2 Rising Sun, Rising Soul

On Mixed Race Asian Identity That Includes Blackness

Velina Hasu Houston

I am the woman on the right. The woman on the left is my biological mother, Setsuko Okazaki Takechi (see fig. 2.1).

It is likely that you have met someone who is an Asian of African descent. If, however, they are under the age of fifty-five, they may differ from me culturally. I am one of the last of my kind—a person of Japanese, Black, Native American Indian, and Cuban descent with a Japanese grandmother born in Japan’s Meiji era, Japanese aunts born in the Taisho era, and a Showa-era Japanese mother. Those eras and the cultural traditions that ruled them are bygone, but they are entrenched in my DNA and spiritual muscle, embodying such concepts as honor, the upholding of loyalty, discipline, integrity, and courage; sometimes (often) even the inability to be at ease in Western cultures. They affect my behavior in critical, subterranean modes. I grew up in the United States, but my cultural consciousness is a product of those eras and their perspectives. As the title of my collection of my plays indicates, I am a Green Tea Girl in Orange Pekoe Country. This culture of mine is ill fitted to Western ways beyond ideological perspectives. It also challenges facial expressions. Mine are usually misunderstood by Westerners because they define them in the context of Western comprehension. Contemplation, for example, often is read as sorrow, inquiry as anger, assertiveness as aggression, reflection as fatigue, and so on. The ways I move, think, and even gaze often are misconstrued by the Western world as it seeks to define me based on its viewpoint. If I looked like one specific monoethnicity, I might fare better, with Western assumption adjusted to its views of that specific monoethnicity. Often, however, those adjustments are askew because of a Western inability to come to grips with the actualities of any non-White ethnicity, especially a mixed ethnicity; or perhaps it is a lack of desire or a subconscious understanding that that energy need not be expended.

Such a cultural consciousness is even more challenging to possess when one does not look the part. How often I have heard the statement “But you don’t look Japanese.” In fact, many contemporary persons of Japanese descent may “look the part” but have little intrinsic Japanese culture. I also think about the parallel statement, which is, “But you don’t look American.” I have been told that, too. Whatever one thinks I may look like, I am nearly extinct. Once my generation is gone, the only mixed race Japanese will be those with a Heisei (or later era) Japan-born parent or a Nikkei parent born and raised in a country that is not Japan such as a Japanese American or Japanese Canadian. Their outlooks, being more contemporary and often Western, will be 180 degrees from mine. That, of course, is as it should be because humanity must evolve. Think twice, however, when you meet someone who is mixed race but is not part White, especially if you are mixed race yourself. They may be more culturally integrated than you regardless of what they look like. They may be the short-grain rice and not the converted. Converting, in fact, may be out of the question. After all, what does it mean to look “Japanese” or “American”? Does it mean to have the same visage as someone in a magazine advertisement? Does it mean to look like the empress of Japan or the first lady of the United States? Does it mean to look like someone that can wear a kimono “properly” or look “correct” in clothing designed for the all-American being? Blue jeans and kimonos are both uncomfortable.

Looking the part is always an interesting experience for the mixed race person. What is she? Where is she from? Where are her parents from? That experience is even more interesting when the mixed race person’s ancestry includes Blackness. Anti-Blackness remains an issue in US society, and I daresay many other societies, such as Japanese society. Consumer racial profiling (the former Kitson’s in Santa Monica, Montana Avenue boutiques in Santa Monica, every store in Junction City, Kansas, when I was living there), police racial profiling (officer Joseph Bohr, Beverly Hills police department), the actions of non-Blacks who believe that they are superior to those of African descent—all are still there, usually subterranean or institutionalized so that there is nothing or very little to take a picture of. Sometimes. These actualities, all of which I have experienced personally, complicate mixed race. Everything that mixed race people who are not part Black experience as mixed race people, and everything that monoracial people feel and experience is tenfold for mixed race persons with African ancestry. Mixed race people are The Other. Mixed race people of African descent are The Other’s Other.

