“Mixed-race people are inside outsiders and outside insiders”- Dr. Curtiss Takada Rooks.
Dr. Rooks, of Japanese and African American descent, is an educator on mixed-race studies, provides a focus on Asian American multiracial identities, and is an advocate for mixed-race people. He is one of many inspirational trailblazers in the space of understanding the intricacies and complexities of the identities of multiracial communities.
I am a monoracial Black African woman writing this blog. I have been raised in multicultural Canada and have been exposed to many beautiful cultures, including Punjabi, Filipino, Caribbean, Indigenous, and many others. However, I realize that I haven’t given enough mental space to seeking to learn more about mixed-race identities. Looking back, I recognize that I had this expectation for mixed-race people to “pick a side.”
My ignorance became astonishingly clear when I met my close mixed-race friend. I remember particularly looking forward to learning about his background during the early days of our friendship. He had (well, has) an ambiguous phenotype, and I couldn’t quite pinpoint where he came from. At some point during one of our hangouts, without a second thought, I asked, “So, what are you? What do you identify as?” A dreadful question that he had been expecting and will continue to expect from other people for the rest of his life. He stood there uncomfortably, not knowing how to answer me, a monoracial Black African woman standing in front of him, and he said nervously, “Black?” I realized, gauging his visible discomfort with both the question and the answer, that maybe I had done something wrong. Maybe “Black” wasn’t something he was comfortable identifying with, so I wondered if “Indian/Brown” was something more comfortable for him. Or maybe that's wrong too; maybe it’s neither, or perhaps it’s both. He is Indo-Afro Caribbean along with other racial groups—he is mixed.
Through the wonderful years that we have been friends, I have been privy to, through both proximity and conversation, what the Indo-Afro experience entails. I have been privileged enough to unravel, break down, and challenge my initial expectations and biases with the help of my friend and other mixed-race advocates and figures. I want to encourage monoracial people and non-mixed people to create space for mixed-race individuals to simply be. To understand that being mixed-race is, in itself, an identity. We can live in a society where you don’t have to pick just one race on a background checkbox. A society where dualities can exist, where one can embody not only two but three or more racialized identities. A society where mixed-race identities simply are.
I want to end this blog with Dr. Rooks’s quote from his article, “Reflections on Being Mixed, but Not Mixed Up”:
“My mother was Japanese. My father was Black (African American). My father was Black. My mother was Japanese. I am Black. I am Japanese. I am both. I am Japanese. I am Black. I am both.”