The Confidence of the Wasians to Show off Who They are is a Privilege

"We're Wasians! Of course we..." The formula is so familiar to regular purveyors of social media trends that it is almost a comic trope by now. People of a particular ethnicity would gather snippets of their daily routines, confidently proclaiming them, often aligned with stereotypes, which defined their cultural identity. But the last iteration eschews the casual banter of wearing indoor slippers and using chopsticks for something a bit more subtle. What if two cultures, one white and one Asian, clash in everyday life, and the conflict defines identity?

For decades, Asia has frowned upon ethnic mixing as a sign of cultural impurity. Even today, Japanese conservatives seek to drive home the idea that the country's increasing number of halves (ハーフ) are essentially less Japanese than the "full-blooded," codifying the unwritten norm that they logically should be less influential in speaking out about what Japanese society ought to look like. In this environment of sometimes outright hostility, it is brave even for the Wasians to speak out in pride about their "impurity," much less flaunt it in social media posts designed to go viral.

But ironically, as the Wasians belatedly jump on the "Of course we..." bandwagon, they only deepen the conversation among these conservatives about how they let the white half of their blood shine brighter than the Asian half. Recently, a Japanese girl's photo went viral when she posted herself surrounded by hundreds of classmates at her graduation ceremony, but with the faces of every single person in the photo, except hers, obscured by emojis. Netizens commented on the sheer hours she must have taken to respect the privacy of her peers, given just how many of them they were in the background.

Beyond the virality of the photo among non-Japanese viewers is the implicit confusion as to why the girl, and Japanese people in general, take such a dim view of even posting the facial features of someone else. Of course, the fear of violating privacy laws plays a role, but compliance may be more cultural. Even as more Asians become comfortable with sharing their faces on social media, many continue to believe the action to be a personal decision, with the individuals making sacrifices for anonymity in exchange for a however remote shot at fame.

While surely plenty of Wasians care about privacy too, the idiosyncrasies of the Western internet, and the fact that the "Of course we..." videos are almost exclusively done in English, entrench the belief that the Wasians are more culturally white than they are biologically. As they show off their personal habits in public spaces with many an unobscured face in the background, the full-blooded Asians watching from Asia become even more convinced that Wasians' affinity for Asianness, like the stereotypes they convey, is but skin-deep.

Perhaps even more saddening, as Wasians are evaluated for the balance between white and Asian, a whole swath of mixed-bloods are ignored. Wasians may be proud that they can laugh at the conflict between their two halves in lighthearted ways, but can what about the mixes of other races? One can imagine a half-black, half-white person courting controversy for saying that she identifies as neither fully black nor white, with plenty of historical baggage they cannot just easily laugh off. And the anti-black sentiment in Asia is enough to not even make "Basians" a term at all.

People speak of being able to confidently speak up for diversity as courage. But these unsavory realities show that it is not even far-fetched to call it a privilege. Wasians on social media may speak of personal struggles. But the fact that they can speak about them publicly means that their general social environment is accepting enough that they do not face the threat of social ostracization for not properly self-censoring their concerns. The same could not be said for the Basian or some Japanese girl who did not obscure others' faces on social media posts.

People of mixed races did not choose to be born that way. Whether or not they can confidently proclaim their identities, the identities themselves cannot change. But sometimes social expectations that certain identities come from certain behaviors are so strong that many are forced to conform to those expectations or hide their identities altogether. Clearly, Wasians are in a comfortable enough position that those social expectations are not debilitating but fodder for jokes. But the same cannot be said for others, who'd pay a much higher price for publicized confidence.