Checking the boxes

Each time we go to a new doctor, begin a new job, file our taxes and even when we sign up for a new gym membership, we are handed an intake form. Through a series of specific questions about race, age, sex and occupation, we are narrowly defined to be easily understood. However, Americans are increasingly pushing against this practice and changing the way we define ourselves.

New research by Takeyuki Tsuda, a professor in ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change, examines the experience of multiracial Asian Americans within the Phoenix metropolitan community.

In his research paper, “Subverting monoracial hegemony? The multiracial identities of mixed-race Asians in the United States,” Tsuda suggests that although there has been a dramatic increase in America's multiracial population since the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia, ethnic minorities are often pressured to prioritize one racial background over another.

The 2020 Census revealed that 33.8 million people in America self-identify as multiracial. That's a 276% increase since 2010 when just 9 million people self-identified as multiracial. According to Tsuda, this is a particularly important change for multiracial Asian Americans.

“Large-scale Asian immigration is relatively recent in the U.S., so there aren’t many mixed-race Asians for whom the racial intermixture happened many generations ago. In contrast, for other mixed-race peoples, because the racial mixture often happened generations ago, they are no longer that aware of being mixed-race,” said Tsuda.

A 2012 report by the Pew Research Center determined that the fastest-growing racial group in the United States is Asian Americans and as much as 68% of adult Asians in America are immigrants to the U.S. Additionally, Asian Americans have the highest rate of interracial marriage among all ethic groups in the U.S.

With the rise in multiracialism, Tsuda’s research found that multiracial Asians tend to publicly embrace all of their heritages more than other multiracial groups.

“I’d rather be ‘Other’ [on official forms] than be forced to say that I’m just Asian or I’m just white,” said one man who was interviewed for Tsuda’s research.

While other countries have adopted what Tsuda refers to as “truly multiracial categories” that are widely accepted and used, the U.S. has not followed suit.

“Even if Asian Americans insist on identifying multiracially, they have to split their complex identities into separate monoracial parts by saying ‘I’m half Asian, half white,’ or ‘I’m half Asian, one-quarter Black and one-quarter white,’ so that other people can understand who they are. This does not do justice to their multiracial identities in which they feel they are a complex, hybrid racial mixture, and not just a conglomeration of separate monoracial parts,” said Tsuda.

In the wake of more multiracial individuals refusing to submit to monoracial identities, the usage of what Tsuda calls “nontraditional monoracial identities,” or blended racial terms such as Blasian (black and Asian) and Wasian (white and Asian), has arisen.

Still, Tsuda finds fault with these attempts at creating a more diverse vernacular.

“It has greater potential to challenge monoracial categories. However, relatively few mixed-race Asians in my research sample used such terminology, because they felt other people would be unfamiliar with such terms and be confused. This forces them to revert again to monoracial terminology by explaining ‘I’m half white, half Asian,’ for example,” said Tsuda.

This raises concerns for Tsuda, who argues that this hybridization of language actually fragments multiracial identity into a compilation of disparate racial parts. If someone is fragmented in such a way, the conclusion is that they are not whole and complete, concludes Tsuda.

The splitting of multiracial identities into smaller, monoracial pieces also plays into stereotypes that such people are vulnerable to maladjustment and lower self-esteem because of their inability to fit into a clearly defined ethnic group, according to Tsuda’s research.

Ultimately, Tsuda suggests that there is only one path forward to combat a deeply engrained monoracially-based system — to make sweeping changes in how we classify people racially in the U.S.

“Our U.S. system of monoracial classification oversimplifies the incredible racial diversity of people who live in the country. The only way for mixed-race people to adequately describe their complex racial ancestry is to use multiracial categories, and not monoracial ones,” said Tsuda.