In Little Buddha, a class of young monks recite a sutra that could stand in for the lesson of all mixed-race supermen: “Form is empty. Emptiness is form. No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind.”

To be mixed-race is to exist in a state of paradox. Race is an illusion that depends on purity and singleness. The Mixed-Race Superman is paradox made manifest, emptiness as form.

In A Scanner Darkly, set in a paranoid surveillance state in the near-future, Keanu plays a government agent called Bob Arctor who, because he works undercover, has to wear a “scramble suit” in the office. This suit, projecting 1.5 million constantly shifting representations of different people—male and female, black, white, Latinx—keeps his identity cloaked. Even the people he works with have no idea who he is.

The scramble suit represents one of our oldest dreams: that of escaping the body. In the ancient world, octopuses were revered for their ability to change shape as they merged with their surroundings. The polytropic Odysseus, clinging onto a rock to avoid being carried off by the waves, is compared to an octopus. And in a fragment by the lyric poet Theognis, written two centuries after Homer, the heart is as tangled and complex as an octopus, taking on the hue of its nearest rock. It’s better, Theognis said, to have the craft and cunning of an octopus than to be atropiis (unchangeable).

In her 1997 biography of Keanu, Sheila Johnston recounts how “At the peak of his fame, Keanu made a sharp comment about himself and his admirers. ‘I’m Mickey,’ he said. ‘They don’t know who’s inside the suit.’ His friend retorted, ‘But you’re a movie star!’ To which Keanu, laughing, replied, ‘So’s Mickey.’ ”¹³⁵ It’s a nightmarish idea, being trapped in a Mickey suit and forced to wake up each day with a cartoon mouse’s huge rictus grin. I wonder if Keanu, as an actor and person of color, is more sensitive to the idea—the horror—of being divided against yourself?

Race fixes what’s apparent, transforming it into fate. Simone Weil’s essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” manages to write brilliantly about how this happens without mentioning race. Instead, she writes about force—“that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing”—using the world of the Iliad as her test case. There, the specter of death hangs over every character, whether terrified or hardened: “He is alive; he has a soul; and yet—he is a thing.” And the force which elevates heroes like Achilles—allowing them to believe in their self-mastery—will inevitably bring them down, because “those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.” Force is “double-edged,” writes Weil. It turns both the people who use it and those who endure it to stone.¹³⁶

Maybe this is why, when asked where I was from in school, I’d hide behind my mixedness, spraying it like a jet of cloudy ink in the faces of those around me. It was a defense against power or force, against those who would fix me stone-like to a particular identity, so making me more thing than person. I wanted to be an octopus—shifting, complex, invisible at will.

Later, I came to think of this lack of stability as a fault. I should know myself, I said. But there’s another vision of strength in the Classical world: of identity that survives difference and disguise. After all, what does Odysseus look like? When he needs to infiltrate Ithaca—as at other points in the epic—Athena alters his appearance. Form is empty. Emptiness is form. And if I try to picture him, to imagine his face, I see a hundred shifting features, all of them distinctly his own.