About White

The “One Asian” Photobomb

“I’m all mixed up,” my daughter announces. I’ve been trying to get her to say she’s “Viet-Cajun” or “mixed” when someone asks, but this is what she prefers to say when someone inquires what she is. I can’t claim what she’s saying is inaccurate, but every time she does say it, I feel like we are the mixed up ones, imposing racial classifications and all the societal muck that goes along with them, on an innocent child.

Yet if it seems surprising that someone would ask her that, wondering what she is as if she’s some kind of adorable breed of dog, then welcome to life as part of a mixed family, where physical resemblance and “background” regularly become a topic of discussion.

Most of the time it’s well-meaning, and I don’t get too bent out of shape about it, even if I want my kids to know they are more than their physical features. That a kind heart is worth a million times more than a beautiful visage.

People are curious about these things. They want to know. And it isn’t just people of one race or another. You learn (if you didn’t know already) that nearly everybody has racialized beliefs and physical feature preferences, and most will let you and your kid know exactly what those are, often in the form of a compliment, but sometimes with criticism, or the act of quietly overlooking.

It can be difficult, as a parent, to navigate. I hope I’m doing the right thing. I often second guess myself after the fact.

Even with seemingly silly things, like the messages I send in the course of trying to keep them safe while they try their hand at dangerous play, jokingly-but-not-jokingly telling them “I brought you into this world perfect, now don’t mess it up!”

Of course we all want to think our kids are sheer perfection, the most lovely little things that existed. The best of us.

So when other people admire my children, as a proud Momma, I also love to see that too.

But I have had to learn terms I didn’t know existed. Like double-eyelid, which means your upper eyelid has a crease in it. Apparently this feature is so desirable that a large number of Asian women get double eyelid plastic surgery. Meanwhile, my mother in law is proud that her and much of her family come by it naturally. So much so that when my first daughter was born and we texted her some initial baby pictures, she called up my husband and amidst all the usual congratulations, asked him “she has the double eyelid?” As I saw him answer yes, without even having to look down and check the baby, I realized that this wasn’t something I’d noticed, despite the fact that I’d been staring in loving awe at this tiny human we’d created for a few hours already. I was initially surprised that he did see this, but now I know it is because for white people, the double eyelid is all there is, so there’s not even a word for it. Instead we might talk about whether our eyes are hooded (like mine) or deep set, or other things like that. And we may be more likely to notice and categorize those differentiating features.

One of the more amusing things I’ve since learned is that this differentiation paints disparate pictures to various cultures. White people usually think my mixed kids look mostly Asian, and Asian people usually think my mixed kids look mostly white, but from either side many people seem to find them very beautiful. There is sort of a wow factor in seeing rarer combinations of features, like my son’s hair, which has my husband’s thick and straight Asian texture, but my reddish blonde color.

Of course I’d like to think that it’s attractive because mixing up genetics is good for human health, and we are meant to do so. I also find it comforting to imagine that my kids have a natural robustness that they might not have if I’d stayed in Louisiana among my own roots and had babies with some Cajun guy named Thibodaux who lives in Thibodaux. But we really don’t know. At least on an individual scale. Genetics are capricious. And, like I tell my kids, people come in all shapes and sizes, and all of them deserve respect.

Unfortunately this is still something of a countercultural message. One that is belied by all kinds of things, like our nation’s history of slavery, Japanese internment, the Chinese exclusion act, and many many small and large acts of terrorism, past and present, stochastic and otherwise.

I remember when, before the most recent national election, you had trump and JD Vance saying “they’re eating the pets.” I laughed about the ridiculousness of it and then asked my husband “what do you think would happen if you went out wearing a shirt that said ‘I’m eating the pets’?”

He’s usually very irreverent about these things, what I assume to be a coping mechanism as much as a personality trait, but he looked at me blankly like I was an idiot and said “are you trying to get me injured?”

Then we watched those same people who said the eating the pets stuff get elected, and as soon as they could, they shipped a bunch of brown people off to horrific prisons, and have made it quite clear that they’d like to send many many more. As I write this, they’re insulting Somali immigrants, including second generation ones, and an elected member of Congress, who they have said, needs to go back where she came from.

What I am unfortunately sure of is that more mixed kids like mine won’t cure this sort of racism. Won’t make people like that decide they belong here and should be treated well. After all, while JD Vance is saying this, he has mixed kids of his own.

What you get instead is colorism. It’s still a whiter-is-better system. Where we prioritize certain looks and cultural identities and don’t get taught to respect and include everybody.

It can start off seemingly innocent and even positive, but the bad side is always there.

“She’s got a high nose,” one of my Asian mom friends helpfully volunteers about my daughter. “Very pretty.” I ask what a high nose is and learn it’s the kind I have. What I’d call a French nose.

I remember sitting around a room with my siblings several years back and talking about targeted ads on social media. I mentioned that a Jamaican friend said she was getting ads for ethnic rhinoplasties, and that this is racist. Most of my family just blinked at me, and then one of them said “no, if you don’t want a nose job, just don’t get a nose job, you know?”

But in my family we all have that high nose. That French nose. The one other people might go under the knife to get. We aren’t the ones getting ads suggesting we change our noses, you know?

