Are We, Who We Are? Or What We Were?

Mixed-race identity

The Current looks at the growing number of mixed-race Canadians

Last Updated September 7, 2007

By Lisa Khoo, CBC Radio's The Current

"Mixed Blessings" is a four-part series on CBC Radio's The Current that looks at the growing number of people of mixed race, and what it means to identity, arts, culture and public policy.

The series will air the week of Sept. 10, on The Current at 8:30 a.m. (9:00 in Newfoundland) on CBC Radio One and online at cbc.ca/radio.

Think Tiger Woods, Vin Diesel, Keanu Reeves, Mariah Carey, Sean Lennon — more and more mixed-race people are turning up in the media and in Canadian society.

In the past decade Canada's demographics have changed radically, as more immigrants from visible minorities settle here, and the number of mixed-race marriages has gone up, leading to more mixed-race children.

Today, mixed-race people are perceived as ethnically ambiguous, even exotic, and are being touted as a marketer's dream. Mixed-race people are starting Facebook clubs, activist groups, writing books, plays, poetry. They're doing visual art, documentaries, even standup comedy routines. In addition to exploring their own identities, they're challenging our notions of race, ethnicity and national identity. That has implications for public policy as well as society as a whole.

"We're going to have to rethink what it means to be a Canadian," says documentary maker Anne Marie Nakagawa, who is of Japanese and Irish-Scottish descent. "I think in 20 years we won't be thinking the person in the 'I Am Canadian' beer commercial is necessarily someone of European descent. At least I hope not."

Identity questions

Lisa Khoo, senior producer, The Current Lisa Khoo, senior producer, The Current

My ancestry is Chinese, Malay, English, and Scottish. My mother has blue eyes and blond hair, and my father had black hair and dark brown eyes. I have light hair and hazel eyes. I don't look British, but I don't look Chinese either. What am I? Mixed-race people get asked that question a lot.

"If it's the first question out of someone's mouth when they first meet me, it's a bit frustrating," said Karen Suzuki, a Toronto filmmaker of Japanese-Canadian and German descent.

Suzuki's ancestors on both sides have been in Canada for four generations.

"Why do we look at someone's face and immediately need to know where they come from, how they got to look that way? It almost feels as rude as asking someone, 'How much do you weigh?' It's as if they look at you and want to know the number, the mass … I'm so much more than that. It's a much longer answer than white, black, Asian," Suzuki said.

Author Lawrence Hill, whose father was black and mother was white, wrote about how he deals with the question in his best-selling memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada, published in 2001. He wrote:

What is wrong with The Question? Nothing at all — when it is asked at the right time, when it results in a genuine interest in you as a person, and when the person asking the question actually accepts the answer. Let's dissect the interrogation process. Imagine me at a party, sipping mineral water. A stranger walks up.

STRANGER: "Do you mind me asking where you're from?" [This is code for "What is your race?"]

ME: "Canada." [This is code for "screw off."]

STRANGER: "Yes, but you know, where are you really from?" [This is code for "You know what I mean, so why are you trying to make me come out and say it?"]

ME: "I come from the foreign and distance metropolis of Newmarket. That's Newmarket, Ont., my place of birth." [Code for "I'm not letting you off the hook, buster."]

STRANGER: "But your place of origin? Your parents? What are your parents?" [Code for, "I want to know your race but this is making me feel very uncomfortable because somehow I'm not supposed to ask that question."]

Concludes Hill: "I suppose the reason many of us mixed-race people find The Question offensive is not just that it makes assumptions, which are often false, about our identity, but because it attempts to hang our identity on one factor: our race."

Fluid identities

Many mixed-race people describe themselves as having fluid identities, perhaps as a result of constant negotiations between multiple ethnicities, traditions and communities.

Paul Bramadat, who is of Indo-Trinidadian-Scottish-Irish descent, says he's learned to turn the ambiguity into an advantage in his adult years. But during his adolescence, it was an isolating experience being in between.

"When you are trying to become a person, going through adolescence, struggling with who you are at best of times … this other complication, along with hormones, school, drugs alcohol … adds another wrinkle. At the time it was very challenging, disorienting and alienating," Bramadat said.

