"Stop invalidating multiracial folks."
I came across this post by The Love Life of An Asian Guy on Facebook. It was about issues multiracial people face in regards to their identity. This guy who wrote this post talked about three ways that multiracial people can use to identify themselves:
1. Based on DNA percentages (half Korean and half black; a quarter white, a quarter Latino and half black)
2. Based on your physical appearance (one may experience his or her life as a black individual even though he or she may be half Korean and half black)
3. Based on culture (one may connect more with his or her Korean culture and heritage than with his or her black heritage)
My cousins are half Korean and half white (my uncle is a white, French guy). As I was growing up, I never thought of them as different from me. What I always noticed was that, whenever I was with my little cousin, people would always make comments about her looking white. Nobody gave her credit for her half Korean-ness. Her ability to speak Korean fluently always blew people's minds away, because she looks white. Even though we tell these folks that she's half Korean, they would never accept her as "Korean" because she's not "fully" Korean. Back in France, my cousins would be considered Asian because of their half Korean heritage.
As I grew up and became old enough to understand the complexities attached to multiracialism and its identity crisis, I asked my cousins and my other multiracial friends about their experiences. Every single time, they would tell me they always felt like they never belonged anywhere. They were not "Asian" enough. They were not "white" enough. They were not "black" enough. One of my friends, who is half Asian and half white, told me that, when she was a kid, she tried to hang out with these Asian kids, but they would not let her in the group, because she was "white." Then, as she was going through puberty, she tried to fit into this "white" group, trying to be white and dismiss her Asian heritage. She told me how this identity crisis shaped her experience as a kid and an adolescent who was trying to figure out who she was, how much others' judgment of her hurt her. Then I remembered how I dismissed my baby cousin for not being "fully" Asian. I remember thinking and saying to my cousin, "you can't even eat spicy food? oh wait, it's okay. You are not Korean." The thing is, She is Korean. The mere fact that she's half white does not change the fact that she's still Korean. That was just one tiny example of my subconscious directing my thought about my biracial cousin.
The point of this post is to educate those who still believe that biracial, or multiracial people are not whole. They are not part something. They are whole. They are whole Asian, whole black, whole white, whole Latino. To quote the Love Life of An Asian Guy, "your identity is NOT your DNA %."
