My Blogging Adventures Continue

My personal blog here is no longer the only place where I can discuss being multiracial. I’m now a freelance blogger for Mixed Nation!

Mixed Nation is a growing blog about mixed, interracial, and multiracial experiences. During my search for other blogs a few months ago, I missed out on Mixed Nation. Maybe it wasn’t as popular then – I’m not entirely sure. But so far, I’m having fun doing a bit of blogging there.

That doesn’t mean I’ll abandon this blog, though. I’m currently in the process of moving to another part of Reno, so that’s been taking up my time. But I’m sure I can find news. In the meantime, check out the blog “We Are the 15 Percent.”

Observations of the Multiracial World

I apologize for not posting as often as I want to! I promise I will work on this. So, I just thought I’d do an update on some things I’ve noticed in the past few weeks:

1. I frequently go to a breakfast place called Squeeze In, and it is awesome. I never thought much about how it could apply to my blog. But sometimes they print a “newsletter” about their staffers, and I saw this clip of one of them:

Note that he is half Mexican and speaks Spanish!

Of course, I thought this was pretty cool. But more importantly, this is the example he gives when asked about something people would find surprising about him. In this photo, he looks white to me, so it seems like I have more in common with a worker from Squeeze In than I thought.

2. I saw many multiracial families in Disneyland during my trip to Los Angeles a week ago. This isn’t too strange since thousands of people go to Disneyland every day, but I still liked to see that diversity. Adding to that, the majority of people have come out in support of the Cheerios ad that I mentioned in an earlier post. That’s great.

3. As usual, there is racial controversy surrounding the Washington Redskins team name. Some Native Americans say it’s offensive; others don’t. Then the Redskins owner and Commissioner Roger Goodell have said that the name is positive and will never change. Here is the letter Goodell wrote to Congress about the name.

For what it’s worth, I strongly oppose the Redskins name and I find Goodell’s reasoning flawed. Only 11% of Americans say the name should be changed. Well, American Indians only make up 1% of the population, so are they actually being fairly represented? It doesn’t seem that way to me. But many white Americans on the web debase “political correctness” and say that people should just “get over it and ignore the name.” Easy for you to say, isn’t it?

More on the State of Racism

Apparently, an innocent commercial that features a multiracial family can’t be posted without controversy surrounding it.

A Cheerios commercial attracted a lot of YouTube comments disparaging an African American and white family, which Buzzfeed picked up on. Apparently, Internet trolls flooded the video with comments about racial mixing and “miscegenation.” Consequently, Cheerios had to disable the comments section.

I suppose hearing about this would sadden me more if I wasn’t used to seeing such things, especially on websites like YouTube. It’s amazing what people will say when they think they’re anonymous. Thankfully, Internet trolls like these don’t represent the population as a whole. Someday, the slew of racist comments may subside, but it’ll take many more years to do that.

To those who say racism is dead – not true at all. Watch a couple of YouTube videos.

This Blog Is Still Alive

So I’ve been on a hiatus for a month or so…but worry not! I will be able to update regularly again. In the last month, I completed my undergraduate thesis, graduated from college and spent a lot of time with my family. Therefore, I slacked off on the blogging, and for that I apologize. I don’t want this blog to go the way of many multiracial blogs.

Anyway, I have had interesting experiences in the last month. For example, I attended not one, but a few graduation ceremonies. One of them was the Latino Graduation Celebration, which was put on by the Student Center of Cultural Diversity and the Latino Research Center. I was excited to attend this because I do identify as Latina, and I put “Hispanic” as the primary demographic on my demographic forms when I entered college.

Here I am at the Latino Graduation Celebration on May 10th. The multi-colored sash is the one that represents Latino heritage.

It was a pretty fun celebration, though many other Latinos didn’t attend. Afterward, there was food and salsa dancing. I kept wondering what exactly the sash was supposed to symbolize (it is the multi-colored one in the forefront, pictured above). To me, it looked like a weave by indigenous Mexican groups. Many people later asked me about it and I didn’t have a real answer. But how could I expect it to be Puerto Rican in any way? There are very few Puerto Ricans in the West Coast. I decided I was just proud to have any Latino recognition at all.

