We need to talk about Afro-Asian identity and representation

O racial debate and the question of representativeness are increasingly in evidence. The black movement, in recent years, has been gaining strength and occupying more and more space. However, we also need to talk about biracial or multiracial people, such as afro-asian women🇧🇷

Perhaps the most current media representation of an Afro-Asian person – who is of black and Asian descent – ​​is the tennis player Naomi Osaka🇧🇷 .Daughter of a Haitian father and a Japanese mother, she conquered the US Open 2020 representing Japan and campaigning for Black Lives Matter🇧🇷 Here in Brazil, however, there are a lot of Afro-Asians.

This is the case of the journalist and marketing analyst Phanie Sampaio, 23 years old. The union of her black mother and her Taiwanese father caused her to be born with black and yellow features. However, discovering herself as a biracial person was not an easy task for the young woman.

“It’s something I keep deconstructing and building again, it’s crazy”, he says. “I started to identify myself as a non-white person at 18, when I entered college and had contact with black militancy. I began to understand that I had experiences as a non-white person and I started to get confused about ‘who am I?’”, recalls Phanie.

Part of this is due to the prejudices she experienced and also the lack of a representation that made her understand who she really was. “I heard too much that I was exotic. There’s something I heard in my childhood that said I was ‘Chinese from Paraguay’. So, they saw that I had Asian traits, they knew that my father is Asian, but I didn’t contemplate, in appearance, what they expected from a Chinese person. So, I was the Chinese from Paraguay,” she reports.

The eagerness to understand his identity gave rise to the Course Completion Work (TCC), Belongs to, made in partnership with colleague Carolina Serrano. The idea was to talk about the different racialities that exist in Brazil and criticize the existing gap in data surveys in Brazil. By defining only five categories for race/color 🇧🇷 white, black, brown, yellow and indigenous 🇧🇷the ranking of Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) does not cover biracial and multiracial people like Phanie.

“From the research and interviews we did, something became very clear. Everyone had this feeling that I always had of confusion, of not knowing who you are,” she comments. “For multiracialized people, who are not included in the IBGE spectrum, there is always this confusion of ‘what am I?’, ‘where do I fit in?’, ‘if I am not included in these categories, am I a be social? Are the social actions aimed at me?’”, he asks.

Aisha Sayuri23, is also biracial and prefers to identify as negramarelaa term created by the graduate student in Social Sciences Camilla Yuri (@negramarela), your friend. “Personally, I don’t identify so much with the term ‘Afro-Asian’, because I believe that the African continent is a gigantic place, with a lot of diversity, just like the Asian continent. And my story, the meeting of my family, is very specific in the face of this, ”she explains.

Aisha has a black father and a yellow mother, is the granddaughter of Japanese immigrants and grew up in the largest center of Japanese culture in São Paulo, the Liberdade neighborhood. Even with Asian culture being strong in her upbringing, the young woman has always understood herself as a black woman.

“As I am a black person with slightly darker skin, I have always felt much more, and first, the issues related to my blackness”, he says. “I always put myself as a black person of Japanese descent, because I carry that very strongly in my family’s customs. But in identifying, what came first for me and I always worked a lot more, was the question of being a black woman”, she completes.

Even considering that the IBGE classification is limiting and that it does not cover all multiracialities, Aisha believes that it has important political purposes. “I really need policies aimed at black people, because many of the racial prejudices that I experience in my life refer to my blackness. So, for me it is very important, in terms of public policies, that I mark myself as black in order to strengthen these policies and reap these fruits, ”she opines.

Representativeness and self-esteem

In addition to the gap in the race/color classification system in Brazil, there is still little representation of Afro-Asian or Black people. Little is said about identity in Brazil. In order to understand how much it is still necessary to talk about the subject, when performing a quick internet search on the term, almost no article is found, except for texts on the history of Japanese immigration to Brazil and the African diaspora.

“It was a shock when I started doing research for my TCC and realized that there is almost no material on these issues in a country that is super mixed. We live in a city that has the largest colony of Japanese outside of Japan and there is no study that talks about miscegenation between Asians and blacks, which is another huge population in Brazil”, Phanie is indignant.

In addition, there is still a lack of representation in the media. “The only big name I know is Naomi Osaka, really,” says Aisha. “I think there is a lack of knowledge of the origin of these people, who is really negramarela and who really combines these two racial identities. I think it’s something that I see is expanding, but I found much more representativeness in the everyday people that I was meeting, “she reports.

It is to be imagined that due to these gaps, both institutional and 🇧🇷 in the sense that there is still no classification that covers all existing racialities 🇧🇷 how much representation, the consequence is felt in the self-esteem of biracial people.

Phanie, for much of her adolescence, in an attempt to mask the features that revealed her black and Taiwanese ancestry, straightened her hair and did not leave the house without makeup. “I always thickened my eyebrows, made them darker, because that’s one of the characteristics that I have from my Asian part, my eyebrows are a little sparse. And I never went out without mascara, because my eyelashes also have this Asian feature, they are a little thinner and smaller, ”she explains.

As for Aisha, because she always understood herself as a black woman, her experience was different. “I never had much difficulty finding myself in this blackness environment. Of course, a lot of representations of black people are lacking in the media, so this is a bigger problem that many racialities face and it ends up shaping the perceptions that we have. Precisely because of this lack of representation, I was never bombarded with a negative image of being a black person, as there is with black people in the media”, she opines.

Union of forces and alliances of movements

It is also to be imagined that, because they have two racialities in their phenotypes, black people, or Afro-Asians, find it difficult to find themselves in racial movements, such as the black movement and the yellow movement.

“Within the yellow community, there is a difficulty in recognizing that there are black people, so many times I am not immediately recognized as part of that community. In the black community, I see that, sometimes, people do not pay attention to the issue of yellow people”, opines Aisha. “I think they are processes that are occurring in parallel ways: to denaturalize that, in the yellow community, black people cannot be part of it; to begin to reflect on the role and potential alliances and everything involving racial prejudice against yellow people that happens within the black community.”

Phanie shares the thought that an alliance between the yellow and black movements to debate issues of raciality is possible. “I see the yellow movement giving a lot of strength to the black movement. There are many yellow people using a bit of the voice they have within their own militancy to raise issues that belong to the black movement,” she says.

Of course, we cannot help thinking that these are different experiences and demands. “The structural racism of black people is very different from the racism that a yellow person suffers. But, perhaps, in the future, this union can make these guidelines cross and the people who are at the crossroads, who are Afro-Asians, manage to take this space for debate. Because something that often happens is biracial people try to join one of these movements and feel excluded, for some reason, and simply exclude themselves from all debates”, opines the journalist.

Both young women affirm: it is necessary that, more and more, black people, or Afro-Asians, use their voices to claim their identities, raising debates. “We need to stop thinking that it’s just white and black. We have indigenous, yellow, black-yellow, black-African, black-Indian, there is a diverse range of people who are claiming their racial place here. It is increasingly important to show people that we exist”, points out Aisha.

“I think this has to come out of us. There is no one else who can do something for us other than ourselves,” says Phanie. “So, I think the only way out is for us to start taking spaces, which are not necessarily those of other movements, but to get together and start sharing our issues and, who knows, creating our own militancy, our movement space racial. Because it is different from these two, it cannot be the same, because they are very different experiences. The only way out is to start raising our voice and raise our little hand to see if someone looks at the other in the crowd – if they find themselves and start talking about us, ”she concludes.

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