constructed right over my body and my story.
It was like being told:
“You don’t matter. But your under-researched soul will provide me a promotion”
It was like being told:
“This big project means more than protecting those we need for the research to exist in the first place”
My lived experience was a fetishised historical fantasy that would gain people access to international conferences, gain them prestige in scholarship, but never further my right to exist in peace.
'Mixed race' research means more to me than a career building platform. It provides a space to physically be able to continue research.
When the body breaks down, hands cramp, wrists weaken, brains flog, eyes fluctuate, what keeps me a float is the fulfillment of self, community-driven research and approaches. It is more than a topic it is a means of survival in an academic world.
I had been told my whole life that my lived experience didn’t matter. That because people couldn’t see my pain it didn’t exist. That I was just walking whiteness that didn’t deserve a seat at any table but to sit on the floor. It was more than “pick a side”, it was, you don’t have a side at all.
I want to showcase how amazing 'mixed race' research can be, in furthering a cause not just for mixedness but for social justice and dismantling the social construction of race. It can do its part while also empowering those who relate to it. It encompasses those who occupy a liminal space outside of the societal identity boundaries no one fits into.
But also the harms of when it is done wrong.
By not engaging with positionality within research, or considering the positionality of others, it dulls the research all together. How we see the world matters. 'Mixed race' experiences will never be understood, but the liminality and complexities of a mixed identity is something shared by those occupying a 'mixed race' space. And we need 'mixed race' voices to amplify that.
Bill of rights
I want to end this on a post I treasure, by the Instagram page @mixdgrlprblems
I remember when I first came across this, I felt an overwhelming release of emotion. I felt connected with. I felt heard. I felt protected by a community I didn’t even know I had.
I want to extend to all those who identify as mixed across the globe, you are enough. You are more than research. You are more than they tell you. We don’t represent equity nor do we want to, we represent a powerful voice that must be heard and amplified.
Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage
I have a right...
Not to justify my existence in this world.
Not to keep the races separate within me.
Not to justify my ethnic legitimacy.
Not to be responsible for people's discomfort with my physical or ethnic ambiguity.
I have a right...
To identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify.
To identify myself differently than how my parents identify me.
To identify myself differently than my brothers and sisters.
To identify myself differently in different situations.
I have a right...
To create vocabulary to communicate about being multiracial and multiethnic.
To change my identity over my lifetime - and more than once.
To have loyalties and identification with more than one group of people.
To freely choose whom I befriend and love.
If you want to do ‘mixed race’, mixed heritage, duel heritage, multiracial (whatever you want to call it) research, then you better do it to serve mixedness , and not yourself.
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