What is a bird without a nest, a bee rejected from its hive, a jack without its box? Who is a person without a community? Madeline (Meimei) Kamprath, a Junior at Mountain View High School, answered this question by stating “Most people, when they frst meet me, they either see me as just fully white or fully Chinese. Because the thought of a mixed race individual does not occur to most people.” Multiracial people tend to struggle with their identity because they get categorized as one race, which leaves them feeling isolated from society. American culture commonly fails to acknowledge this issue as an effect of racism arising from slavery and segregation. Many people who have a multiracial identity experience prejudice from a young age that results in feelings of dysphoria. American society needs to bring awareness on the impact on multiracial people being constantly unacknowledged for their racial identity, by providing resources and support, and promot ing social acceptance.
Hana Mijares May 15, 2023
American Segregation
Our current understanding on multiracial identities as Americans stems from the long his torical relationship between the US and segregation. People often take ease in categorizing others as one race, on assumptions based on their appearance and will often disregard how they identify. This is a product of the deep rooted stigmas used against people of color in American culture in order to maintain the established system of white superiority. As a way to preserve this status quo, after the ending of slavery, laws were created in order to segregate white and black people. This can be exemplifed by the 1896 supreme court case Plessy v. Ferguson which originated from an affair where Homer Plessy, who was 1/8th African American, refused to sit in a train car for black people. He argued that not allowing him to sit in a car with white people denied him his constitutional rights. Regardless, the Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal was constitutional, meaning that segregating white and black people would be offcially legalized (Onion et al). However, obviously, this logic was simply false, continuing almost a century later, public fundings would be directed towards white facilities and withheld from black institutions. This kept black people in a position of poverty and upheld stigmas that colored people were beneath their white counterparts. We can still see these prejudices in our everyday life. It creates a barrier between different races, causing people to want to avoid racially diverse relationships. And in multiracial families, we can see racial discrimination towards other family members, which can result in distress from mixed children who see or experience this struggle. The decision also resulted in the widespread establishment of Jim Crow laws and other segregational laws, including the one drop rule. James Davis, author of the article “Mixed Race America,” states, “The nation’s answer to the question ‘Who is black?’ has long been that a black is any person with any known African black ancestry.” The concept of segregation forces the idea that a person must be of one ethnic group, and in the south, the one drop rule was used to justify discriminating against anyone with a drop of ‘black blood’. As previously mentioned, this practice results in people putting others in a box by labeling them as one race. Maintaining the culture of making assumptions about people based on their appearance with disregard to their identity continues the tradition of the racist treatment of others and propagates segregational ideals.
Furthermore, miscegenation, illegal in almost every state, was socially unacceptable all across America. “During this time, ‘Tragic Mulatto’ was a label used to describe individuals that emerged from Black/White relationships. This descriptor portrayed offspring of such unions as social misfts due to their ambiguous phenotypes and perceived diffculty fully ftting into the ‘White world’ or the ‘Black world’” (qtd. in LaBarrie). Our society lacks the knowledge of how to treat multiracial people because it was something that the US has suppressed for most of its growth. In order to progress past the discrimination of mixed race individuals and relieve the diffculty multiracial people tend to experience in fnding community, it is important to educate people to be more race conscientious. (In my experience, many people don’t know the difference between race, nationality and ethnicity…) Building a more race conscious society can be done by teaching people from a young age how to interact with and understand a diversity of races. In a transcript released by EmbraceRace, Dr. Sarah-SoonLing Blackburn states, “So I think the biggest and most important thing that we can do is to model and practice using accurate language for human difference, because that sends the idea that difference is not a good thing or a bad thing. Difference is just different.” This highlights that If we neglect the education of race in schools, we would fail to accommodate children with the knowledge to interact with the world. Because we are all introduced to race from a young age, just by interacting with our environment, American school systems should open up the discussion of race.
According to Mountain View High School Junior, Annie Marcelino, her appearance affected the way people perceived her and it added to her feelings of dysphoria. “It was my friend’s birthday and this girl, she goes, ‘Oh, we have to sing Happy Birthday for you. Even better, we’ll do it in Korean.’ And then she looks around and she looks to my other friend. He’s not Korean, but he knows it… She goes, ‘Oh, sing it with me.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, no I’m eating.’ So then she pauses and she’s like, ‘Okay, I’ll just sing it myself.’ And I look at her and I’m like, I’m literally Korean. When you ask me. And she’s like, ‘Oh, but you don’t know, you’re whitewashed.’” At this moment, she felt invisible, which is how many multiracial people feel when it comes to their race. They are often dismissed and wrongly categorized for others to more easily process what “exactly” they are. We need to let go of race as the defnition it is given by white colonists. Race is a social construct. White people consider themselves Caucasians because a German researcher loved the features of a people who lived in the Caucus Mountains in Asia. The separation of “races” was used as a tool to justify that one group of people is more elite than the other. Of course we can’t reverse the way we perceive race, we can learn to just be more accepting of others and attempting to rid ourselves of the prejudices we hold.
Appearance vs. Racial Identity Segregation
People feel the need to categorize and label things in order to more easily comprehend our world. This also applies to the tendency to subconsciously categorize others based on how they look, and try to defne what race or ethnicity they are. We learn from a young age, often from our parents, how to interact with people based on appearance. Pushing the ideology that a person’s physical appearance is synonymous with their racial identity affects multiracial people’s self esteem because they don’t ft the limited view our society defnes race as. This also results in the rejection of mixed people as a part of communities, because they are not recognized as valid members due to their appearance. They are often perceived as ‘too different’.
Hana Mijares is a Junior at Mountain View High School and a first year attendee at Freestyle Academy, where she takes Animation as her elective. They enjoy drawing and sleeping, and hopes that you have a good day today.
