Not Your Post-Racial Future: Why Interracial Families Need to Talk About Race

By Sophie Steains



I have this memory that’s been troubling me for a while.

I was 18 and out in Kings Cross for the night. As I was waiting to order at the bar, a man came up and offered to buy me a drink. He was in his early 30s or so, white, built. He told me it was his birthday and that he wanted to celebrate. I knew he was coming on to me, but I was young and naïve, so I let him do it. Anyway, the lady at the bar made up this special blue birthday cocktail for him. She set it on fire, everyone around us cheered. I couldn’t help but join in on the celebration too. But then, as the man motioned to pay, I noticed a photograph tucked into the front pocket of his wallet. It was a young, beautiful Asian woman holding a Eurasian baby. My blood ran cold.

The reason why this memory troubles me is not because of the moment itself. Trust me, I’ve had many more like these over the years. It’s the silence that gets to me. Not once in my life has this side of my interracial experience been brought out into the open. Not in any books, interviews, online rants on ‘yellow fever,’ and never in the home. A couple years ago, when I attended a group counseling session for half-Asian students, a girl suggested “does my dad have yellow fever?” and we all laughed. We laughed, not because the question was preposterous, but because we knew we would never, ever ask.

Thinking back to that moment in Kings Cross, five years later, I’m left to wonder about the baby and its mother, and the way our interracial stories momentarily intertwined that night. By now, the details of the mother’s face are blurry, but the outline of her body is there. The baby’s smiling face could be something I added in hindsight, I can’t tell anymore. More than anything, I wonder about that baby. It must be 8 or 9 now. I think about whether it’s parents are still together. What language it speaks. Whether it spends Christmas with dad’s family or mum’s.

When I see chubby-faced Eurasian children running around my neighbourhood - the rapidly gentrifying suburb of Marrickville - I can’t help but wonder about them too. Eurasian children seem to be popping up in Marrickville as frequently as its houses are being auctioned off for seven figure prices. I wonder which parent has the better paying job? Which parent gets treated better in public? Which parent does the cooking, and what food do they cook? Who is in charge of the radio in the car? All these little power-plays that influenced how I felt about my own Asian-ness and my own White-ness growing up. I wonder about the girls, how will they cope with being fetishised in clubs? Who will they talk to?

Growing up half-Okinawan and half-white Australian has left me with a lot of these unanswered questions. It’s led me to the belief that our society just isn’t equipped to discuss mixed-race, despite the fact that I’m seeing mixed-race faces everywhere I look today. Despite the fact that mixed-race people existed on this land well before white people were even a blip on the radar. Watching Japanese-Canadian Jeff Chiba Stearns’ documentary “One Big Hapa Family,” I was struck by how much his own reflections mirrored my own:

“After thinking back on some bizarre identity related experiences that I had growing up mixed, I started to wonder if interracial couples ever considered how their marriages might affect their children? I got the sense that my relatives never discussed multiracial identity with their kids. I mean, not once growing up did I tell my parents that I experienced cultural confusion.”

Often when mixed-race identities are discussed today, they are conflated with this idea of our “post-racial future.” A future where race is no longer an issue and everyone looks like Halle Berry. The kinds of people who seem to be the most vocal about mixed-race are the people who claim that, “Everyone is a bit mixed-race” or “I don’t see race, we are beyond it” etc. There is this belief that Love and its mixed-race children will help break down the barriers that have been so doggedly safe-guarded for the past several hundred years. Parents of mixed-race children often believe this too, I’ve heard it coming from their mouths many times.

The problem is, it’s much easier to say “I don’t see race” when you actually belong to a race. Whether you want to believe it or not, your race connects you to your parents, your grandparents, to random people who have nothing to do with you but still share thousands of years of collective history with you purely because you look a bit like them. When a stranger approaches you on the street, they categorise you and you know intuitively what category that is. Maybe you can celebrate your right to your culture without having to question it, or legitimise it, or think about what’s being left out. This is just not the case for a lot of mixed-race people.

For me, mixed-race is a rupture. It’s isolating, it’s confusing. On a good day, you feel great about being unique. You are proud of who you are and you think, “Yes! Today I’m ready to shatter stereotypes! I am complicated and I am proud! Come at me monoracial world, see if I care!” But on a bad day, those very same reasons that make you love yourself can make you feel very, very alone. Sometimes, you do just want to belong. So you start to emphasise one part of you more, you act more x, you speak x language, you invest in x culture. But, inevitably someone casually says something or acts in a certain way that reminds you that no, you’re not really an x, so you’re left back at square one. You’re left with the other parts of you that you left behind. Parts of you that will never be the same again, no matter how hard you try.

I used to have a lot of bad days, but now, after a few years of reading and talking about mixed-race, I have a lot more good than bad. Still, I often wonder about how I can productively use all the time and energy I’ve spent thinking about mixed-race to help others who are having a bad day. More than anything, I want interracial couples to know what they are doing when they decide to have a cute little mixed baby together; to have the tools to sit down and have a meaningful conversation when their child starts to question who they are and why they are being treated differently to them. We need to be resolving imbalances in racial power or tendencies for sexual racism between interracial couples before they are transferred onto their children. Or at the very least, not silencing them with claims that “love conquers all” or “race doesn’t matter anymore.” We need to make parents, teachers, friends, counselors - everyone - aware that mixed-race children aren’t just fractions of other races, but are an entirely different equation.

Anti-racism needs to start in the home, in our most intimate spaces. If we can’t start these conversations with the people we love, then we have a long way to go.

Images sourced from the National Geographic’s “The Changing Face of America” Feature