Always Never Enough

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[SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is made possible through generous funding from the Henry loose foundation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In conjunction with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative, Apari, and the Institute for Religion Media and Civic Engagement.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Access, Moody.
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[SPEAKER_02]: My name is Gator Bartlett, I'm a Neon White Christian, and I'm not one of the other.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And then, I think, you know, kind of like later in high school and into college, I kind of just had had enough of those experiences where, if I am in a space, and I feel like I'm not welcome, I just...
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[SPEAKER_02]: either like if they're real, I have to stay at a stay and I just don't really care what anyone who did with me thinks or I just leave because there are there are places that don't accept me and I feel like the kind of people who like really take your shoe with my identity like it's not it's not my job to fix and they're not really people I want to be around in the meantime.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's my son Kiddar, talking about his understanding of himself and where he's arrived as a young man who is both mixed race and mixed faith.
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[SPEAKER_01]: These are the answers to the question of how to be both as a young person in the world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't come easy for him or for me.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He's in his early 20s now, a college graduate who was just beginning his life as an adult.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But as we'll see, he's still wrestling with the complexity of identity and how to show up in different contexts with different communities, different expectations, and different rules.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What do you do as a mixed race person in the world when the view of yourself doesn't match up with how the world views you?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Do you code switch?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Do you please others?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Do you just hide
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[SPEAKER_01]: Kather has been answering these questions since he was a child.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Even if he didn't know they were questions, the world would ask of him.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I've been asking these questions since I was pregnant.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Hellsons John and I fell in love and we started thinking about having kids.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Kather and I don't have all the answers to these questions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We have our experiences.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I have my research.
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[SPEAKER_01]: As we enter the final two episodes of this series, it's time to go beyond how you can be both in your marriage or at home with your family to the wider world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Dr. Kathy Joshee.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a scholar of Race Religion and Education, a tenure professor who has spent two decades teaching about and studying how identity actually gets formed, not just in textbooks, but in kitchens, classrooms, and car rides home.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I've written six books, including White Christian Privilege, the illusion of religious equality in America, teaching for diversity in social justice, and Asian Americans in Dixie.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I've spoken to audiences from university lecture halls to the White House.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But this podcast isn't just research, it's personal.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's where the scholarship and lived experience meet.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is mixed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One day, my sister called me in full panic mode.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Not because someone was hurt, not because there was some big family emergency.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was because my seven-year-old niece had come home from summer camp, crying.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And not just regular crying, it's that kind of crying where the kid is so upset that they can barely breathe between sentences.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My niece, Jaya, had gone to an Indian cultural
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[SPEAKER_01]: One that she had been excited about for weeks, she loved the music, the dancing, the stories, the snacks.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But that day, she came home devastated.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She looked at my sister and shouted, why didn't you marry an Indian guy?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now imagine hearing that as a parent.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My sister called me and told me what happened and said, you know, we both had heard, you should marry an Indian from mom and dad.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I can't believe I'm now hearing the same thing from my kid.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She went on to say, look, I don't know what to say to her.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Can you talk with her?
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[SPEAKER_01]: I said of course.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When a child is upset or there is some kind of trouble, it's really important to hear the story directly from them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Adults edit adults interpret, adults may even sanitize.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Kids will tell you exactly what happened.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So I got on the phone with Jaya.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She's still crying, sniffling, trying to get the words out.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And finally, she says, Massey, which is the word for maternal aunt in Gujarati.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Massey, they said, I couldn't really be at the camp because I'm not 100% Indian, because Daddy's not Indian.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And honestly, my heart broke a little.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because here was this little girl excited to connect to her culture.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And within about five minutes, somebody had handed her a calculator and started dividing her humanity into fractions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Jaya's light skinned, and I knew was gonna face this issue, but it still bothered me that it happened.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Half this, quarter that, not enough of this, too much of that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I said, sweetie, I'm really sorry this happened.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I know how excited you've been for camp.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And then I asked her, which of your arms is Indian?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Silence.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Which one of your legs is British, more silence, which I is American.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now, she pauses and says, Massey, you're being silly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, you are right.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This is silly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I told her, you are 100% Indian, 100% British, and 100% American.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And immediately, she says, that's 300%.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I said, okay, good.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So your math skills are excellent.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And finally, finally, she laughed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I share the story with the teachers in my classroom and professional development workshops all the time and they love it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Not just because kids say funny things, although that's 300% is objectively fantastic.
