If you have Asian-White biracial friends you probably heard from them that they didn’t fit in with white or Asian people. They would say that when they were around white people, they weren’t seen as white enough. Conversely, when they were around Asian people they were told they weren’t Asian enough. According to Psychology Today, this is typical of biracial Asian people. After doing some research, they found that Asian Americans see Asian-White biracial Asians as less Asian and more white. This result turned out to be different than Black-White biracial people where black people claimed them as their own.

Jacqueline M. Chen, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Utah, Nour Kteily of Northwestern University, and Arnold Ho of the University of Michigan set out to examine what caused this effect. And it turns out that it has to do with Asian American’s ideas on racial identity, inequality, and passing.

Racial minorities know that they are at a disadvantage compared to their white counterparts. But the severity can have a big effect on how biracial people are seen. For black people who saw their racial discrimination as severe tended to include biracial blacks as one of them because of the shared hurt. But Asian Americans who believed racial discrimination was severe felt that biracial Asian-Whites were not one of them. On the other hand, Asian Americans who saw racial discrimination as less severe were more accepting of biracial Asians-Whites.

The reason that the Asian Americans who saw more racial discrimination saw biracial Asians as less Asian, was because they felt that biracial Asian-Whites would not want to identify as Asians. This is because they felt that Asian-White biracials could pass as white and would choose to do so.

The Asian American participants were tested on which side biracial Asian-Whites were loyal to. The more Asian Americans felt disadvantaged relative to white people, the more they felt biracial Asian-Whites were loyal to white people. Similarly, even though the black community was more accepting of black-white biracials, that was not the case when they felt that the black-white biracial person can pass for white.

The study concluded by saying that Asian-White biracial people are discriminated against by both Asian and white communities. This forces them to “choose a side” and that can be painful and uncomfortable for the hapa.