My biracial identity and racism in the Asian American
Transcriber: omar idmassaoud
Reviewer: Aga Ismael
Recently, there’s been an increase
in hate crimes all across America
about the Asian and Pacific Islander
community.
Because of this,
I thought it would be fitting
to talk about my experiences
of being Asian American.
Hi, my name [is] Anna Hight,
and I am a sophomore
at Carmel High School.
So, to start off with, I’m Wasian,
it means that I’m half white
and half Asian.
More specifically,
I’m half white and half Japanese.
Growing up, I’ve only ever known
fully white people or fully Asian people.
It’s never been a mix of the two.
Being in this kind of environment has
definitely affected me to come here today.
For example:
put me in a group of Asian people,
I’m always as a white one.
Put me in a group of non-Asian people,
I’m always the Asian one.
It’s just a very interesting
kind of environment to be in.
Recently, though,
I’ve had the priority of meeting
many other Wasian people for my life.
One notable person
is actually a waitress that I met in LA.
I was never able to catch her name,
but we were both happy
that we could relate to each other.
She was still fairly young,
she couldn’t have been more than 25,
and we’re both half white
and half Japanese.
We both agreed that we lived more Japanese
as a baby than we do now.
And we had both only been to Japan
a handful of times.
She had only been in Japan three times,
and although I’ve never
actually been to mainland Japan,
I have lived
in the tiny island south of it.
My dad’s in the military,
so that means that we move overseas a lot.
When I was in kindergarten
through second grade,
we lived in this teeny tiny little
tropical island south of mainland Japan,
called Okinawa.
Interestingly enough,
the waitress’ family is from Okinawa,
which is where I lived.
I remember one day in first or second
grade during some practice.
I was just in line waiting
to do something.
I don’t remember.
And this person in front of me,
he turns around and looks at me and says;
“why are you here? You’re a Gaijin.”
Gaijin is a derogatory Japanese
slang word for foreigner.
And I remember just my face
turning red, then white.
My stomach dropping.
My hands trembled.
I almost cried because I was confused.
I was scared.
I was hurt.
I had never been in this
kind of situation before.
And just, this scared me,
and it still makes me feel
uneasy to this day.
So, this is just one of my
many encounters with racism.
Once I started to move back to America,
it started to become more normalized,
more frequent.
People would come up to me
and call me nicknames
like Ching Chong or Ling Ling.
They would pull their eyes back
and say: “Chinese, Japanese, Korean.”
And I would laugh along with them,
because if everyone else did it,
then why shouldn’t I.
I didn’t realize at the time
that this was racism.
I thought it was just a little funny joke.
Once I start to get into middle school,
I became more aware
about what was right and wrong,
what was racist, not racist,
and I still started
to kind of stand up for myself.
But at the same time,
I still laughed along with the things.
I was still unsure about
laughing along or just yelling at someone,
because what they were saying was wrong.
Interestingly enough,
freshman year, last year,
when I was still incredibly aware
of racism,
I still laughed along.
I thought I had grown as a person.
I thought I had known everything
about racism and everything.
Because I’d done research on it.
But when Covid-19 hit,
friends would turn to me and say:
“Oh, don’t get too close to her.
She’s Asian, you might get Covid.”
And I would still laugh along with them.
I still had this part of me
that didn’t really understand,
that I didn’t really stand up for myself.
And this made me lose confidence
in myself a little bit
slowly without me realizing it,
but lately I have luckily regained
that confidence back.
At my own place; at my old school,
I was in a somewhat conservative area.
Some people there were known
to say some racist things.
And one person even went to say
that Covid-19 was good
because it was taking out all the Asians.
People knew that he would say that.
He got away with maybe a slap on the wrist
and many teachers would even
just turn a blind eye to it
because they didn’t want
to get too much into it
because it’s such a sensitive topic.
Racism is similar
or exactly like bullying.
And I’m pretty sure that we’re all
well versed on how to combat bullying.
So, similar or same techniques
can be used to combat racism
and some similarities
between racism and bullying
are like you had
the racist people or the bullies,
the bystanders, and you have the victims
of the racists or bullies.
So, with this knowledge,
hopefully people are able
to either stand up for themselves
or stand up for others,
and hopefully young people
can become more self-aware
about what is racist and what is not.
Recently, as we have probably
seen in news,
more people have been getting attacked,
but more people have also
been speaking out about this
and hearing people speak out about
their struggles of being an Asian American
has really helped me come to terms
and helped me regain my confidence
about being an Asian American.
And seeing other [Inaudible]
talk about this.
Talk about this has helped me
regain my confidence.
in being a biracial Asian American.