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[SPEAKER_01]: they love it because underneath the humor is something deeply true and now they have language to talk about these issues with their kids, whether they're first graders or in high school.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Race isn't biological the way many people think it is.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Identity is not a pie chart.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Human beings are not recipes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody walks around saying I'm 30% courage, 40% anxiety and 12%
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[SPEAKER_01]: But somehow when it comes to race, there's a great deal of confusion.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the damage is real.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One of the most consistent things mixed race people talk about, and one of the things research shows over and over again, is this feeling of never being fully whole.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Never fully enough.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Too black for one space, not Korean enough for another, constantly being measured against somebody else's definition of authenticity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It starts heartbreakingly young, like it did for Jaya, who should have just enjoyed her summer camp experience.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Just like parents are forced to reduce their kids to one identity or another on government forms, kids are told shockingly early how much of one thing they are and what parts of themselves will never be enough.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's why moments like this matter because sometimes the most important thing you can give a child isn't an answer.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's permission to feel complete.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So what are you?
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[SPEAKER_01]: For many biracial people, this is a common and emotionally exhausting question.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And mixed-race people here at constantly is one of the most loaded questions in the American Social Vocabulary, because the question is not really about curiosity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It is a demand for categorization.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's often followed by, I knew you were something
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[SPEAKER_01]: In our society, you are this, or you are that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Modern racial society is deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now, on the surface, that can sound harmless.
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[SPEAKER_01]: People often mean curiosity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes, they even think they're being friendly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But for a lot of mixed race people, the question carries a very different message.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You do not fit into the categories I expected.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that experience often starts incredibly early.
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[SPEAKER_01]: A byracial child quickly notices that people are trying to, quote, figure them out, teachers pause, other kids stare a little too long, adults start playing detective.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Are you black?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Are you Chinese?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe Latina?
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[SPEAKER_01]: What are you mixed with?
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[SPEAKER_01]: And suddenly, a human being becomes a guessing game.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Like their identity is a trivia question or a math problem, everyone else gets to solve.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Over time, that repeated questioning creates pressure.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Pressure to explain yourself, defend yourself, simplify yourself.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Make your identity easier for other people to process.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One day, I was piled together in a car at an academic conference, five women and one man.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And to me, that man appeared white.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So casually, without even thinking about it, I said, well, we've got five Asians and one white guy here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure the restaurant doesn't see groups like this very often.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And immediately, he said, I'm not white.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm biracial.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And honestly, I felt like an idiot.
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[SPEAKER_01]: because this is literally my field and my life.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My own child is biracial.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I teach it as material.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I think about identity almost all the time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: People make assumptions about mixed race people constantly and their truth is, even people who are educated about identity can still fall into those habits.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, in that split second, my brain did what so many brains do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It categorized someone visually and assumed I knew who they were.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That moment has always stayed with me, because it reminded me how deeply conditioned we are to sort people into racial categories.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We absorb these ideas constantly through media, history, culture, forms we fill out, and even the language we use every day.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the thing is, bias is sneaky.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's not always louder malicious, sometimes it's automatic.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes it's just the speed at which our brains
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[SPEAKER_01]: But being informed doesn't mean you never make mistakes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It means you stay vigilant about them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it means that when you do make a mistake, you don't get defensive.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You don't explain it away.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You don't make the other person comfort you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: You just take responsibility.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When I made that comment assuming my biracial colleague was white, I apologized, I acknowledged it, and then we moved on.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, that's what most people want.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Not perfection.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Just a willingness to listen when someone tells you who they are and enough humility to admit when you got it wrong.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One of the most important things we can do is let people identify how they want to identify.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That sounds obvious, but mixed race people struggle with it all the time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Particularly when someone identifies in a way that doesn't match what I call our visual library.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The mental shortcuts we carry around about what different groups are supposed to look like.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I have to be careful about this myself.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In my classes, I give the full explanation about why I have this and have that language is problematic.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I talk about how reducing people to fractions can make them feel incomplete, like they're permanently divided against themselves.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But social situations are messier.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If someone says to me, I'm half black and half white.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I don't launch into a lecture.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's not the moment.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Instead, I try to reflect back language that feels whole and humanizing without correcting them or policing their identity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: For example, I will say, so, a someone who is black and white you, dot dot dot.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Because none of us should be standing there telling somebody else the way they describe themselves as wrong.