The filmmaker Vincent Ward said, “To map someone else’s territory is the first step in possessing someone else’s land.” I believe that he meant two things: the mapping of what is now Alaska by Westerners (in his film Map of the Human Heart) and also the mapping of the territory of a mixed race identity by monoracial people. Mixed race is race that does not embody or boast a singular ethnicity or race, but that signifies individuals who are amalgams of multiple consciousnesses that blend races and ethnicities (and sometimes cultures and nations as well). In the progressive sense, a mixed race person is an individual who embodies and embraces two or more races or ethnicities (with at least one being of color) in a composite identity; an inclusive rather than excluding approach to identity. The artificial European and European American construction of race demands falsification of the total genealogical ethnic actualities of the mixed race individual by attempting to constrain membership into a single, government-sanctioned racial category, thus ignoring (and invalidating) one or more of the other races or ethnicities of which the mixed race is composed. I am a progressive individual of blended ethnicities. I use the term “mixed race” to hail such an identity politically.

I employ the term “multiple consciousnesses” to describe the nature of mixed race. W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness for African Americans provides an apt (but, of course, not perfect) parallel for mixed race identity: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”1

Du Bois’s biographer, David Levering Lewis, extended the double consciousness theory to include the natural path that a double consciousness must travel. The doubly conscious self was an infinitely spiritually and socially evolving being that, through struggle, was “destined to cohere and to merge,” in time becoming stronger for being doubled, “the sum of its parts, not the dividend.”2 In its progressive incarnation, mixed race owns multiple consciousnesses that coalesce. The mixed race individual exists in a multitude of racial, ethnic, cultural, and/or national consciousnesses that she attempts to meld together organically into an authentic hybrid identity that may transcend the limitations of racial concept and code, and extend into a racially noncategorical humanity. The cohered sum has arrived.

The Western view of race is shackled by plantation-era race theory. Traditional race is presented as, in effect, monorace, for example, “White” or Caucasian being only “White” (and no longer Irish American, Norwegian American, German American, etc.—and certainly nothing else of non-White ethnicity) and “Black” or African American being only that and nothing else, and so on. In so doing, traditional race is defined as a hypodescent theory of race that reflects a one-person, one-race ideology. This obsession with the presentation of race as monorace—which has its foundations in the entrenched Black-White binary created during slavery by the European American power base of plantation owners—seeks to preserve, distinguish, and privilege what is White from anybody and everything that is not, “the dominant culture’s tendency to collapse all racial groups into one undifferentiated mass which serves as the ‘Other’ of White society.”3

Interestingly, this tool for the preservation of White elitism is wielded just as powerfully by people of color (especially monoracial people of color) as it is by Whites. The binary dictates that what is White is White, and everything else is Black; that, whenever the majority of the United States talks about race, it talks about Black versus White as if no other races of people existed on the continent or at least they do not matter in the large scheme of things (witness former President Bill Clinton’s racial advisory panel’s largely Black-White composition and its internal conflicts about whether its agenda needed to move beyond Black-White issues and embrace concerns of other groups of color as well).

Awareness of the context of racial politics related to my birth and growing up is useful. Progressive mixed race culture is relatively new, born into US discourse in the late 1970s and continuing with fortitude to the present day. Within this period, several textual constructs emerged including scholarly books and articles, dissertations, documentary cinema, popular periodical literature, mixed race organizational literature, popular media discourse, dramatic literature, poetry and prose, as well as visual expressions in art and performance art. These works have initiated public discourse that is reconfiguring the way that mixed race individuals are identified, and is attempting to dispel the myths and stereotypes that have plagued mixed race identity in the United States since the days of the plantation. Because of its bicultural and binational aspects that can complicate society’s efforts to categorize it racially, the Hapa ethnicity has lent credence and support to the growth of the overall mixed race community’s movement with the United States and its project: to allow those of multiple ethnicities to embrace and identify with all of their cultures, and to identify themselves as mixed race. The immigrant-kindred nature of some Hapa individuals can enrich the mixed race landscape. Some Hapas who are born in Asian nations or who have mothers who were born in Asian nations claim a sense of nationness within established nation-states with regard to “nation-ness, as well as nationalism . . . [being] cultural artifacts of a particular kind . . . [that] command such profound emotional legitimacy” and “deep attachments.” Such attachments and the striving for emotional legitimacy that they catalyze enhance the project of the mixed race movement in the United States. The collective culture of progressive mixed race is what Benedict Anderson describes as a “sub-nationalism” within the borders of old nationalisms “once thought fully consolidated.”4

