Consider that game where you have to describe a thing without saying the word for it. The quickest way is by naming its opposite—black if you want someone to think white, or man for woman. Though black isn’t the opposite of white nor man the opposite of woman, the mind falls easily into the simplest of patterns: either/or.

In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway talks about the pervasiveness of certain dualisms in the West: mind/body, culture/nature, active/passive. Whether or not these concepts are opposed, they’ve been hitched together for so long that they’ve come to prop up—and to depend on—one another’s meaning.

The category of the Other, Simone de Beauvoir suggested, is “as original as consciousness itself.”²

In other words, we have a habit of defining ourselves by what we’re not. For Haraway, the dualism between Self and Other is essential to how we as non-cyborgs think about ourselves: The Self dominates while the Other is dominated; the Self is active, while the Other is passive; the Self is associated with mind and culture, the Other with nature and the body; the Self is pure and white, the Other black, brown, yellow, or otherwise tainted.

Haraway concludes sadly that “one is too few and two is too many”³—no single idea can make sense on its own, but no two ideas can be grasped simultaneously.

The mixed-race person embodies this. With too many heritages or too few, too white or not white enough, the mixed-race person grows up to see the self as something strange and shifting—a shadow on the roadside—shaped around a lack. Whereas most superheroes build their identity around a clearly established sense of Self (buttressed by its opposition to an evil Other), the mixed-race superhero must forge their identity in the confusing space between.