What are you? Journalism’s impact on complex identities

I have said the words “imperialism” and “colonialism” more in the past 10 months than I have in my entire life before.

One of my goals as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford was to explore second generation and complex identities as they relate to journalism. As part of that I took several classes on identity, Asian American communities and history, in addition to whatever speakers and workshops I could wander into.

I am part of this group, but these numbers to underline why this demographic is important: According to the US Census, people who said they were multiracial increased in 2020 for every age category by over 164%, with 32.5% under the age of 18 and 37.6% from ages 18–44. By 2045, people of color will be more than half of the population of the United States. As of 2023, 34% of the US Asian American population is second generation. The number is the same for the second generation Latine population.

I also embarked on needfinding interviews, to see what people in this demographic wanted and needed in terms of news and information. I discovered much about myself, and a few themes came up.

I’ll detail these four, but there are many others I’ve neglected in the name of brevity (click to go to that section):

Our primary and secondary identities are context specific ||| The words we use don’t matter, but journalism fails to describe people correctly ||| Dichotomies are rampant ||| Representation is only the first step

What I learned about myself

I have struggled with my identity for years. There were few people of color, let alone Vietnamese or other Asians, in the suburb I grew up in. I’ve endured being called a chink, told that I speak English really well, and numerous microaggressions. Between all that lies a secret I held closely: I did not know anything about Asian American history. I knew the name Vincent Chin, but not the story. I understood there were Chinese in the 1800s who built railroads and Japanese Americans were incarcerated. I knew of the United States’ racism and systemic dysfunction, but I did not deeply understand it.

Despite this, I was frequently asked to do DEI work. This isn’t uncommon for leaders of color. Because we are leaders and are of color, who made it through the glass/bamboo ceiling, we must be experts in DEI, and we’re expected to not only know how to, but also to want to do the work of creating inclusive work cultures. What I knew was that I only went into leadership to help ensure that some of the things that happened to me wouldn’t happen to others. No one gave me training. For better or worse, my instruction was my own experience and that of others.

Of late, I’ve been trying to interrogate my own beliefs and actions. And I’ve been working on undoing some of them. I’m trying to make fewer assumptions about people, and looking through the lens of solidarity (strife between communities has as much to do with ingrained racism as it does systems pitting us against each other) and history (the kind that wasn’t taught in school).

Having the space allowed me to realize how deeply ingrained the structure of racism was, even in my own mind. The burnout that led me to JSK was partially fueled by the weight of expectation: that Asians are the model minority so I must be perfect; that I bear the emotional weight of all journalists of color I was trying to support; that any possible failure would be weaponized against me and others. These came from good intentions, but created an inability for me to see myself for who I am, instead I only saw what people wanted me to be. Unraveling this has been a process, and will likely continue to be one for the rest of my life.

What I learned from others

I define this group as those who are second generation (children of immigrants) or have complex, intersecting identities such as 1.5 generation (immigrated as children) or multi-racial. I set out to interview people who embodied this demographic or those who had spent time studying it. I interviewed about 9 people: parents, writers, people who were multi-racial, therapists who specialize in children of immigrants, creators like artists and game designers, young people attending school in the US and professors who teach subjects related to race and equity.

The identities we use and name are context specific

Part of the interview was an exercise where I asked people what words they’d use to introduce themselves if we have just met at a party. I noted primary identities and secondary identities, then asked each person why they listed what they did and what was behind the order of listing.

Race was not always in the first ring. Nor was profession. But it was very clear how we talk about ourselves indicates what we value most and the situation we are in.

“​​Context matters in identity, especially for people who have hyphens,” said artist Sami See. For example, if they were in their mother country, then there was no reason to list their ethnicity.

Part of what is deemed an appropriate identity to name also has to do with power. The internal calculation for what is the right identity to claim and when is a byproduct of oppression.

“You’re already starting with certain power imbalances, certain voices, certain people that are given much more permission than others to be whole, to be complete, to be complex. Right? Like nobody would think like, oh, white women are exactly the same… You’re allowed to be full individuals,” said Pauline Yeghnazar Peck, a trauma-informed psychologist and speaker who specializes in working with the children of immigrants.

Phenotypes are not ethnicity, which is not nationality, which is not culture, which is not language

Phenotypes are visible characteristics (like skin color). Ethnicity is the culture or group dynamic you grew up in. Race is a constructed grouping of people with similar backgrounds or phenotypes. Culture can transcend ethnicity. Language is used as a gauge of whether a person is “enough” of a group to claim that identity. Most people, including myself, often conflate one descriptor with another.

When race and other descriptors came up, most people were far more specific than journalists ever allude to. They believed journalists (and society) often made them choose a single descriptor instead of accepting multitudes. Just like the gender spectrum, the people I spoke to did not believe that journalists cared about any identity that is not obvious or singular.

I spoke to predominantly Latino and Asian American people, and it was rare they used either exact descriptor. Instead it was Filipino American. Hapa. Vietnamese refugee. Mexican American. Mostly, the specifics were used because it was a conversation between two people of color, but also, people who were phenotypically ambiguous felt they had to name their background to claim (or not claim) their identity.

Indigenous heritage was specifically named in some conversations, particularly when that person was not an enrolled member. “One drop” rules and their ingrained mentality led to people feeling excluded from their own heritage. A person who presented more white than Mexican American was loathe to correct people who made assumptions on race due to melanin. The western world privileges a lighter skin color, and oppresses those who do not fit into the ideal of white.

