Engaging whiteness within mixedness: multiracial Filipina/o American scholars’ journeys towards belonging

ABSTRACT

This collaborative autoethnography shares the stories of two multiracial Filipina/o American scholars at various points in their academic careers as they engage in a purposeful journey towards unlearning the whiteness of their upbringing and larger society. The enduring legacy of American colonisation of the Philippines grounds the analysis with thematic findings outlining the saliency of (a) reflecting on whiteness, (b) distancing from whiteness, (c) seeking ethnic belonging, (d) claiming (multi)racialised space, and (e) remembering to resist. Taken together, the narratives and findings outline a potential journey towards engaging whiteness within mixedness while demonstrating how even the best intended educational theorising can fall victim to unrecognising the systemic nature of whiteness. Whiteness tends to be invisible in multiracial scholarship; thus our paper urges educators to critically engage whiteness as a construct in relation to multiraciality in order to disrupt white supremacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Multiracial
• Filipino American
• unlearning
• autoethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Though much debate surrounds this term in relation to naming (see for instance Barrett, Hanna, and Palomar 2021), we use Filipinx to refer to broad diasporic communities of/from the Philippines who include queer, trans, and non-binary people, while reserving Filipino or Filipina to refer to individual identities or how previous literature used the terms. Also related to identity labels, we use mixed (race), multiracial, and multiethnic interchangeably, though we know others may use these terms distinctively (see Johnston-Guerrero 2016).

2. Though there are hundreds of languages spoken in the Philippines, our families speak Tagalog (particularly in the U.S.), which we mention here and we encourage readers to further engage how language illustrates complexities of racialisation, colonialism, and immigration (e.g. San Juan 2005). Additionally, we italicise the English translation and not Tagalog words in an attempt to decentre the normative English writing styles that perpetuate foreignness of other languages (e.g., Balcarcel 2018).