Another experience was with my first cousin on my dad’s side. She is also half Puerto Rican, but is even “whiter” than me. She has light brown hair and is very thin. I found out that she has had to deal with the same reactions as I have when it comes to telling people that we are Latina. “Nobody believes me,” she said. “And they ask me if I’m telling the truth.” Her sister, my other cousin (who is 11), says the same thing.

They live on the East Coast, not far from New York City, but their town seems to be pretty racially diverse – at least more so than Reno. It was a little sad to hear that even they are invalidated in a place where they should feel comfortable about their multiracial heritage. But that’s the way things are sometimes. Maybe when they get older, people will show more respect as to how they identify themselves.

White, Hispanic, and Native American – Which One Counts?

Carmen Wright is a student in my media graphics class and she definitely looked Hispanic to me. I couldn’t tell whether it was her skin tone or her eye color that did it, but I intuitively knew that. Apparently, other people don’t.

I am not the best observer, and I don’t think my own Hispanic heritage had to do with why I knew she was Hispanic. Most likely, it was just luck. But Carmen said she didn’t have to deal with those issues until she was in middle school. Before then, she always identified herself as white, although her father (who is white and Native American) encouraged her to embrace the half-Mexican part of her heritage.

Carmen described the time she first asked about how to fill out a demographic form at school. Listen to the clip here:

She ended up checking the box for “white,” though she said she wasn’t happy doing that.

“It felt judgmental at that point, so I checked white,” Carmen said. “I don’t know. I got nervous. Ever since then, I decided I wasn’t (white). I happen to be paler than the traditional image of the Hispanic, so why follow that? It’s not my fault.”

Carmen isn’t only white and Mexican. She is one-eighth Native American, specifically Chinook. In fact, her primary heritage listed in the University of Nevada, Reno database is Native American. As a result, Carmen gets to participate in a graduation ceremony for Native Americans, since she is graduating this semester. However, she said that the demographic listing in the database wasn’t intentional on her part.

“I don’t know how that worked out, to be honest,” Carmen said. “I didn’t get recognition for the 50% of my other identity. I clicked all that applied, but Native American was all that showed up… I don’t know how they took that one over the other one. Like I said, I don’t want to go to Admissions and Records and fill it out. I could do it online but I can’t change the primary (demographic).”

Carmen Wright describes herself as white, Mexican and Native American.

Although I was invited to the graduation ceremony for Latinos this year, Carmen wasn’t, because Hispanic is not her primary ethnicity listed — mine is. The system has it set up so that people are made to identify with one race. Native American was the demographic that counted for Carmen, though others see her as white and she sees herself as Mexican. For me, the troubling part about this was that not all of them can count. Carmen expressed this idea as well.

“I think that when we started categorizing people, it was like, ‘it’s okay if (this person) and (this person) of different ethnicities can have a child,'” Carmen said. “Now, there is no right place to put anybody. It’s really confusing.”

The Tsarnaev Brothers Are White

I thought it would make a good follow-up to my post on racial profiling to share another article on the issue.

Salon addressed the question: are the Tsarnaev brothers white? Writer David Sirota was trashed by conservatives by saying he hopes the Boston Marathon bombing suspects turn out to be white. And, indeed, they did. But according to the article, many conservatives wrote in and said he was wrong and that they weren’t white.

Considering the Tsarnaevs are from the Caucasus Mountains, this means they are Caucasian, which means white. The Salon piece brought that fact up and it hadn’t even occurred to me before. Caucasus = Caucasion. Who’da thunk it? Also, most people think now that they worked on their own, much like James Holmes, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Timothy McVeigh and others worked on their own or in pairs. I still firmly believe that had al-Qaeda had anything to do with it, they would have owned up to it. They would want everyone to know, like after 9/11.