Those who did not speak the language associated with their heritage also juggled whether to even claim their heritage. I know many people like this, because there is a sense of shame around not being able to speak. My Vietnamese is not strong, leading me to shy away from calling myself fluent in the past, as if fluency is only determined by a high school language test.

In all of these cases, people felt constricted by what is “enough” or the right characteristics to identify under a particular race, while acknowledging it’s a constructed social stratification.

Cards (including my own) from a audience response to aKehinde Wiley exhibit at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco. (October 2023)

Dichotomies are rampant: Victims or villains, never just a person

I found in my conversations that the black-and-white portrayal of people as immigrants or generations-old groups (the dichotomy that led me to this topic) was not the only dichotomy in this world.

There are villains and victims. An example cited was Mexican Americans can be poor, border-crossing migrant families, or gangsters, rarely in between. When this was mentioned I immediately recalled learning at my previous job that most front pages only feature Black Americans in photos as sports stars, crying or criminals. In my own community, people assume any Vietnamese American came from “boat people,” which is not true for my family.

Exceptionalism and pity was another dichotomy that was noticeable to those I interviewed. A woman in the gaming industry said she would be happy “seeing an executive doing the work” with a similar racial background, but others noted too much coverage is centered on cultural holidays. We often publish stories about success stories to celebrate a community, but positive stereotypes, like the model minority myth, also have their drawbacks.

“If you create such a positive stereotype, that’s also bad, because then it puts so much pressure on kids,” Hien Do, a professor at San Jose State and Stanford University, told me. “If all that you see is like, here’s a successful professor, here is a successful dentist, those kids go, ‘oh my God, I’m just doomed because I can never become one of those people.’”

These dichotomies led some people I spoke to unsubscribing from the news. Despite recognizing that change is happening in journalism, they felt like it was not happening fast enough. The damage to their perception of identity was often already done at a young age. Combine that with the massive overflow of information, another dichotomy was created: The few places that get it right (generally not mainstream media) vs the rest of media, who only play to clicks and would rather publish recipes and animal stories.

Representation is only the first step

Where do we even go from here? In a 500-word breaking news story, how can we pay homage to the complexity of intersecting identities?

One conversation has stuck with me. It was with someone who identified as mixed race, with an Asian American background. We spoke for about 30 minutes, talking about identity, journalism, and noted several people in our conversation (authors, artists, journalists). We both knew all the names we mentioned. All of them. At the end of the interview I asked him how journalism could even attempt to turn around and start deeply representing Asian American identity. He said, in the past 30 minutes, we’ve listed many names. You and I just met, he said, yet we both know all of these people, either personally or by reputation.

That’s the problem. There cannot only be one columnist. There should be so many that we can’t remember them all. There cannot only be a single Juneteenth story. A single week spent in low-income housing or at a immigration detention center. Black and Latine communities have other joys, and other issues. A trans athlete is far more than just a trans athlete.

“Under white supremacy, it’s particularly frustrating because we don’t get to be multitudes,” one person said.

We are multitudes, all of us. The stories journalism tells should highlight those multitudes, without tokenizing.

When we properly tell stories of multitudes within the US (or wherever we live) that means we are the voice of all the people we seek to serve through storytelling and create a sense of belonging in our communities. Telling these stories cannot and should not be up to a single “race reporter” or the few journalists of color we’ve managed to hire and retain. It is not a checkbox of whether you’ve covered the Latine community in the past 3 months. Our goal should be to strive to represent all the identities our communities contain, in every story. This was so obvious to me, and what I’ve always strived for, but the people I spoke to said a large portion of the media cannot get this simple solution right: Portray the whole of your communities with even representation for all identities and acknowledgement of the systemic imbalances that exist.

Almost everyone I spoke to agreed that this simple solution is likely going to be the hardest for journalism. We agreed that representation within newsrooms, particularly newsroom leadership, is key. Stories focusing on those communities are important. But representation is not a quota, or a magic percentage of coverage. No one said please only cover Black joy. They all said please cover us like we belong in your community, and deserve to have our stories told, even the mundane. Because we do belong, and it is our community.

Acknowledgements and next steps

The agency to pursue my thoughts to the end, without the interruption of daily news, is the best thing JSK gave me. JSK Fellow Tiffany Walden, over the course of many car rides and glasses of wine, fleshed out the depths of racism with me and taught me about things like No Sabo kids — those who have Hispanic heritage, but are not fluent in Spanish. Other fellows and I shared our own histories, our families and journeys to where we are today. JSK Fellows Araceli Gomez Aldana, Kaveh Waddell and I would speak frequently about language, our proficiency (or lack thereof), our parents and how that all played into who we are today. I would like to list them all; every single fellow had some role in encouraging and progressing my research.

I’m also appreciative of JSK staff and Stanford professors who had a coffee, lunch, or chat with me. The JSK directors — Dawn, Pam and Alberto — were a supportive backbone. Thomas Jimenez, Jonathan Rosa, Hien Do, Tran Ha and Jay Hamilton were lovely thought partners as I imagined this project, and what it might become. A number of classes, many within Stanford’s Comparative Studies on Race and Ethnicity department, gave me brain food and endless current research to read and scholars to speak to.

There were many more than the nine interviews mentioned. Casual conversations after class, thoughts probed during workshops, and discussions about current research with more people than I can count contributed. I hold those close, with gratitude.

This line of thought started about a decade ago, and it will continue to be part of what I explore within journalism. Beyond storytelling, I believe this demographic is a valuable, growing market and community to build and support with journalism, but someone has to take the first step.