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[SPEAKER_01]: to the teachers out there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If a kid in your class or my denifies in a way that doesn't seem right by you, by which I mean, if they identify in a way that doesn't match your visual library, then you have some homework to do.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Find out through conversations, assignments.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Why the student might be identifying the way they are?
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you are in a regular social setting, the rule is pretty simple.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Believe people when they tell you who they are.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And there are a few things you really should avoid saying.
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[SPEAKER_01]: For example, oh, wow, you don't look Mexican or I never would have guessed you were Chinese or I can totally see the white side of you or you don't seem black.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Just stay away from all of these phrases.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Mixtraise people hear these sentences, constantly, and I mean constantly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I have a colleague named Kate.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She is a white woman raising two sons who are by racial.
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[SPEAKER_01]: She's told me about these school projects, the boys have to do when they're talking about culture and who they are.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The boys' father is from Code Dibbar in Africa.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Kate shared how her boys are always providing responses to teacher questions and assignments based on what they think the teacher wants.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They include things that are tied to their dad's side, like the food they cook with him, the music they listen to with him, but they don't really mention all the traditions they have at home.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it feels a little strange to her, like they don't see her traditions as cultural.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They do see the African Ivorian side as cultural.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And they'll even say things like,
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[SPEAKER_01]: What are we going to put mom?
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[SPEAKER_01]: We eat lasagna, we make Christmas cookies, those things don't feel cultural to them.
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[SPEAKER_01]: While they have both cultures, when they think about what the teacher is asking for, they assume it's something outside the norm.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that's something she struggles with as a parent.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They live in Montclair a really diverse part of New Jersey.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The kids in these schools come from dozens of different ethnicities, and the teachers are always sharing prompts like, share your heritage, bring in a family recipe, talk about your traditions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And it seems to feel strange to the boys to put forward things that are part of white European Christian culture,
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[SPEAKER_01]: Kate's story reflects an important phenomenon that most people don't see.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Many biracial people become experts at managing other people's expectations and discomfort.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They learn which answer feels safest in different spaces.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They learn when to give the shortest explanation versus the long one.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They learn how to laugh off awkward questions they've heard a thousand times before.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Many mixed-race people describe feeling hypervisible and invisible at the same time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Constantly noticed for being different, but not fully seen for who they actually are.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Some feel like they are perpetually not enough of any one thing, not enough to fully belong here, too much to fully belong there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And eventually, some people experience what research or sometimes call identity fatigue.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The exhaustion that comes from constantly being categorized, questioned or explained.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But here's the important part.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The problem is not being biracial.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Being mixed-raised results in many people developing extraordinary strengths, they often become highly adaptable, culturally fluent, able to navigate multiple communities and perspectives with nuance and empathy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But there is a cost, even when they appear okay.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The exhausting work of code switching being one version of yourself at your grandmother's temple, another at your father's church, another in a school hallway where neither of those worlds exist is real cognitive and emotional labor.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Research on racial identity development consistently finds that the burden of legitimacy falls disproportionately on those who don't fit neatly into pre-existing categories.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There is a difference between choosing to share your heritage and being required to account for yourself.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One is self-expression, the other is attacks.
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[SPEAKER_01]: A few years ago, I was running a continuing legal education seminar.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The kind where judges earned their required professional credits, and I was explaining the concept of race as a social construction.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The judges they work with evidence, they understand that categories are made, not found.
