#Who sings road to nowhere skin

Both of these interventions have felt like strange paradoxes, simultaneously positioning people like me in and disassociating us from America. I wouldn’t have to be constantly weighing my changing privilege and oppression anytime someone new entered the room if I had just one race, I would always know what role America had assigned me.īut my impulse towards an external definition of race has been complicated recently by two groundbreaking interventions into America’s discussion of race: Isabel Wilkerson’s new book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” and the election of Kamala Harris as Vice President of the United States. While I acknowledge that existing in a liminal space of non-whiteness is an immense privilege, somedays it feels like if someone could assign me to just one race, I would always know the conditions of life I would have to be living under.

Maybe this impulse to have people define my race, to have people definitively say who I am, comes from my own failures of creating my own coherent identity. Even when actors play characters who are explicitly racially ambiguous, like James Cusati-Moyer’s role in “Slave Play,” I still find myself frantically scrolling through the actor’s Wikipedia page, trying to find their ethnicity. When I see Conrad Ricamora performing in musicals as both Filipino in “Here Lies Love” and Chinese in “Soft Power,” it’s hard for me to assign him to any nationality. When I watch Darren Criss and Keanu Reeves on my television screen, I have the faintest sense that they’re like me, but when their hair is slicked back, they pass as white. When I saw Phillipa Soo in “Hamilton” from the very back row of the Richard Rodgers Theater, I tried to discern if she was a person of color like the darker-skinned cast mates around her before submitting to the fact that I couldn’t tell. This is particularly true with mixed, white-Asian actors. I’ve tried to imagine how audience members might racially profile me so many times because I’ve already played this game: I myself have been the audience member trying fruitlessly to assign races to actors whom I have seen on the stage. They responded tan, yellow, olive, brown. One time, during an immersive theater piece, I asked people to assign a color to my skin. It’s as if knowing my race is a prerequisite for being attractive, and if I reveal myself to be Asian I will suddenly be emasculated. “Where do you come from?” is the most frequent question I get on dating apps, as if I will only be attractive when made legible to their preconceived racial preferences. Would it be rude of me to explain that I’m the descendent of a country that was colonized by both Spain and America? I feel most distant from myself when people come up to me speaking Spanish, assuming I’m either Mexican or Hispanic. But I also feel most white when I fall between the softer, darker shades of groups at Wesleyan like Asian American Student Collective (AASC) or Pinoy (the Filipino group on campus). I feel most Asian when I am thrown against the sharp white background of my hometown of Alexandria, Va.

#Who sings road to nowhere skin

Depending on the time of day or how far it is into the summer, my skin color changes, ripening and paling with the passage of time. Being the son of a white father and a Filipina mother, I carry around many racial identities and labels in my being simultaneously: white, Asian, “Wasian,” Filipino, Asian American, biracial, hapa, mixed. Maybe some people further back in the audience wouldn’t be able to tell, and in their frustration would vote for “racially ambiguous.” And maybe those in the very back row of the mezzanine would barely be able to distinguish my features and assume from my radiating epidermis that I’m white.

Maybe some people in the orchestra would see my brown eyes squinting under the light and assume that I’m Asian.

Maybe some audience members in the front rows would see the thick black mesh of my hair and assume that I’m either Latino or Middle Eastern. Then, after running backstage, people would have to vote on what race I am. For only a brief moment, a bright spotlight would pulse down from over my head, false sunlight illuminating every pore of my body. I imagine myself walking out onto a Broadway stage in front of a packed audience. The easiest way to find answers to this question would be a theatrical confrontation, an experiment that I’ve rehearsed too many times in my head. Content Warning: This article contains references to racism and suicide.įor all of my life, I have wondered what race people assign to me when they see me for the first time.