Now, he says, it has helped him, especially in his career as a professor at the University of Winnipeg where he teaches about multiculturalism and tolerance.

"More than ever I am coming to appreciate the ambiguity, the looseness. I think it's actually been very helpful for me. It's made me more open about learning things, about other cultures, other religious groups, that I think is reflected in my research," said Bramadat.

By the numbers

The number of Canadians identifying themselves as belonging to more than one group, including white, Chinese, South Asian, was 328,115 in the 2001 census. Executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies Jack Jedwab says that number may double by 2027.

"I think we can expect as much as a doubling of people of mixed ethnic and racial background in the next 15 to 20 years simply by virtue of the increased social acceptance of such mixing … People of different backgrounds are far more in contact today than they were, say, 20 or 30 years ago," he said.

The number of mixed marriages in Canada rose by 35 per cent between the 1996 and 2001 census to 452,000. The visible minority population in Canada grew threefold between 1981 and 2001 after Canada's immigration policy changed with the introduction of the Immigration Act in 1976. It set up a point system to determine entry into Canada.

Between 1956 and 1976, 63.6 per cent of immigrants came to Canada from Europe and the U.K., while 11.9 per cent came from Asia. By 2004, 48.6 per cent of immigrants came from Asia, 19.7 per cent came from Africa and the Middle East, and 17.8 per cent came from Europe and the U.K.

A look at history

Mixed-race people have a long history in North America, starting with the Métis, the product of unions between French traders and native women as far back as the 1700s. They developed their own language and customs and today are legally recognized along with the Inuit and First Nations. But their status did not come without a struggle, similar to what other mixed-race people are experiencing today.

"The idea that society doesn't know how to deal with the mixing of cultures is a very key part of how we are all treated," says lawyer Jean Teillet, whose great-grandfather was Métis leader Louis Riel, and whose mother is of Polish ancestry.

"I think circumstances of the collective Métis Nation and individuals of mixed race are probably a difference of scale but not in nature. The individual in each group will have the same situations," Teillet said, "Who are you, what are you, why aren't you just a Canadian, what's your background, what do you identify as? Those things are all things Métis people experience every day as well."

A new name

Some European-Asian people are adopting a new name to describe themselves — Hapa. The term itself is not new. It is from Hawaii, a state where most people have mixed backgrounds and embrace their fused heritage. Hapa means half, and is sometimes used as a short form for "hapa haole," which means half-Caucasian.

Kip Fulbeck Kip Fulbeck

Prof. Kip Fulbeck, who teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is one of the leading voices using the term. His father is Caucasian and his mother is Chinese. He became aware of "Hapa" while living in Hawaii.

"I use it because there was simply no better way to describe myself. My whole life it's either been a clinical scientific terminology "Amerasian" or "Eurasian," words which are really biological. I didn't like that. Hapa felt more home-style, more downtown."

Last year, Fulbeck published a book called Part Asian, 100% Hapa, featuring hundreds of photos he took of mixed-race people. Each picture is accompanied by a statement by the individual, identifying themselves. At the shoots, said Fulbeck, the air was electric, as people saw others who looked like them, a point of connection many had not felt growing up.

"To me it was always a struggle to fit in. I was always identified as 'other.' Every school form or job application asked me to check one box on these stupid ethnicity questionnaires. For me that was asking me to pick Mom or Dad and I didn't want to do that. I realized identity is a personal thing. I decided I was Hapa — mixed-blood or mixed-race — and if people wanted to talk about it, I was fine talking about it," said Fulbeck.

Jeff Chiba Stearns is a Canadian animator who also uses the term. He grew up in Kelowna, B.C., with a Japanese-Canadian mother and Caucasian father. Stearns describes his signature style of work as "Hapanimation," fusing elements of Japanese anime with traditional animation.

His film What are you anyway? is a funny, poignant story of how he came to embrace his heritage, and he's currently producing a documentary on his family called One Big Hapa Family. He embraces the term, with mixed feelings.

"Using the word Hapa allowed us to escape from other people's definitions. But has it become a box? It's good for a sense of community but is that in danger of becoming too limited? It should be fluid."