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[SPEAKER_01]: then I move to mixed race identity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And I explained why the fractional language of, quote, half this and half that does harm.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And a judge raised his hand and said with complete sincerity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm half Italian, a quarter German, and a quarter Irish.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What's wrong with identifying that way?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely nothing is wrong with that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But here's what the judge was doing and what most Americans do without realizing it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He was describing ancestry.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He was telling me about his lineage, his genealogy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The places his people came from, and that is rich, meaningful, and worth knowing.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What he was not doing was describing his race.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He is white, full stop, no fractions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The fractional language is part of that tax.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And the first step towards lifting it is understanding where it came from and deciding deliberately to stop paying it.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's not confusion, that's complexity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When we ask what are you, we love you that tax.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When we say, tell me about yourself, we invite them to share whatever and however they want.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This brings us to a really important point about the mixed experience.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We need to make a distinction that sounds simple, but cut steep.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Race is not the same as ancestry.
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[SPEAKER_01]: They are not interchangeable and conflating them causes real harm to mixed race people.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Ancestry is genealogical.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It says, where your people came from, geographically, historically, genetically.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's a record of lineage.
22:26.072 --> 22:31.694
[SPEAKER_01]: You can have ancestors from Italy, Germany, Ireland, Nigeria, and South Korea simultaneously.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Race is something entirely different.
22:34.555 --> 22:37.396
[SPEAKER_01]: Race is a social and legal construction.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It is a side.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It is enforced.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And its meanings have shifted throughout American history depending on who needed to be included or excluded from power.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Race is not about DNA.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Race has been written into law and public policy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: For example, Irish and Italian immigrants were not considered white when they first arrived in large numbers in the 19th century.
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[SPEAKER_01]: South Asians have been legally reclassified multiple times.
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[SPEAKER_01]: First ruled white for citizenship purposes in 1910, and then denied citizenship as non-white in 1923.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Race is a political category dressed up as biological fact.
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[SPEAKER_01]: If you're scratching your head a little confused, that is okay.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One of the best ways to understand that raises a social construction is our United States Census.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The terms have changed over time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: For example, if my family had been in the country in the 1920s, I would have been categorized as Hindu.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In 1970, I would have been categorized as other.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I became Asian in 1980.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, in the second half of the 20th century, no two senses would have categorized me and my family the same way.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The terms to describe us and other groups have always been changing.
24:12.958 --> 24:18.222
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is where people get tangled, especially now, with the rise of DIY ancestry kits.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Companies like 23 and me have made ancestry testing mainstream, and that is genuinely wonderful.
24:25.367 --> 24:30.911
[SPEAKER_01]: Knowing your lineage connects you to history to geography, to family stories that might otherwise disappear.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But the results have also generated enormous confusion.
24:35.914 --> 24:47.404
[SPEAKER_01]: Because people receive a breakdown, you are 14% West African, 32% Northern European, 18% South Asian, and they treat it as a statement about their racial identity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It is not about their racial identity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It is a statement about where your ancestors lived.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Those are two different things.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I know what some of you are thinking, you're thinking.
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[SPEAKER_01]: But we can see differences, and you're right, we can.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I am an Indian-American woman with dark skin and dark hair.
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[SPEAKER_01]: My husband is white with red hair, green eyes and freckles.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We look different.
25:19.440 --> 25:21.582
[SPEAKER_01]: Those differences are real and visible.
25:22.547 --> 25:26.689
[SPEAKER_01]: But here's the distinction that scientific racism got catastrophically wrong.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And that modern genetics has definitely clarified.
25:30.410 --> 25:38.033
[SPEAKER_01]: There are phenotypical differences between human populations, differences in skin color, hair texture, eye shape.
25:38.553 --> 25:44.215
[SPEAKER_01]: But there are no meaningful biological differences among the racial categories we use.
25:44.835 --> 25:46.636
[SPEAKER_01]: Most of us have a four chambered heart.
25:46.656 --> 25:48.637
[SPEAKER_01]: 10 fingers and toes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: a pair of lungs and kidneys and arms and legs and nostrils, the same basic anatomy, human.
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[SPEAKER_01]: how scientific racism became policy.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Approximately 150 years ago, academic institutions across Europe and America were actively promoting a pseudoscience framework we now refer to a scientific racism.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The belief that racial categories were biologically fixed, hierarchically ranked, and empirically verifiable.