It’s hard for some people to realize it, but the Tsarnaevs were white Americans. They were both naturalized citizens, sure, but their skin was white and they were considered American. They spoke English and everything. They were multiethnic, but in this case they really weren’t multiracial. They aren’t even as racially diverse as me. The Salon article concluded that Sirota’s “hope” did play out. Hopefully people can accept that.

Maintaining a Blog About Race

It’s not easy to keep up a blog on race, especially multiple races. Not only are there not very many active blogs that even discuss it, as I talked about in this post, but it’s hard to talk about every single thing that happens that may involve multiracial people. I obviously don’t do that. If I did, I’d be posting every second of every day.

ColorLines, however, does a pretty good job of this. I linked to their blog/breaking news page because it’s constantly updated, and the posts are about issues that matter. Just scanning the page, I noticed content about immigration, homosexuality, health and film. I find that pretty awesome. Sure, ColorLines has staff members to update it, but it’s still impressive how often they post.

A screenshot of ColorLines’ NOW page.

ColorLines has a clear agenda, so it’s not the most objective news source, but then again not many blogs are objective. I even injected a bit of pathos in my last post about Dzokhar Tsarnaev  and the racial profiling of the media and the Internet (ColorLines wrote about that as well here). I couldn’t help it. I’m not working at a newspaper. This is a blog. And ColorLines’ website also appeals to certain demographics – not only to multiracial people, but those who are left-leaning. It seems like they’ve found an audience that way.

Who knows? Maybe my blog will become as popular as that site! Someday…

Racial Profiling in the Last Week

Unfortunately, racial profiling became a big part of the Boston Marathon explosion aftermath last week. A Saudi national was rumored to have been questioned by the police after the bombing simply because he had been there. The New York Post cover showed two men who had nothing to do with the incident. The Internet went on a witch hunt after missing Brown University student Sunil Tripathi, simply because people on Reddit thought they recognized him (here’s a good story on The Atlantic website about that).

Why were these people incorrectly identified? Simple. They look Arabic.

Well, Sunil Tripathi is of Indian descent, but still – he was brown. That seems to be what mattered.

Again, what does this have to do with being multiracial? Well, the people accused (and the Tsarnaev brothers, the actual suspects) are all Americans. Maybe being American doesn’t count as a race. We certainly don’t seem to think so. But they are multiethnic, at least, and that  means the same thing to me as being multiracial, because multiethnic people face the same struggles.

Dzokhar Tsarnaev, a naturalized American citizen from Chechnya, is the suspect accused of the Boston Marathon bombings. Photo courtesy of stream47 on Flickr.

Dzokhar Tsarnaev, then, and his now-dead brother Tamerlan, were Russian-American Muslims. Nobody knows yet why they did what they did, but many people on the Internet like to blame Islam and al-Qaeda, before we even know which to blame. The sad part is that Tsarnaev doesn’t even look anything like Tripathi, but Tripathi is darker, so he was targeted.

I suppose just looking at Tsarnaev that he doesn’t quite look “white” but he isn’t dark-skinned like the men on The New York Post’s cover. Salah Eddin Barhoum, a 17-year-old Moroccan-American, said he was only labeled as a suspect because of his brown skin and the bag he was carrying. He was too frightened to even go outside.

I understand that racial profiling is essentially a fact of life, but it hurts me to know that ignorant people go online and blast Muslims and Arabs before they even know who is responsible. After all, 99% of Muslims aren’t part of these terrorist bombings perpetrated by people who happen to be Muslim, and certainly we have experienced many incidents of terrorism that have nothing to do with people who look Arabic. It reminds me of how terrible I felt after the shootings in Norway in 2011. CNN initially reported that Anders Breivik was a Muslim terrorist. Turned out he was a white Norwegian wacko.

Again, these young men were all Americans but were accused of being Islamic terrorists, loyal only to their country of origin. I still don’t know about the Tsarnaev brothers, but it sickens me that other innocent young people were accused of such a terrible crime because of their skin color.

