M A C V A Y S I A

I call my kid a lot of things. Alisdair Imran. Al. Ali. Ali Imran. Al Imran. AL.I.M. Pocoyo. Little Man. Buddy. In terms of his ethnicity, I suppose he could also be a lot of things. Malaysian. Canadian (not officially, but you know). Malay. Mat Salleh. Malaydian. Canasian. And now I’ve learned a new term: Hapa.

I just learned of the word Hapa (a word from Hawaii that is often used to refer to people of mixed parentage) over at the CBC News site, where there is an immensely interesting article about mixed-race Canadians. The article was written by a Canadian woman whose ancestry is Chinese, Malay, English, and Scottish. Very interesting stuff.

Here’s an interesting quote:

Many mixed-race people describe themselves as having fluid identities, perhaps as a result of constant negotiations between multiple ethnicities, traditions and communities.

And, according to one person who was interviewed for the article:

“More than ever I am coming to appreciate the ambiguity, the looseness. I think it’s actually been very helpful for me. It’s made me more open about learning things, about other cultures, other religious groups[.]“

I was a bit wary with the article’s seeming acceptance of the very idea of race at first. For example, this bit bothered me a little:

Mixed-race people have a long history in North America, starting with the Métis, the product of unions between French traders and native women as far back as the 1700s.

It only bothered me a little, but it bothered me because it requires one to believe in the idea that race is a purely biological thing, a biological fact, which ignores the fact that, because various North American tribes actually differed from one another in varying degrees, the product of a relationship between members of two very different tribal groups could have been considered just as mixed as the product of a relationship between a member of any of those tribes and a European. I think race is indeed a valid concept, one worthy of study, but in a sociocultural way. Yes, biology (genetics, to be precise) plays a part, and because of that, some people could indeed be considered more ‘mixed’ than others: my ancestry and Leen’s are further removed than, say, the various parts of my own ancestry are from one another (Scottish, French, English, Irish, Welsh). However, in some ways, I’m mixed too. Most of us are. The idea that anyone can really be considered racially ‘pure’ is quite laughable.

But then the article made me smile by putting race into proper perspective:

The idea that the world can be divided into a handful of separate races has been debunked by biology, even as the term continues to be used by social scientists. The idea of races gained traction in the 19th century when scientists, including Linneus, were applying classifications to all animals and plants. There were four, then later five, races: red, yellow, black, brown and white.

Today geneticists know that, in reality, humans share approximately 75 per cent of the same genes, and the genes for skin colour and hair type are just a fraction of those. While people do look different around the world, those differences unfold gradually and have more to do with adapting to local geography over time.

“Today we recognize quite strongly that race per se is not a natural biological fact about human variation,” explains leading anthropologist Jonathan Marks. “It’s composed of a negotiation between what we might call natural facts of difference and cultural facts of otherness.

“It’s not that people don’t differ from one another — obviously everybody differs from everybody else except identical twins genetically — but we perceive some differences as significant and other differences as insignificant. And that’s at the heart of the problem of race, that what we decided that the difference between these two people is not very important and the difference between those two people is very important and that’s a very subjective cultural assessment.”

Even though science may not focus on skin colour, we live in a very visual world, and racism still exists, whether it’s based on outdated notions or not. Some sociologists say the idea of race as a social construct is still useful, particularly in fighting racism.

Oh yeah. Anyway, do check out the article. Quite fascinating.

As for Alisdair, I do call him a lot of different things, and I’m sure he’ll have plenty of different labels stuck on him by various people who come into his life. But in the end, while he can’t change who, where, and what he comes from, he—and he alone—will decide who he actually is.