Many Hapa Returns

Or a defense of the new shade of American white

Mr. Sunshine is feeling cloudy about race in America

sunshine moonlight

has a new piece out attempting to blow a hole in Walt Bismarck’s proposal of Castizo Futurism. Walt contends that mixed race Americans can gradually come to identify as white in an Argentina-esque bleaching where everybody comes out mostly white, but with a better tan and charisma. Doesn’t sound so bad to me and maybe skin cancer rates will drop at the same time.

Sunshine’s piece pushes back on that thesis using his Hapa “lived experience”. In brief, bleaching can’t or isn’t happening because:

1. The civil rights regime has been encouraging a “flight from white”

2. Slave morality, when combined with the historical narrative of US history curricula, disincentivizes identification with the category white

3. America’s too white for ambiguous features not to stand out but not so white that they’ll be washed out

4. People enjoy feeling unique and special; they see whites as bland and boring

Maybe at some point I will have the time to respond to the above 4 points. For now a barrage of anecdotes and my “lived experience” will suffice.

I’ve spent my whole life in the South. I’m the son of a biracial father and a white mother. My father is half Asian Indian and half German. Quite the combination and it was extremely rare for someone born in the 1960s. From him, I inherited my darker swarthy features combined with Germanic height. It’s a heady combo, let me tell you.

All this means that I can speak to what sunshine is referring to and from my own perception as a mixed race kid growing up in the South in the 90s. Back then, there were relatively few immigrants in the South. Especially compared to now. I was routinely teased as kid for being the “ethnic” friend. Without fail, I would make a new friend or meet someone publicly, and they would ask me, “So where are you from?”. Being used to this social query, I knew what they were really digging at. But I gave them a vanilla answer at first. “Oh, I was born in such-and-such state and in such-and-such city.” Their face would twist in confusion and then the million dollar follow up question would land. “But, where are you really from? Like, where is your family from?” I would then launch into my prepared speech explaining my convoluted family tree and why I don’t look like Johnny down the street, but I sure do talk like him.

I’ve stopped being asked this question in the last decade, probably because I have an email job and don’t get the same summer tan as those halcyon days after the end of history. But there were plenty of other alleged “micro aggressions” I endured as a child (not that I ever cared). Once, I was put into someone’s phone contacts as “spicy Indian food”. A friend from church pointed me out in front of a whole group of friends and told them that I don’t speak with an accent and my family assimilated well. 3 generations here in America will do that to a person.

I write all of this to point out that I know what sunlight is talking about when he writes that any mixed child with non-white features (tan, hair color, nose shape, etc.) will be pointed out as foreign. My suspicion is that this phenomenon will decrease as more intermarriage occurs, but it does still happen. What is missing from sunlight’s piece is that mixed ethnic children will have a fluid, reminiscent of code switching self-conception of their ethnicity and it isn’t so clear cut. They don’t need to be taught this. Simply hanging out with different groups will teach them this. Once an Indian in my friend group discovers I share the supremacy of Indus Valley genes with them, I’m one of clique. I’m an ethnic. On the other hand, to the government and any employers, I’m “other” or “mixed” or “not white”. Fluid. Like water. There is no need to be put in a stationary box. I’m all things to all people, depending on what the moment needs.

The magic really happens with the 4th generation. My grandfather married a German. My dad married the daughter of poor white sharecroppers. I married an upper middle class half-Dutch beauty. And my children? They look nothing like me. We speak only Dutch to them at home and if you could drop them in a random school in the Netherlands, they would look like and sound like Duchies. This is assimilation and bleaching in practice. My children will carry a Hindi last name, but they look like Joe and Jane America to everyone who sees them.

Perhaps this is all due to my family’s conversion to Christianity (a most blessed and fortuitous event). The beauty of Christianity is that (practiced correctly) it is a right wing, universal religion able to unite disparate groups, sometimes even in holy matrimony. America was and still is to an extent a Protestant state. Christianity has the unique ability to bring together the Asian, Indian, white, Mexican, and whoever else into the same singles Sunday school every week. I’ve seen it at my old church. Some of those couples get married and then they get blessed with cute mixed babies. Yes, those babies will have to get used to a few snide comments or confusion about “what are you really?” But they will feel American as a remixed, fusion apple pie.

And that is what Walt is getting at. A castizo futurism that takes the best of what America was (broadly Northwestern and Southern European) and combines it with the driven, high IQ immigrants that are coming in and creates something new. A curried or kimchi’d apple pie, if you will. It can be exciting. It is confusing at times. And it takes a few generations for the process to fully bloom, just like the Founders foresaw. sunlight says that he doesn’t see many mixed couples where he lives. I can’t speak for the rest of the country. However, I know many of them here in a large city in the South. A few are neighbors. The birthday parties of the kids have hot dogs AND sushi. It’s fusion. It’s castizo. It’s futurism.

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