“My dad and me are Asian. My mom’s not”: Multiracial Identity and Disassociation Before and After the Internet Age |
Interface on the Internet: The Journal of Education, Community, and Values
Berglund Center for Internet Studies
Pacific University of Oregon
Volume 9, Issue 9 (November 2009)
Jenn Hernandez
Growing up, I’d tell people that “my dad and I are Mexican, my mom’s not”. (I suppose my future kids could say something similar: “my dad and I are Asian, my mom’s not”.) Surely, many kids growing up these days could say something like this because, of the total American population, as taken from a 2005 internet-only publication of a population profile by the U.S. Census Bureau, 13.9% identified themselves as being of “two or more races”.
I didn’t necessarily know what this all meant when I was a kid. Later, I learned that my mom is a mix of European heritages, and my dad is of a line that I’m only guessing comes from Mexico a few generations back. We’ve talked about using Ancestry.com or something similar to find out where we really come from, but we’ve never actually followed up on the idea. (I don’t want to pay for a membership, and my dad is too busy anyways. I considered trying out Ancestry.com for this article, but I’m sure I’d forget to cancel after the 14-day free trial and end up having to pay the subscription fee for something I’d probably never use again).
I wondered how others deal with this issue, so I took my query to the Internet, where I can be part of a bigger group that transcends traditional demographics and borders. Out of curiosity, I searched within popular social networking sites—general ones, as well as ones specifically geared towards ethnic groups, such as Asian Avenue, MySpace Latino (which is the regular MySpace in Spanish), and Black Planet–a small survey of what’s out there. All had at least a few groups pertaining to multiracial people and issues…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: Interface on the Internet, Jenn Hernandez