This isn’t the kind of thing that makes someone want to apologize for being white, à la JD Vance’s most recent comment reassuring us we don’t have to, but if you love someone of color the disparity suddenly becomes visible and painful.

The idea that my husband’s nose (which is a very nice nose) may be seen as less attractive than mine, and that it is less prioritized, to where it’s harder for him to go into a store and find glasses that fit the bridge of his nose well, bothers me. And I do want to say “I’m sorry for this, it’s wrong.”

Because exclusion hurts. Being ignored hurts. Being treated as less-than hurts. Being lied about hurts. Even, or especially, when it’s so normalized that it’s just the way things are.

This past week I learned my daughter had had an incident involving racism at school. But unlike how I imagined it might eventually go down, she wasn’t the one on the receiving end. She was the one who had said a mean thing to a schoolmate in the hall, overheard by a teacher. She’d announced she didn’t like the girl’s dark skin.

I asked her about it after school. She said “yeah, I don’t like dark skin because it’s boring.”

I sent an email to her teacher that evening, letting her know that I’d talked to my kid, and would talk to her more, explaining a bit about what racism is, and letting her know her words were hurtful and she needed to apologize.

Her teacher wrote back, a kind note, talking about the context of kids this age working on self-regulation, and saying that some information about MLK is going to be included in January’s curriculum.

Often when kids say this sort of stuff, I wonder what’s being said by the parents at home. But it’s not just at home where they’re learning. My daughter knew darker skin meant more melanin before she started school. But now she is clearly processing something else.

“We are all the same color,” she said to me that same day, meaning our family. “No,” I said, “we are not. I have freckles.”

“Is Dad darker than us or lighter than us? I think Dad is lighter than us?” my daughter asks me. “Well, he’s lighter in winter, when he doesn’t get a lot of sun, and more brown in the summer” I respond.

I look over at my husband, who is quietly listening, offering me no help at all. Afterwards I ask him if I handled it ok. “Yeah, you did fine” he says. I am both relieved and annoyed, as it felt all on me, and I know he’d be quick to tell me if he thought I didn’t.

All this to say that with a mixed family, these issues are complex and crop up randomly and often, but I’m trying my best to pass good values down to the next generation. Better concepts than I was raised with.

It is within this context that I saw a video put out by Quincy’s city government. Or I should say the mayor’s office, because I believe there needs to be administrative distinctions drawn, as his longstanding political machine gets broken up, and with the recent local election, people who work for the city hopefully not feeling as pressured to go along with certain problematic initiatives in order to get along.

So the mayor’s office put out this retrospective end-of-year video entitled “2025,” mostly featuring the Quincy 400 festivities. But if you didn’t know any better, you’d see this set of clips, set to Taylor Swift’s new song “Opalite,” and get the impression that Quincy is in fact very opa-light, as in a pale skin color sort of way.

The video is just chock full of white people having tons of fun. Peroxide blondes jumping up and down in cowboy hats at a free (i.e. taxpayer-provided) Darius Rucker concert, moms smiling at a book signing, and with their kids, posing in front of the one hot air balloon that ended up getting into the sky despite high winds grounding the others.

I was at that hot air balloon festival, with my three mixed kids, hanging out with a family we know that’s Syrian and Turkish and whose curly-haired little son adores my daughter, feelings between them that are clearly mutual.

But families like mine and theirs were not reflected anywhere in the official Quincy 2025 video.

You’d never know from this government-issued highlight reel that the city is only half white (about 55% on the census). You’d be even more shocked to discover that this place is about 30% Asian officially, (and probably closer to 40% IRL), because there literally was only one Asian person visible in this whole video. It was a friend I recognized, a Vietnamese woman named Thuy, owner of the Medilush Spa and wife of the newly-elected school committee member Tom Leung. Thuy was standing behind the mayor and waving in a brief clip.

What does it say about us that the only people of color included in an official city-issued and taxpayer-funded year-end recap video are a hired country music musician from out of state, and a local resident and business owner essentially photobombing the mayor?

“Sounds about white” my husband says when I show him the video. He grew up here and is used to Quincy being like this. Only thirty years ago, it actually was a pretty white place.

Did the mayor’s office decide, like my five year old in the hallway, that brown skin was simply too boring to feature? Are they stuck on what Quincy used to be rather than what it is now?Could they perhaps not find enough footage, in a city that’s at least a third Asian, of more than one Asian person out having fun?

I do not believe we ever have to apologize for being white. Or being light-skinned. Or “mixed up.” Or any of our physical attributes, which we didn’t ask to inherit anymore than anyone else did. And indeed I’ve never had anyone in my life asking me to. But we do need to apologize if we act like jerks about it. If we go around openly or tacitly assuming or behaving like we are better-than. Or the only ones that matter. If we exclude, diminish, and erase. If we conduct ourselves in ways that are ugly.

And so I’d like to say the same thing to this city that I say to my own children. And it is that we are lucky to have multiple cultures here. We are lucky to know people from many different places and who can make many different kinds of food. We are lucky to have a wide circle of friends and be counted as a friend by people whose families come from all over the world. And we need to remember that being a good friend to all of our friends and neighbors is a lot more important than showing off a pretty face.