Nicole Littmann of Oakland: “When I was younger, there was also an exoticism that was applied to me and my mixed-race friends that we used to talk about a lot. We didn’t like it because it further isolated us (pedestal or not). I’ve also been approached by complete strangers out of the blue and been asked what I am. Hated that, too. I don’t mind the question if I’m getting to know someone, but for someone to be so compelled to categorize me in their minds to the point where they would approach a stranger and ask that one question? Crazy!”
Alison Perez of Fremont: “I can’t tell you how many people have matched my face to my name and said, ‘Well, you don’t look much like a Perez.'”
Anthony Wright of Davis: “I’ve appreciated living in California in the last 10 years, where the hyperdiversity is common and in many cases accepted, and where there’s an understanding that a last name doesn’t necessarily indicate ethnicity. I joke that I am a typical Californian: half Latino, half white, a percentage Asian, and from New York.”
Lora Santiago of Vallejo: “Even at college, I wasn’t Filipino enough to join the Filipino Club because I couldn’t speak Tagalog and my parents weren’t born there. UCD seemed like the land of tall blondes. I definitely felt culture shock coming from a predominantly Black neighborhood in South Vallejo.”
Whitney Pennington of Berkeley: “At home, I was very much Korean. In public, I did everything I could to just be black. It wasn’t until I was in college that I began to embrace this part of myself … being of mixed race has often made me feel conflicted and empty.”
Anonymous: “As a ‘multi-ethnic American,’ my language skills, knowledge of tradition or culture, the way I look, and my overall being in general never quite met the qualifications of authentically belonging to any of those branches. The result has often left me an outsider, at best a diplomat.”
Leah Price of San Francisco: “I feel like I get the best of both worlds! I get to learn about, celebrate, and enjoy two very different, yet rich cultural heritages. My mixed race background has been an asset to me and has helped me be more open to cultural differences.”
Maria Pilar Bratko of Oakland: “Being mixed race has resulted in my appearance being difficult to decipher. What that means is that people often make me what they want me to be… sometimes I’m Hawaiian. Sometimes I’m Indonesian, or Native American, or Philipino, or… you get the gist. However, sadly, no one has ever guessed what I really am which means I fit everywhere and yet am never seen.”
Dan Pimpan of Emeryville: “When you come from a “mixed” background your intuition is to find the compromise between two situations as ‘you’ came from ‘two’ culturally different ideologies, cultural influences, social economic backgrounds to form a new biological entity and at some point in one’s life, your faced with finding ‘your’ middle or identify with one and disregard the other. I think well rounded blender babies have mastered the middle. But getting to the middle can be a mind-screw as you grow-up, to tell you the truth.
Jay Harvey of Chicago: “Teenagers especially are the strongest generation I’ve seen in terms of not choosing one race or another. It’s a joy to see.”
Sahra Sulaiman of Los Angeles: “In short, being a mix has set me up to be a mediator. After 9/11, I found myself becoming a voice for the Muslim world with my students at USC, where I was pursuing a doctorate in International Politics. As a mixed person, I was somehow more legitimate and not fully one of “them” … even if airport folks still treat me as a potential threat…sigh.”
Susan Champion of San Francisco: “She’s optimistic about the increased presence of mixed-race individuals in the media. She says “I am super-encouraged by the increase in media representations of interracial couples and their proliferation in daily life. Although I still feel that black women tend to have far less inter-racial romantic opportunities than black men. All-in-all, though, I am so excited for the almost exponential, yet unspoken-about increase in interracial couples/offspring in the media.”
Ella: “I do wish there were more multiracial characters in TV and movies, where they just happen to be mixed. It sounds stupid now, but as a kid — I felt torn because I thought I had to choose between the Asian characters and the white characters … Whenever a character is “mixed” in some way, it is often in a cheesy fantasy or sci-fi way, where the character angsts constantly about being half human (or whatever).”
Cheryl Quintana Leader of Mar Vista Hills: “The Caucasian community that are my friends feel that I should ‘take advantage’ of being ‘the flaver of the month’ and opt into all the opportunities afforded to my community by the government. Then, there are those in the Caucasian community … who feel that I am just a mere opportunitst who is ‘scavenging off’ what they feel to be unfair ‘hand-outs’ by the government. Then, there is the Latino community who feel that I am not ‘Latino enough’ because I don’t speak Spanish fluently, I don’t come from ‘the neighborhood,’ and I don’t subscribe to the same religious or cultural beliefs as more traditional Latino/as do.”
Chris Buswell of Costa Mesa: “It is becoming the defining American experience to be multiracial.”
Jonathan Gillespie of Los Angeles: “There isn’t an automatic ‘you belong with this group’ when I walk into a new situation or work place or school, or whatever. I often have to branch out to to other people who don’t fit into a solid group, or make friends with people from all different groups, which I think is not the normal experience for people who know automatically where they ‘fit in’ so to speak.”