{"id":36848,"date":"2014-07-22T23:15:10","date_gmt":"2014-07-22T23:15:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=36848"},"modified":"2014-11-11T16:18:06","modified_gmt":"2014-11-11T16:18:06","slug":"%ef%bb%bfwhy-mixed-with-white-isnt-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=36848","title":{"rendered":"\ufeffWhy Mixed with White isn’t White"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why Mixed with White isn’t White<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Hyphen: Asian America Unabrided<\/a>
\n2014-07-22<\/p>\n

Sharon H. Chang<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

When I wrote my first post for Hyphen, “Talking Mixed-Race Identity with Young Children<\/a>,” I was deliberately blunt about race. I wrote about how I don\u2019t tell my multiracial son, who presents as a racial minority, that he\u2019s white — but I do tell him he\u2019s Asian. While the essay resonated with many people, others made comments like this:<\/p>\n

\u201cYour child is as white as he is Asian\u2026 Why embrace one label and not the other?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy is he Asian but not white? He has white ancestors as much as Asian ones. So if it’s OK to call him Asian, it’s OK to call him white. Or, if it’s not OK to call him white (because he’s not completely white) then it’s not OK to call him Asian, because he’s not completely Asian either.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYour child is neither white nor Asian. I once heard this description: When you have a glass of milk and add chocolate to it, you no longer have just a glass of milk and you no longer just have chocolate because you have created something completely different. A bi-racial or multi-racial child is not either\/or.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the 1990s, psychologist and mixed-race scholar Maria P.P. Root<\/a> wrote the famous “Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage<\/a>,” stirred by her examination of mixed-race identity, interviews with hundreds of multiracial folk across the U.S., and the struggles multiracial people face in forming and claiming a positive sense of self. \u201cI have the right not to justify my existence to the world,\u201d it reads. \u201cTo identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify. To create a vocabulary about being multiracial or multiethnic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost two decades later, these proclamations still ring so true. Some people are completely unwilling to honor my family\u2019s choice to identify as mixed-race and Asian because it doesn\u2019t align with their own ideas about how we should identify. The right of a mixed-race person to self-construct and self-define, even today, endures continual policing from people with their own agendas…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why Mixed with White isn’t White Hyphen: Asian America Unabrided 2014-07-22 Sharon H. Chang When I wrote my first post for Hyphen, “Talking Mixed-Race Identity with Young Children,” I was deliberately blunt about race. I wrote about how I don\u2019t tell my multiracial son, who presents as a racial minority, that he\u2019s white — but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,125,8,20],"tags":[17310,15067,17600,14613,16773],"class_list":["post-36848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-hyphen","tag-hyphen-magazine","tag-hyphen-asian-america-unabrided","tag-sharon-chang","tag-sharon-h-chang"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36848\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}