26:22.756 --> 26:30.381
[SPEAKER_01]: Different people across the world were categorized with terms you might recognize, like Caucasoid, Mongaloid, Negroid and others.
26:31.422 --> 26:40.228
[SPEAKER_01]: Experiments were conducted to prove the intellectual and biological superiority of white Europeans, and the inferiority of everyone else.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was to put it plainly, hogwash.
26:43.831 --> 26:49.435
[SPEAKER_01]: But it was hogwash with institutional authority behind it, and that made it dangerous.
26:50.546 --> 27:04.400
[SPEAKER_01]: Out of this ideological movement came eugenics, a project of engineering the human population by encouraging reproduction among the quote unquote fit, and discouraging or forcibly preventigate among those deemed unfit.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The United States was not a reluctant observer of this movement.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was a leader.
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[SPEAKER_01]: by 1931, 30 states had enacted forced sterilization laws.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The experiments justified under scientific racism were grotesque.
27:21.689 --> 27:31.551
[SPEAKER_01]: Claims that black Americans possessed an extra muscle explaining athletic ability, studies measuring skull size to assert the superior intelligence of white people.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Elaborate taxonomies designed to keep a racial hierarchy intact by dressing it in the language of science.
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[SPEAKER_01]: and Congress listened, the Supreme Court listened.
27:45.108 --> 27:57.821
[SPEAKER_01]: The Immigration Act of 1924, building on the restrictions enacted in 1921, dramatically curtailed immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, Italians Greek, Slavs and Jews.
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[SPEAKER_01]: These groups were considered racially inferior to the Anglo-Saxon and Northern European ideal.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The law was not subtle about this.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Its architects cited the genesis literature explicitly.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The Supreme Court was no different.
28:14.947 --> 28:22.293
[SPEAKER_01]: In United States, the Puggetsing Thin, in 1923, the Supreme Court stripped citizenship from an Indian immigrant.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Since the court at the time was relying on science, the pseudoscience of the time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His attorneys argued that as an Indian he was classified as Caucasian.
28:32.624 --> 28:42.026
[SPEAKER_01]: Part of the pseudoscience also suggested that people from present day North Indian Pakistan were Aryans, as they had migrated to India from the Caucasus mountains.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The justices acknowledged the classification and still ruled against Bucket Singthin.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Their reasoning was openly racial.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thin, a dark-skinned, turban-wearing sick immigrant was not white in the way the law intended.
28:59.392 --> 29:06.255
[SPEAKER_01]: The opinion actually invokes without irony, the quote, common understanding of the man on the street.
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[SPEAKER_01]: In the judgment of the court, the man on the street would not look at Bhagat Singh Thin and see a white man.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Therefore, he wasn't one.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Race confirmed again as a social verdict, not a biological fact.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So here's a question.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When a child says, I'm half Indian and half white.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Where did they learn to say that?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Their parents didn't sit them down
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[SPEAKER_01]: their teacher didn't draw it on a whiteboard.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So where does that language come from?
29:43.942 --> 29:47.465
[SPEAKER_01]: It comes from our society, our history, and some of our laws.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Specifically, it comes from the most violent legal machinery this country has ever produced.
29:54.410 --> 30:05.307
[SPEAKER_01]: In the late 19th and 20th centuries, the United States federal government developed what we called blood quantum laws, policies that literally measured indigenous identity infractions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One-half, one-quarter, one-eighth.
30:09.523 --> 30:20.085
[SPEAKER_01]: The fraction determined whether a person was legally recognized as Native American, and therefore, whether they could hold land, receive federal benefits, or belong to a tribe at all.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This was not a neutral administrative system.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was a tool of a racer.
30:25.806 --> 30:32.627
[SPEAKER_01]: Blood Quantum was deliberately designed so that over generations, the enrolled native population would shrink.
30:33.367 --> 30:35.588
[SPEAKER_01]: Land would refer to the federal government.
30:36.168 --> 30:40.869
[SPEAKER_01]: and indigenous nations would effectively dissolve themselves out of legal existence.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The fraction wasn't describing a person.
30:44.430 --> 30:46.650
[SPEAKER_01]: It was counting down to their disappearance.
30:48.031 --> 30:49.791
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there was the inverse.
