My mixed heritage is a gift. It’s also complicated.
By Dr. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt
Iam a biracial, Asian-white woman, born and raised in Hawaiʻi, in a predominantly Asian American context. For much of my life, I believed that being mixed race meant that I was part of the solution to America’s racial tensions. After all, I literally embodied racial reconciliation. Right?
But, in recent years, I’ve learned that my mixed identity is by no means an exculpation of our country’s racial guilt. The events of the last few weeks throw this reality into high relief. And yet, honestly confronting the communal sins, particularly anti-Black racism, within my entwined personal histories is also what allows me to celebrate those cultures more rightly.
On May 27, 2020, I watched a video of a white woman threatening a black man who had corrected her. That day, I meditated on the long history of white women leveraging unjust systems in their favor.
I thought of the thousands of seemingly mundane acts by white mothers who sought to maintain white supremacy in their neighborhoods and children’s schools. I remembered Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others who sacrificed black women’s suffrage in order to make their own enfranchisement more expedient. I recalled Carolyn Bryant Donham who falsely accused Emmett Till of grabbing her and being sexually crude. Her claims were cited as absolution for the white men who lynched the fourteen-year-old Black boy.
On May 27, I also saw the photograph of the Asian-American police officer who stood by and did nothing as his partner crushed the life out of a Black man. That day, I meditated on the long history of ignorance, mistrust, denigration, and violence that has been perpetuated against Blacks in Asian American communities.
I recalled the silence from my Asian American community regarding Black history and current injustices experienced by Blacks in America. Our silence was cultural, I thought; we don’t make a fuss. But, our silence was also a shield that could cover only ourselves. I was reminded of Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian Sikh man who sought to differentiate himself from “the lower races” by taking his claim of whiteness all the way to the Supreme Court. I mourned over Soon Ja Du, the Korean American convenience store owner who shot and killed fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins. Du saw Harlins’s Black body as criminal and a threat, and so she took the girl’s life over a bottle of orange juice.
When I believed that my biracial body was an emblem of racial peace, I would have resisted hearing, much less telling, these histories. I wanted a purely celebratory model of diversity, one that dispensed with black-white binaries in favor of joyfully highlighting a beautiful array of colors and cultures. Past wrongs should be forgiven and forgotten so that we could move forward toward unity.
I did not realize that, like the false prophets in Jeremiah, I was treating a gaping wound like a mere scratch. I cried, “Peace, peace!” where there was no peace (Jer. 6:14).
The histories of dominating and denigrating those who are different than us must be spoken of repeatedly within all ethnic communities. This recounting is not futile self-flagellation. It releases us; it allows us to see God’s grace for the miraculous work that it is.
The goodness of our cultural pasts is only the result of God holding back the sin that would otherwise twist and bend us. So, I can grieve that my Japanese ancestors tortured Christians, but marvel that God would yet allow them to craft gardens that offer quiet and serenity to their country people and to others around the world. Likewise, I can mourn that my English Puritan ancestors likely owned slaves and be utterly astonished that God would also enable them to write passionate, Bible-soaked poetry.
Delight in our ethnic identities comes from the freedom that lament provides. God already knows the fractures in our collective pasts, and he is glorified when we confess our sins and proclaim his power.
But, if we refuse to acknowledge the cracks in our histories, we will be forced to reckon with their consequences in our present. History does not simply “repeat” itself. History runs along the courses we have carved. Like water seeking the easiest path, it finds the fissures, then cuts a furrow. If we ignore the fractures, they deepen and expand until they form formidable canyons.
When Martin Luther King, Jr., quoted the prophet Amos and asked that justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream, he was calling for a love-driven justice so powerful that it could fundamentally reshape the land itself.
Naming the fractures in both of my cultural pasts has been humbling, but it has freed me to understand just how radical the multiethnic, multilingual throne room of God in glory must be (Rev. 7). The work that lies before us must be a daily dying to self, a rejection of the idol of power and the illusion of an unassailable history. It must be a liturgy of repentance and an active commitment to carving new paths for the water to flow. But what good, good work to do.
Photo by Eutah Mizushima on Unsplash
Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. As a biracial Japanese-white woman, she has navigated the joys and tensions of a hybrid identity. Elissa is currently associate professor of art and art history at Covenant College, in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. Her teaching and research focus on the intersections of race, gender, and representation, and explore the potential of art to model and encourage empathy. You can find more of her published work at elissa.weichbrodt.org, and follow her on Instagram and Twitter.