Race, more complex than checkboxes

“What are you, Chinese? Or white?”

I never understood those questions growing up. Throughout my childhood, I made it clear that as a biracial American, I was both. Mistaking their curiosity for judgment, I was desperate to answer the question and move on.

The differences in how mixed-race Americans like myself identify often change depending on how people view us, as well as how we view ourselves. The shifting perspectives blur the fixed boundaries that society usually splits race into.

At a time when many of us accept gender and sexuality as fluid constructs, we should approach race with a similar level of acceptance. These attributes are not chosen, but how people reconcile them is. When 9 million Americans identify themselves as more than one race, it is critical to acknowledge the varying racial identities that largely get filed under “other.”

The U.S. Census Bureau first allowed Americans to choose more than one racial category in 2000. While an esimated 6.9 percent of the country’s adult population is mixed race,  the number is rapidly increasing and will diversify even more in the future. If projections are accurate, the mixed American population will triple by 2060.

Growing up in a predominantly white community, I tried as hard as possible to blend in. My Chinese father immigrated from Singapore when he was 22 years old, and my mother, having European ancestry, grew up in New Jersey. As a family, our household was very Americanized, and race was never an issue we dealt with. Based on my own understanding, I was simply American.

But just because I never questioned my racial identity doesn’t mean other people didn’t.

Although I never thought of my race as something I get to choose and identify with on my own terms, the growth of mixed-raced Americans should force us to change how we view race. Instead of seeing race as a definitive black-or-white classification, we should view it as existing on a spectrum. This racial spectrum will then allow us the freedom of characterizing each and every one how they wish to be characterized, not by the assumptions of others.

When other kids would point out my race and use it as a way to make me feel different, I resented that feeling of isolation. It was this sense of exclusion that caused me to identify more as white and try to fit in as much as I could with my fellow white peers.

Flash forward to my college years, and I had never felt more at ease being in an environment that welcomes diversity and all forms of differences. Seeing all kinds of ethnicities and people of different backgrounds here at Pitt gave me a sense of belonging and the need to no longer hide my mixed-race identity.

It was not until adulthood that I fully embraced it and accepted my Asian background as a part of me — and I’m not the only one experiencing this shift in identity based on a new environment and self-perception.

Last year, Pew Research Center released a report showing the number of people who identify themselves as multiracial is growing three times as fast as the general population. The study also showed that multiracial Americans tend to feel more connected toward one race or the other depending on the pressures of parents, peers and society’s views of them.

For instance, the study showed that 69 percent of multiracial adults with a black background said most people viewed them as fully African-American. These people end up with a set of experiences and face discrimination that align exclusively with that community, regardless of their actual heritage.

Adults who had a white and Asian background tend to connect more with whites than Asians. A majority of American Indian and white, the largest multiracial group, identify as white.

These results exemplify how the social and societal pressures that determine how multiracial people are treated and view themselves are based off of arbitrary presumptions. The tension between fitting in with a group of people and having no control in how people view them causes people to question who they really are and where they fit in.

Instead of embracing both elements of their backgrounds as a unique distinction that is beneficial in many ways, they may see themselves as the “other” category with no communal presence.

If one sides with their non-white background, they run the risk of discrimination and exclusion. If one sides with their white background, they might lose their cultural heritage for the sake of acceptance. Not only is this dilemma damaging to embracing cultural and ethnic diversity, it reinforces the racial borders that divide people by the color of their skin.

By letting people identify themselves freely, we give them a voice to say who they are.

We’ve come a long way since the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision to fully legalize interracial marriage. The demographic lines will continue to fade, and America will only expand its mixed-race population. We should not be lumped in as the “other” — rather, we should be able to select the races that we express for ourselves in forms, applications and everyday life.

Psychologists and sociologists have been arguing that race is a social construct for years, yet we still determine race by categorical demographics. The social, economic and political meaning behind those races have not been dimensional either, severely limiting the individuality of people by burdening them with historical pressures that don’t actually fit their backgrounds.

Scientifically, there is no such thing as race. As Bill Nye once famously said, “The color of our ancestors’  skin and ultimately my skin and your skin is a consequence of ultraviolet light, of latitude and climate … Humans are all one people.”

By accepting this notion, we will eliminate the pressures to identify with one race or the other, as well as other forms of discrimination that occur due to race.

Racial identity is something we should all be able to define ourselves — not by the narrow categories the world uses to define race.

Kirsten Wong primarily writes on social justice issues and education for The Pitt News

Write to her at kew101@pitt.edu