My curiosity about the different phenotypes of my internationally, interracially married parents began early in life. I was five when I asked my parents why my mother was “vanilla” and why my father was “chocolate.” My parents felt compelled to teach me about the realities of my roots. My father went to the store and bought Neapolitan ice cream. He returned home, opened the carton, and told me that the vanilla stripe was similar to my mother because she was Japanese. He said the chocolate and strawberry stripes were kind of like him. He stirred the three flavors together into a brown mixture and showed it to me. “That’s you,” he said. Then he asked me if I could take that mixture and turn it back into the three stripes. Of course I could not, no more than I could take myself and divide myself into my various ethnicities. My father instructed me to remember that and to live my life that way. I have and I do. I take great pleasure in knowing that my father’s actions have inspired others. Recently, I read another mixed race person’s account of having this same experience with her parents in the 1990s. Legacy. Important.

Living one’s life as a mixed race person wasn’t always an easy thing in a small Kansas town in the 1960s and 1970s. Most things, including televisions in the early years, were black-and-white. To most Kansans, if you were not White, you were Black. When the US military brought nearly seven hundred US-Japanese couples to the area, the Kansans were dumbfounded. How were they to categorize the immigrant Japanese women and their mixed race children? Were Japanese White or colored? What if two partners in a couple were different colors? But their puzzlement was brief with regard to the mixed race offspring because, after all, they had to categorize us in order to feel safe, comfortable, and in control. They perceived those who were married to Whites and those who were ethnic blends of Japanese and White as White, and those who were married to Blacks or who were ethnic blends of Japanese and Black as Blacks. I can only assume that such people saw violet as red and blue, and not as a new color that looked different and therefore required a new name. Based on prejudgment stemming from narrowly acquired assumptions, ignorance can present itself in many gradations.

Ethnic misinterpretations have abounded in my life. When I lived in Kyoto, Japanese people frequently told me that I was from “Ceylon,” supplementing their declarations with information about how much they loved Ceylon tea and cinnamon. At the wedding of a Cuban friend, I was assumed to be a part of the Cuban family and immediately put to work helping with last-minute details. In Tokyo, I have been asked more than once if I am from Colombia. I have been asked if I am from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Baghdad, Egypt, Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Hawai‘i, Cambodia, Micronesia, Tonga, Bali, Thailand, and so on. I have sat on committees where White European Americans perceived Japanese Hapas of White extraction to be Japanese (or White), but did not perceive me as having any relationship to my own cultural origins. Furthermore, the Japanese Hapas of White extraction did not recognize me as anyone remotely akin to their experience. I have been dragged into a Tongan church group because a Tongan mother thought I was one of her relatives. I have been scrutinized by a White European American anthropologist who thought I was Micronesian. In Hawai‘i, White European American tourists think I am Polynesian and ask me for directions to different sites on the islands. Never mind just trying to navigate the routine of life; ethnic inquiry and misinterpretation require a bit more navigation and maneuvering just to get through the day. Once when at the gym, a woman said to me, “Are you Korean and Black?” “No,” I answered, “wrong war.”

In my home while growing up, ethnic pigeonholing had no bearing. As far as my mother was concerned, the inside of the house was Japanese and the outside was the United States. Inside of the house, shoes were taken off, baths were taken at night, and Japanese food was prepared. It was a means of surviving in the midst of a United States that at that time felt hostility toward the Japanese due to the sociopolitical residue of World War II. It also was a means of my mother ensuring that her children would be steeped in her culture, despite growing up in the United States.

