Theorizing Racial Identities As Social Identitities

“Where do you come from?” is the most frequently asked question that I can read from the puzzlement on people’s faces the moment I enter a classroom. It is also the most common inquiry I hear from curious others who muster enough courage to ask, “What is your ethnicity?” My ethnicity, my nationality, or my place of origin has become a question that almost always arises in every social interaction I have experienced ever since I moved to the United States of America almost four years ago.

Growing up, I never had any doubt or uncertainty what my nationality was. Although I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and had American citizenship, my mother would always tell me that that was only on paper. “You’re Filipino,” is what she would always say to me and I accepted that as my ethnicity. Of course I knew I was mixed, since my father was half-Irish and both of my parents had Spanish and Chinese descent, but it was only in my appearance where that mixture was apparent. In my heart, I believed I was Filipino.

I grew up in the Philippines and lived there for eighteen years and it was a very diverse environment. Seeing people of various skin color, hair texture, and ways of life was an everyday and customary thing to me because, after all, it was all I ever knew as a child. My childhood friends were of different nationalities and my best friend at the time was Japanese. In addition, I went to a private school called International School of Manila (ISM) which enrolled students of many different ethnicities, from Korean to German and Indian to American, and it was never unnatural to be close friends with people who exhibited these different races and cultures. However, being a student in ISM from kindergarten to twelfth grade and even if part of the curriculum was learning various cultures, most of the students were required to speak English. Therefore, it was my first language since it also began with my parents’ instruction.

The Philippines is a country of numerous dialects. My mother came from the north and spoke Ilocano and my father came from the south and spoke Ilonggo and since the only language they knew together was English, that was what I was taught. However, even if English was the language I could speak fluently, I knew that since I lived in the Philippines as well as possessed Filipino blood and heritage, I ought to learn one of its dialects. I grew up in Makati City, where Tagalog was the common language; I was lucky enough to be able to pick it up from television shows, books and magazines, as well as the people I interacted with.

In the Philippines, I was considered a mestiza, which means I was of mixed racial ancestry. In my case, it was Filipino-Irish. However, there were many mestizos and mestizas in the environment I lived in so I never felt out of place or not “one of them”. People treated me the same that they would any other Filipino because they would speak to me in Tagalog and became my friends not based on race but on common interests. However, I soon realized I was naïve in thinking that my appearance, my one fourth Irish blood, did not affect my positionality at all. It became alarmingly apparent with my decision of moving to the United States for college.

I thought that moving to California was not going to be that big a culture shift. After all, it seemed as a diverse environment like the Philippines and the common language was English which I already knew. I couldn’t be more wrong. Although I experienced racism in the Philippines, it was nothing compared to the passion and conviction this society had when it came to the subject of race. Race as well as ethnicity is based on nationality, origin, language, religion, culture, worldview, and shared history. In this society, everyone is organized and categorized into races.

Racialization is part of the processes where racial identities are produced by discourse.  What were once racially unclassified relationships or social practices now have been given racial meanings. Discourse, in this sense, is the conversation, language, and thinking that we have made to associate with race. The big “D” of symbols, tools, values, beliefs, and thinking styles all contributed to the racial classification. In addition to seeing this racialization and experiencing a major culture shock by moving to California, my positionality became far more apparent to me than ever before.

It was always a fun game to me whenever someone asked where I came from and I told them to guess. I got all sorts of answers such as Latina, Middle Eastern, white, and even something as specific as Russian. Among my friends, I was also considered the “white one”. When I answered them that I was born in Hawaii with a heritage of Filipino, Irish, Spanish, and Chinese, though predominantly Filipino, my friends in the Philippines would just say, “Oh, that’s cool! You’re mestiza!” However, when I told people here, I got a completely different reaction. It was more like “Oh, how come your English is so good?” or “Wow, and you don’t even have an accent!” Sometimes I even got reactions of disbelief like “No, you’re not!” or “Really? I never would have guessed!” This made me realize that before I told them of my ethnicity, I was treated in a certain way.

Since I was fair-skinned, had round eyes and a high nose, no one gave a second thought that there was any possibility that I was Asian. White girls would include me in their circle of friends and tell me stories assuming that I shared the same experiences and similar feelings. Then they asked me where I was from. And from there things changed.

With the new knowledge, they interacted with me quite differently. It was as if the moment they heard “Filipino” and that I had lived there for eighteen years that I was some kind of different species. They acted as if I did not know any better, that I was somehow inefficiently educated, or that it was phenomenon that I could speak English fluently. Instead of the acceptance of being of mixed race like I was back home, people I met in California tried to make sense of my race. It felt as if they were trying to classify me in a way that they could understand.

I remember when I used to go to school at Palomar Community College, one of my classmates from my psychology 100 class sat right next to me and we became instant friends. He was white, a really fun person to talk to, and seemed open to new ideas. However, the topic of ethnicity never came up. He never asked me and probably assumed that I was born and raised in Southern California my whole life.

One day, before the lecture started he told me about this one Asian in his Math 15 class. He said that it shocked him how an Asian, who he said are supposedly smart and good with numbers, was enrolled in the lowest math class in college. I told him, “Hey, I’m Filipino and I’m not that great at math either.” He laughed as if it was the funniest thing he ever heard and replied “No, you can’t be.” I maintained that I was and eventually got him to believe me. The next class he acted cold and rather aloof whenever I tried talking to him. Several classes later it got to the point where he completely ignored my existence. At the time, I did not want to believe that it was the knowledge of my being Filipino that turned him away.

In a way, I believe that these instances are examples of how I experienced Du Bois’ “double consciousness” theory. The white girls I interacted with and my friend who talked about his Asian classmate, I saw how they perceived others. After telling them of my ethnicity, I was aware of my own self. I knew there was a danger that I would change my own identity in order to conform to the others’ expectations. However, I set a goal for myself to prove that although we experience more similar things and exhibit more similar emotions than we do with someone who is not part of our race, we are not all the same. 

I knew that not all white people would treat me this way, but because of this certain shift in my positionality from moving to the United States I began to realize more than I did back in the Philippines just how much race is socially constructed. Of course, I was made aware of the literature and the media but I never really experienced that people had this “internalization of the other”. What did that even mean? It was as if my race was so separate from them, somehow beyond their reach. That I was part of the outside, detached from their world.

Since race is looked at as a socially constructed identity, racial categories were determined by social, economic, and political forces rather than by biological determinism. In other words, race was not shaped by a person’s biology or upbringing but by an individual’s social relations.

My experience of living in California made me more aware of how racial identities become our social identities especially with the theory or positionalities, racialization, double-consciousness wrapped up in the world of racial formation.