Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
Early in your career you were working on a TV show and pitched an episode about a white family trying to adopt a Black child, and it was rejected. Why did you never pursue adoption as subject matter again?
That was my third show on television. I had written the script and loved it. It was so personal, as you know. And to have the network come back and say, “We’re not shooting this because it’s too controversial”—that was the beginning of the end for me on that show. Imagine writing something that means so much to you, and you’re the only Black writer on this show. Most of my time was spent trying to give agency to the one Black character, and to call out atrocious dialogue and story lines connected to that character—when they decided to write for that character at all. So now I’m going to focus on that character and tell this personal story. Then to have white people tell me that I can’t tell my own story . . . It is traumatizing. That shit hurts. But I have to think that had to have been a part of what pushed me to keep going.
“I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S.,” says Mitski [Miyawaki]. “I didn’t identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.”
Mitski Miyawaki, who performs with her band under her first name, grew up in a biracial, multicultural household. During her childhood, Mitski lived in Japan, Malaysia, China, Turkey and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But it wasn’t until she returned to the U.S. that she had a racial designation imposed on her.
“I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S.,” says Mitski. “I didn’t identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.”
In the U.S., Mitski was regularly asked what most biracial people – her being half Japanese and half Caucasian American – are asked at least once in their lives: “What ARE you?” Mitski doesn’t particularly identify with American or Japanese culture, and her parents didn’t encourage her to choose or adopt either.
“I think growing up the way I did has made me a lot more objective, and that’s important in the process of writing and trying to look at subjective matter that way,” observes Mitski. “Being an outsider at the time nurtured my eye as a writer.”…