The Racism Problem

People are extremely offended by the word “racist.” It is a term that no one (at least no one rational) wants to be identified by. Therefore, we don’t talk about race. We say we should see past it, that all people are the same. That’s not the way to teach about race and, sadly, we are racists.

You may wonder why I write about racism on a blog that generally discusses multiracial issues and people. Well, racism affects everyone (including multiracial people), and it should be talked about.

In September 2012, I wrote an editorial for The Nevada Sagebrush discussing the results of a test on the Harvard website that I had done. Essentially, it was about grouping — I had to quickly organize faces under certain words. And I ended up associating black faces with negative words. Interestingly, most people get that result. In fact, many African Americans get that result.

People are inherently racist. It is something that happens because of the media, but also because of our culture and our fear of discussing race. My parents never really talked to me about it before. I was raised as an ethnic minority in an Asian majority town and I had many black friends as well. When I moved to Reno, all of that went away and I was shocked by all the white people. I became a majority and I got used to that.

An article from TheStranger.com in 2011 basically discussed the same issue. Jen Graves wrote that white people are, honestly, just awkward talking about race, and they don’t “own up” to their whiteness. In a sense, I don’t either. I don’t really indicate that I’m white anymore, because I say I am of two or more races.

Kaitlin Oki, my friend I interviewed, said it didn’t surprise her to learn that I was multiracial because I didn’t “look” completely white. I took this as a compliment. Why? Because being white isn’t what it used to be. Should I say I am white? Is it racist to say I’m not? Was it racist for Kaitlin to say she knew I wasn’t 100% white?

Do I look white? Or multiracial? Should I say I’m everything?

The thing is that the term “racist” has an extremely negative connotation, and certainly it is not a positive trait to consciously discriminate based on race, but the truth is that we are racist. We have our preconceived notions of race. I’ve been afraid before at night when I’ve been out and a black man passes me, even though white men are much more likely to commit crimes than black men are and black men are overrepresented in prisons. Do I blame that entirely on the show “Cops” showing more footage of police apprehending black men? No; I’ve never even seen the show. I don’t really know where my own feelings on that come from, which is scary.

But as the article on TheStranger said, realizing we are racist is the first step, and it’s easier to address the issue than to be irrationally defensive about how tolerant we are. After I took that Harvard test and wrote that column, I realized that I am actually racist. So when a black man walks by me at night, I try to control my feelings. “It is extremely unlikely he is going to hurt me,” I tell myself. “The skin color doesn’t matter.” Now I fear them just like a fear any other man walking past me at night…which is an entirely different issue.

I am not “better” than anyone in terms of racism because I am multiracial. Just because I’m Latina, Italian and Basque, it doesn’t mean I claim superiority over people who are Irish, English, of African descent, etc. In this regard, most of us are the same.

One Demographic Form Gets it Right

I’ve been frustrated with demographic forms lately, but, the other day, UNR’s SurveyMonkey form got it right.

I suppose my definition of “right” is subjective, but the form allowed me to mark as many boxes as I wanted for race. More than one! It was amazing. I checked “white” and “two or more races.” It felt nice not to have to choose. I still identify as white, but I also don’t think that being Caucasian solely defines my race. Others may think so, because I do have white skin, but to me race means more than that, and that survey allowed me to express it.

I believe I had similar luck on the Census. I personally feel they organize the race categories fairly well (though not all agree). They even have explanations for the demographics:

The U.S. Census defines its racial classifications on its website.

You can check out the form in a non-screenshot view here.

You may ask why  I had to do a demographic survey. I will be attending an undergraduate research symposium tomorrow and I was required to complete surveys on my research and on my demographics (probably so they have statistics of the students who conduct undergraduate research). It surprised me that a research symposium, of all things, would be so flexible on its demographics forms, but I’m pleased to know they do. I was able to answer that question the way I wanted and the way in which I truly identify, so I think having forms like that can only be beneficial.