30:50.691 --> 31:03.014
[SPEAKER_01]: The so-called One Drop Rule enforced by a statute in many southern states held that any traceable African ancestry no matter how remote made a person legally black.
31:03.988 --> 31:05.029
[SPEAKER_01]: no fractions there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: One drop was enough.
31:08.311 --> 31:10.092
[SPEAKER_01]: That rule wasn't about measurement.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It was about exclusion about keeping the racial hierarchy intact during and after the era of slavery.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Two legal systems, two uses of fractional thinking, both designed to control human beings through the language of blood.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Here's what I want you to hold on to.
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[SPEAKER_01]: When a child today says I'm half Indian, they are unknowingly echoing a legal language that was never designed to describe the fullness of a person.
31:39.671 --> 31:41.393
[SPEAKER_01]: It was designed to divide people.
31:42.073 --> 31:47.340
[SPEAKER_01]: And we have inherited it so completely that we don't even notice we're speaking it.
31:50.614 --> 31:53.635
[SPEAKER_01]: What feeling whole actually requires?
31:54.075 --> 32:03.039
[SPEAKER_01]: Psychologists has studied what happens when mixed race people are forced to choose to commit to one racial identity and set the other aside.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The research is consistent, identity fragmentation.
32:07.621 --> 32:13.784
[SPEAKER_01]: The experience of feeling split, a performing oneself for one audience and another self for another.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's associated with higher rates of anxiety, depression, and what researchers call psychological malagestment.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The language of fractions implies competition.
32:25.960 --> 32:29.124
[SPEAKER_01]: If I'm half of this, then I'm only half of that.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Every claim on one side feels like a betrayal of the other.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Mixed kids know this feeling viscerally.
32:37.472 --> 32:41.596
[SPEAKER_01]: Being too Indian for one set of cousins and not Indian enough for another.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Being legible in one space and illegible in the next.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Contrast that with identity integration, the experience of holding multiple identities together, not in competition, but in combination.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Mixed race individuals who integrate their identities, report greater self-esteem, stronger sense of purpose, and better mental health outcomes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The difference isn't trivial.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It is the difference between a child who grows up feeling like a problem to be solved, and a child who grows up feeling whole, fully himself or herself, and armored against a world that would try to split them into parts.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Here's what we've established so far.
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[SPEAKER_01]: First, people aren't fractions.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Mixed race people are whole, period.
33:42.377 --> 33:51.563
[SPEAKER_01]: Second, mixed race people often carry the burden of explaining themselves to a society that wants to reduce them to a monoracial category.
33:52.183 --> 34:01.730
[SPEAKER_01]: Society runs more smoothly when people fit into familiar categories, so reducing people to one race makes people think they understand.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And when they are familiar with their category or how they identify with something they are more comfortable.
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[SPEAKER_01]: third.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Another issue that arises is using fractional language to describe people.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The problem here is that it reifies the myth that races biological.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It is not.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It is a social and legal construction.
34:29.725 --> 34:44.128
[SPEAKER_01]: With all this in mind, the last thing we need to figure out is how to help mixed race people, especially kids, build a foundation of self that enables them to withstand the reduction and intrusion they face out in the world.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What tools and strategies can we equip them with to keep showing up resiliently and beautifully in a world that so often will reduce them, misunderstand them, and simply want them
35:00.753 --> 35:12.040
[SPEAKER_01]: In order to share how we've walked this path, I'll turn to give our my son to share his experiences, lessons, and heartbreaks as a mixed-faith mixed-race kid.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Did what I taught him work?
35:15.603 --> 35:16.844
[SPEAKER_01]: What does Kether think?
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's next time on Mist.
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[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
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[SPEAKER_01]: That's it for this episode of Mixed.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for listening.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Mixed was created by me, Dr. Kathy Joshee, in conjunction with the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement, and Access Mundi Media.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Mixed was produced by Andrew Gil and Bradley of Nishie, and the original music and engineering by Scott Ocamoto.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Cari of Nishie provided production assistance.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Our story editor is Lee Epang.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Mixed was made possible through generous funding from the Henry loose foundation and is made in collaboration with a party and the Under God's project.