So that was my world. I saw it as the norm. I thought it was abnormal for people to have two parents of the same color. Didn’t everybody have a Japanese immigrant mother and a father who was American? Didn’t everybody eat short-grained rice and drink leaf green tea from Japan? And what was this Mother Goose that everybody at school seemed to know about? My mother shared with me the only children’s literature that she knew, Japanese stories such as Momotaro and Issunboshi. How fortunate I was because those tales of natural and supernatural worlds coexisting and of fantastical elements that never gandered with Mother Goose came to be a tremendous influence on my artistry. I felt sorry for any mixed race Japanese who fiercely tried to acculturate, especially those who chose to pass for White or Black because, I suppose, it was easier—to fit in, to belong, to be in the mainstream. I felt that several worlds belonged to me ethnically and that I should not have to compromise who I was to be a part of any of them. I still feel that way. My mother used to say, “I was born Japanese, I die Japanese.” I say, “I was born mixed race, I die mixed race.”

In Kansas, the only Japanese Americans who I knew were like me, mixed race. The first time that I met a Japanese American that was not (at least to the best of his knowledge) was in Los Angeles in 1980. I remember thinking that he was not Japanese at all. He looked Japanese, in the historical sense of what it means to look Japanese, but he was entirely American. He was proud of that fact, and said that his family had fought hard to separate themselves from all things Japanese and to be fully, patriotically American. It was then that I realized that I was an anomaly ethnically. Not looking Japanese in the historical sense of what it means to look Japanese but being culturally Japanese, I realized that I was more Japanese than “Japanese Americans.” I had not ever had to sidestep my heritage for the benefit of the US government or anybody else. My cultural idiosyncrasies, tastes in food, and cultural possessions were foregrounded in my life and would never take a backseat in the face of any threat. I also did not look like the average non-plantation racial perception of an African American. Some might ask if I was Black, but I knew that they long had been indoctrinated in the one-drop hypodescent theory that was a relic from US plantations. Even in Hawai‘i, where being a racial mélange is commonplace, racial perspective is shifting: mixed race is so White that it is sometimes hard to identify who is mixed race. The native Hawaiians look more like people of African descent than like the majority of people born in Hawai‘i today, not only phenotypically but also with regard to their cultural artifacts on display at the Bishop Museum, Honolulu.

Life is constant diplomacy. Coming to California posed other ethnic discoveries, too.

▪ I saw signs for sushi bars and was astonished to learn that Americans ate what they called sushi, what my family had always called o-sushi.

▪ When I was invited to a meeting for the UCLA Asian Pacific Alumni Association, I was appalled when I overheard a Japanese American judge telling another Japanese American that they had to do whatever they could to keep anybody who was part Black out of the organization.

▪ When I was an invited speaker at a mixed race studies conference, a Chinese and White scholar dismissed Blackness as part of Hapa culture.

▪ At another mixed race conference, a Japanese and White Hapa remarked that Afro-Asians would “do just fine if they stuck to sports and entertainment.”

▪ At a National Black Journalists Association convention, as an invited panelist I spoke about mixed race identity and was booed and hissed at; several spectators threw wadded up paper and spit balls.

▪ In graduate school when my play Asa Ga Kimashita won several national first prize awards from the Kennedy Center including the Lorraine Hansberry Award for the best new play about the Black experience, several Black student union groups protested, resenting the choice of the play on racial grounds, saying that the play, which was set in 1946 Japan and included the representation of a mixed race Afro-Japanese couple, was in fact not a Black play.

I quickly learned that multiple-minority mixed race is different from mixed race that includes a White element. We are, in essence, seeking the same thing in challenging society to accept a person of multiple ethnicities, but we differ in that White mixed race often practices the same discrimination against mixed race that includes Black ancestry that it experiences from the monoethnic majority. Indeed, Afro-Asian identity can be peculiar not only to Whites, but also to other Asian Americans and other Hapas, not to mention Blacks. Many felt that they didn’t need to understand it; many in the Hapa movement wanted Afro-Asians to be a part of the movement but did not address their marginality within the overall landscape of mixed race. Often at Hapa events, Afro-Asian programming was peripheral or nonexistent. Like Native American Indian identity, Hapa identity was foregrounded as an exclusive, non-Black arena. Mixed race persons with African ancestry were marginalized into an intellectual ghetto, just as the dominant population marginalizes the mixed race discussion in general. Such color against color discrimination diminishes the integrity of political movements of color, especially mixed race ones. This, I daresay, racist perception is part of the movement’s foundation, despite the fact that two out of the three landmark dissertations that are the mixed race Asian movement’s theoretical underpinnings were authored by non-White mixed race individuals, both being Japanese and Black; and the first mixed race Asian conference (ironically at UCLA) as well as the first mixed race Asian nonprofit organization were founded by someone of Japanese and Black heritage.