Picking a side

Some people of mixed race have chosen to identify more fully with one of their heritages. While individuals vary within every community, some mixed African-Canadians identify more strongly with black culture. In the U.S., people were identified as black by law if they had any black ancestry whatsoever, the so-called "one-drop" rule.

People with one black parent and one white parent identifying themselves as black is, said author Lawrence Hill, "a historical trend that has marked the experiences of blacks in North America since we've been brought here 400 years ago. But it's also an internalized response. Many black people tend to feel this way, and embrace this aspect of their identity very proudly, regardless of the levels of their mixture in their family."

In the U.S., many African-Americans were opposed to changes to the 2000 census which allowed people to pick several ethnic backgrounds, out of concern that it would reduce their numbers.

There are also mixed-race people who have little or no attachment to their ancestry. Anne Marie Nakagawa studied in Japan for two years but didn't identify with the culture or society at all.

"I've discovered that being Japanese, whatever that is, is against my nature. Many things that are Japanese are counter to my intuition so I couldn't call myself a Japanese person," she said.

Many Japanese-Canadians have been in Canada for several generations and feel few ties to Japan. Having endured internment during the Second World War, the vast majority intermarried with people of European descent. Now, 95 per cent of Japanese-Canadians are in mixed marriages.

Debunking 'race'

The idea that the world can be divided into a handful of separate races has been debunked by biology, even as the term continues to be used by social scientists. The idea of races gained traction in the 19th century when scientists, including Linneus, were applying classifications to all animals and plants. There were four, then later five, races: red, yellow, black, brown and white.

Today geneticists know that, in reality, humans share approximately 75 per cent of the same genes, and the genes for skin colour and hair type are just a fraction of those. While people do look different around the world, those differences unfold gradually and have more to do with adapting to local geography over time.

"Today we recognize quite strongly that race per se is not a natural biological fact about human variation," explains leading anthropologist Jonathan Marks. "It's composed of a negotiation between what we might call natural facts of difference and cultural facts of otherness.

"It's not that people don't differ from one another — obviously everybody differs from everybody else except identical twins genetically — but we perceive some differences as significant and other differences as insignificant. And that's at the heart of the problem of race, that what we decided that the difference between these two people is not very important and the difference between those two people is very important and that's a very subjective cultural assessment."

Even though science may not focus on skin colour, we live in a very visual world, and racism still exists, whether it's based on outdated notions or not. Some sociologists say the idea of race as a social construct is still useful, particularly in fighting racism.

The implications

Some people suggest that, as we move into a time when ethnic and racial lines are being blurred, Canada needs to update its multicultural policy. Born out of the 1969 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, the policy was announced in 1971. It was designed to help cultural groups foster their identity while being able to fully participate in Canadian society. That later led to a Multiculturalism Act in 1988. Multiculturalism is also legally enshrined in Section 27 of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which says laws will be interpreted to preserve and enhance the multicultural heritage of Canada.

Critics say the policy has been a positive force but now needs to move beyond helping individual ethnic groups and stress our shared values of tolerance, the rule of law.

"In a society where there's increased mixing, which is going to be the case particularly for the younger generation of Canadians, we'll probably focus more on the individual and trying to ensure that that individual has a larger freedom to choose their lifestyle and culture without obstacles or discrimination or other barriers being put in their way of doing these things," said Jack Jedwab, from the Association of Canadian Studies.

For some mixed-race people, it's about getting beyond race completely or refusing to let yourself be defined by classic notions of race. Some say that what's more important than race is gender, class, religion, language, location, occupation, age … that at any given time all these things are important in a range of ways.

Karen Suzuki lists the things that are more important to her than her racial history.

"One day I'm a filmmaker, one day I'm a martial artist, one day I'm an aunt, I'm always a daughter, a partner, and always a woman."

"I think people get to do what they want," said Paul Spickard, professor of anthropologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who has written extensively on mixed-race issues.

"We live in a democracy and this is a place where individual freedom is one of our highest values. I think people ought to be allowed to define themselves as makes sense to them."