LOVE CONQUERS NULL: NAVIGATING PRIVILEGE IN MIXED-RACE ASIAN AMERICA

I am a third-generation half-white, half-Chinese Asian American. As the third generation and with my racial heritage split between the East and West, my Asian America is almost entirely theoretical. I have been taught to invent myself against the stereotypes that plagued my predecessors, using their merit and sacrifice to counteract the American system and redefine my place within it. Where my second-generation father has distanced himself from the archetypal confines of Asian America through his art, I seek to reunite with my Chinese roots via scholarship. This eternally swinging pendulum between generations that rubs up against dissonant cultural expectations has informed each move I make as the most internally Americanized generation in a body still visually read as the “other.” Moreover, my desire to pursue my Asian heritage presents a threat to my whiteness. At the intersection and in the presence of male and white privilege, I have lived within question: “What does the presence of mixed people mean for both white and male supremacy?” (Omi and Winant 108).

My mother has often encouraged me to wield an invisible white power. She enjoys the bewilderment in strangers’ eyes when they register that a blonde, white woman is indeed “Mrs. Hwang.” My last name, however, confirms that my phenotypic features correspond to Asian heritage. My potential alliance with white privilege without enjoying any of the superficial benefits of white protection feels fraught. She struggles to accept my distance from whiteness, as though rejecting its power is rejecting her. However, even the premise of refusing whiteness is a privilege, as though I no longer must depend on whiteness for status and can escape the advantages of my ancestors by finding identity in my own racial subjugation. In addition, my invisible white privilege compounds with my Asian grandparents’ immigrant success stories to create a complex web of privileged identities.

When my father and I discuss our experience as Asian Americans, navigating microaggressions, enforced stereotypes, and critical race theory, my mother grows quiet. Then the conversation shifts, recentering whiteness as the central reference point. At the dinner table, there is silence, sometimes recognition that I’d never realized that, and then my mother talks about her upbringing, focusing on the issue of class: Sara Ahmed observed this phenomenon in On Being Included: “It happens over and over again. We speak about racism, and they ask questions about class… They displace the attention. Discomfort shows the failure to fit” (154-155). It is frustrating to uphold a center of whiteness, for fear of my mother feeling excluded, and have a conversation on race turn into her explanation of patriarchy and socioeconomic hardship. However, discourse with my father often overlooks the economic privilege of our Asian American experience.

           The internal conflict with my white identity stems somewhat from this false premise that love conquers all. In a mixed-race body that occupies proximity to whiteness as a privileged minority and biological whiteness, I can attest that the premise of the interracial family can only do so much work to obliterate racism when the hard conversations about identity become an either/or dilemma. Instead of finding commonality in shared experiences, there are unspoken boundaries for who is able to speak to certain oppressive forces; where my father battles racism, my mother battles patriarchy. The premise of the mixed-race family as the solution can overlook the internal work necessary to destroy the ingrained white patriarchy, as though singular love can cure systemic racism, rather than function as the exception.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2014.

Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. “The Theory of Racial Formation.” Racial Formation in the United States, by

Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Routledge, 2015, pp. 105–112.