But still, like air, I’ll rise. It is a line from a Maya Angelou poem that I also think speaks volumes about anti-Blackness, particularly for mixed race persons of African descent within and outside of the mixed race community. I have had many try to silence my mixed race transnationalism. I have had two death threats, and threats of violence from Asian Americans and African Americans. I have had statements made such as Why don’t you write for a Whiter audience or Why do you write that “stuff.” The poem coalesces the rising sun with the souls of Black folk, to borrow a term from W.E.B. Du Bois’s seminal work of US literature and sociological history.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

—Maya Angelou

Mixed race individuals live constantly with racial misrecognition, not necessarily and not usually self-misrecognition, but invariably from others. It is akin to what Judith Butler calls the “uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong.”5 As Butler suggests, to stand under a sign that promises to be a site of hope for articulation or rearticulation of identity and experience failure may itself be “the point of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference.”6 Historically, mixed race individuals stood under signs of monorace and experienced failure of identification. As time moved into present day, they learned to use this failure to name their difference and to articulate their progressive mixed race identity in and on their own terms. While I have existed in a mixed race site all of my life, others have tried to place me under signs that reduced my ethnic identity to a singular that was comfortable to them, sometimes one that had nothing to do with my actual ethnic background such as the Sri Lankan gift shop owner, the Cambodian donut shop clerk, the Ecuadorian market manager, or the Pilipino gentleman on the plane full of White people who spoke to me in their respective native tongues, elated to find what they believed to be a face of a native of their motherland; and sometimes an attempt to reduce me to one monorace for the sake of (their) political imperatives. With such failure and misrecognition, is it any wonder that I depart from convention and avow my difference?

I am not the first person, and certainly will not be the last, to talk about race. European Americans often have diagnosed me as being “obsessed” with race, but I know that they are the only ones who have the luxury of not discussing race—and also the luxury or arrogance to believe that they have the right and wisdom to diagnose me, and to believe that their diagnosis is sacrosanct. Trina Grillo and Stephanie M. Wildman have pointed out that many European Americans take such a position toward people of color and cannot fathom why we invest so much “emotional and intellectual energy” into the issue of race. They note precisely that “white supremacy [domination of society] privileges Whiteness as the normative model,” a stance that “allows Whites to ignore race, even though they have one”; and that the only time Whites do not ignore race is “when they perceive race (usually someone else’s [someone else of color]) as intruding upon their lives.”7

Noting that many people in the United States have trouble “accepting that you can be two things [racially/culturally] at once—that you can be ‘double,’” Regge Life says that Japanese people, while not always accepting of Japanese Hapas, think more internationally and recognize that Japanese Hapas, while not being fully Japanese, have “a Japanese part” and allow them access to “even the subtlest elements of Japanese culture.”8 Rocky Kiyoshi Mitarai contends that mixed races of Japanese heritage often relate well with Japanese natives (in Japan or in the United States) because they are “raised with many of the same cultural values that exist there [in Japan].”9 Life believes that the transnational and multicultural aspects of Japanese Hapas are definitely a benefit for them. I know, however, that this can be compromised when dealing with Japanese Hapas who are not part White.

Notes

1. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903; repr., New York: Dover, 1994), 2.

2. Ibid.

3. Tania Modleski, Old Wives’ Tales and Other Women’s Stories (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 175–176.

4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 3–166.

5. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 219.

6. Ibid.

7. Trina Grillo and Stephanie M. Wildman, “Obscuring the Importance of Race,” in Critical White Studies: Looking behind the Mirror, ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 623, emphasis added.

8. Stewart Wachs, “Reel Life & Real Life: Film-maker Regge Life on Identity & the Joys and Trials of Being Intercultural,” Perspectives on Asia: Kyoto Journal, no. 40 (Spring 1999): 14–19.

9. Rocky Kiyoshi Mitarai, “Hate Crime in Japantown,” Mavin 1.3 (1999): 41–42.