Half-Asian? Half-Valid?: An Autoethnographic Account of the Situational Mixed-race Experience

This autoethnographic study uses the researcher’s personal racialized experiences to illuminate the complexities of being mixed-race. Understanding one’s own identity is crucial to positioning oneself in the world and experiencing one’s surroundings. For mixed-race individuals, understanding oneself becomes more difficult and nuanced as compared to monoracial groups. The mixed experience is marked with struggles with racial ambiguity, rejection from racial communities, and racial performativity. Feelings, including invalidation, self-doubt, discrimination, and longing for community often arise, prompting an investigation as to what it feels like to carry a mixed-race identity. This study contributes to the field of race and identity studies, exploring mixed-race identity from a first-hand perspective. Through three main frames of analysis: 1) perception of mixed-race by others, 2) internalization of invalidity, and 3) understanding the contextuality of the mixed identity, this paper delves into how identity is constructed uniquely for mixed-race individuals. Findings from this paper provide insight to the situational experience of mixed-race individuals.