When I returned to the States from Tokyo, I was surprised to learn that I was “Wasian.” This is partly because that term, a portmanteau of White and Asian, had gained widespread use while I was away. Since coming back, hardly a week has gone by without a reminder of that identity. But this change extends beyond Wasians: “mixed Asian” as a racial category has emerged with unusual vigor into the American consciousness. 

Maybe this emergence began 30 years ago when Tiger Woods became the youngest top-ranked golfer. Or maybe our interest peaked last year when a presidential candidate assailed Kamala Harris and questioned her racial identity. 

What is certain is that interracial marriages have nearly tripled since 1980, with a dramatic increase in White-Asian couples; today, one in nine intermarriages involve a White man and an Asian woman. Perhaps it was only a whim of probability that a child of such an intermarriage, Charli XCX, would write the meme album of the Harris campaign. 

Increasingly, these demographic changes are manifesting on our campus. A decade ago, mixed Asian undergraduates founded Asian-ish, an affinity group for the not-quite-Asian. In January, the club launched its “MIXED” photo project, a panoramic exhibition of mixed Asian headshots — featuring Wasians and Blasians, among other combinations. The project’s goal: “to expand our collective definition of what an ‘Asian face’ looks like.” 

It is this urge to be recognized as an Asian that has troubled me since discovering I was Wasian. This concern is not mine alone: the Asian-ish project was created to address this ambivalence mixed Asians hold over their racial identity. 

Yet, the internal contradictions are inescapable. On one hand, mixed Asians are burdened by the verifiable truth that neither their face nor their identity is wholly Asian — a reality that necessitates the existence of an “Asian-ish” affinity group. On the other hand, they assert their claim to Asian features and heritage. As a result, mixed Asians must aspire to have their cake and eat it too — that they might somehow be both Asian and not Asian. 

This dissonance is only natural under American racial politics, which struggles to imagine mixed-race people. American Blackness exemplifies this struggle: although Barack Obama was raised by his white mother, few question his race. He is Black. Too Black, even, according to the same president who wasn’t so sure about Kamala Harris. 

It is this particular attitude toward Blackness that confuses mixed Asians, whose Asianness is not as readily acknowledged. The confusion is true of Blasians as it is of Wasians: few fans will champion Olivia Rodrigo, of all people, as an Asian artist — yet her father is Asian, just as Obama’s was Black. While history may explain this different treatment of Black and Asian Americans, it is still true that American society applies inconsistent logic to mixed-race people.

But to interpret this inconsistency as proof that mixed Asians should be “Asian” would be hasty. I see no moral imperative for mixed Asians to emulate this “one-drop” philosophy that pervades White and Black America today. Instead, we might all benefit from considering a new racial paradigm, one that asserts “mixed” or “mixed Asians” as a racial identity in itself. 

To imagine what a “mixed” identity might look like, we need not reinvent the wheel — its blueprints are found abroad. In multiracial South Africa, the “Coloureds” are a racial category for any mixed-race citizen; in Brazil, the “Pardos” serve a similar function. Both appear as options in their censuses. If “mixed” is too vague a racial category, it is at least logically consistent.

But the vagueness of just “mixed” is an understandable concern. What about “mixed Asian?” It helps to imagine how a “mixed Asian” identity might be politically organized. Consider, for example, a youth group concerned about the “solidarity” of some “Anglo-Burman” population. Or a racially exclusive country club for half-Asians in segregationist British Singapore. A hundred years ago, such communities of Eurasians — the people we now call Wasians — populated colonial Southeast Asia. In these societies, being “mixed Asian” could mean belonging to a distinct racial class.

Some mixed Asian communities continue to withstand the test of time. Few places so clearly expose the remnants of imperialism as these. In Okinawa, where American military bases predominate, there are schools dedicated to children of mixed American and Japanese heritage — one even declares it in its name, the “AmerAsian School.” Some children may feel ashamed of the stigma surrounding their serviceman fathers; they can find solace in their representation by Gov. Denny Tamaki, who is himself the mixed child of an American Marine. Perhaps no other modern society more strongly associates mixed Asians with a distinct racial identity and political significance.

Americans will do well to consider the politics inherent to mixed Asians in America. It behooves us to examine the preponderance of Asian mothers among Wasians and to witness the breakdown of Jim Crow logic on Blasians. If we have any qualms about how race has been constructed in this country, the emergence of mixed Asians offers us a renewed opportunity to challenge these ideas.

But whether challenged or not, the nation’s trajectory is clear. In the next few decades, more Americans will look more like me than ever before. They, like their predecessors, will be ambivalent about their Asianness and unsure of what to call themselves. The dilemma, then, is whether we want more “Asians” or “mixed Asians.” 

RYNE HISADA is a sophomore in Davenport College majoring in history. He can be reached at ryne.hisada@yale.edu.

RYNE HISADA