been called a Heinz 57 and for those of
you who don’t know what that is a Heinz
57 is a mess us up thing now before you
try to make this into a science fiction
double feature I should tell you I’m
multiracial now growing up multiracial
and San Francisco was by no means
groundbreaking in fact compared to some
of my friends I was fairly homogenous
but still as someone who is multiracial
you try to find your place in the sky
and where you belong in all of this so I
went where anybody would have gone the
dictionary and this is what I got
identity state of being I don’t know
about you but I didn’t know what to do
with state of being so going into
college I had this idea that identity
meant it was my state of being and that
became a little bit more complicated
when I would tell people my racial
identity of german irish Spanish and
Native American which is a completely
dumbed down version of it but we don’t
have time to tell the whole story and I
would hear things like well what are you
more of or you can’t be all of those
things or your American because your
grandparents were born here and this
idea that you could only be one or the
other or more of one compared to the
other really push me to find out what
identity was so identity is not just my
racial identity but it also includes
your personality your religion your
sexual orientation where you’re from
what you really think makes up your
state of being so Who am I well I’m a
fourth-generation San Franciscan I’m
Catholic I am as of may going to be
college-educated I am a sister of Delta
Rho Delta I am strong will to a point
and I am a foodie I literally love food
I will do anything for food and so you
take this combined with my racial
identity and you have this giant
snowball going on and what does that
mean in the big
term of this because I’m not the only
one like this in fact there are more
people who are more mix than I am so
picture this 2002 is the first time in
the census multiracial people are
allowed to put more than one race and
this doesn’t sound like a big deal but
this is a big deal for us because for
the first time we don’t have to decide
what we’re more of but recently a pew
research study said that out of 21,000
American sampled only fifty six percent
of those who are multiracial felt proud
of one or more of their backgrounds and
when you think of fifty-six percent of
21,000 and then the remainder of that
that’s not quite enough okay one out of
four people have had people come up to
them and guess what their ethnicity is
or tell them what they look more of and
as someone that’s multiracial that’s
really annoying furthermore over 60 over
sixty percent of people have been the
butt of racial slurs or racial jokes now
you might think with this information by
2060 our population of multiracial
individuals is thought to triple that
our approach to multiracial individuals
is going to become more open-minded and
we will somehow be able to grow that
percentage of people who accept their
identity well I would like to believe
that but past examples lead me to
believe that this might not be the case
in fact we might be pulling back the
numbers of people who are proud of
themselves so here are a few case
studies that lead me to believe we might
be pulling it back Spain many of you are
familiar with the fact that Spain had a
civil war what you probably don’t know
is that the Civil War was based on 1931
reforms that were pretty much trying to
separate church and state well this
doesn’t seem like a big deal to us but
this was a big deal to the Catholic
Church who had pretty much reigned over
Catholic Spain for centuries and they
took a lot of offense to this and that
seems small again except they started
take advantage of
fact that Catholics were being killed
for being Catholic Spaniards and then
the Catholic Church started to back
Franco and the rebels and this Civil War
okay that’s one example next example is
Ireland Ireland faced a period of time
known as the troubles the civil war
itself was only a year long but the
troubles were much longer the troubles
essentially meant that Irish Catholics
and Irish Protestants were going head to
head over what it meant to be Irish in
part because of English rule so out of
this the IRA comes to part and takes
advantage of the Irish Catholics who are
having their identity suppressed for
things such as housing food and they’re
essentially being starved out so they
took advantage of identity suppression
in this case now my next one is a little
bit different this is Russia a lot of
you are probably familiar with the
Russian Revolution and often the Russian
Civil War often gets overlooked because
revolution so let me tell you a little
bit about this of a war the Civil War
was between the red Russians the
Communists and the White Russians the
imperialists and when we take a step
further back you have Peter the Great
enacting a beard tax the beer tax
primarily focused on people in the
southern regions of the Empire who would
express what we would consider
ethnically Slavic identity through
growing a beard and expressing that
through their Orthodox religion now when
you have years of suppression in an
empire and the red Russians are telling
you that they would like to move to a
time in which they embrace ethnically
Slavic ideals and move away from the
Western ideals people like Peter pushed
for you’re going to stand behind them
because you’ve been oppressed by the
White Russians so that’s essentially
what happened they went with the red
Russians are communists against the
White Russians the imperialists so that
example was a little bit different in
that this is an ethnic conflict versus
the previous were religious conflicts so
you’re probably thinking what we’ve
moved past that
and I like to believe that I really do
however here are some examples from our
own country and I should preface this
with I by no means want to get political
the black lives matter movement the
pro-immigration pro-islamic protest or
movement and the women’s march now what
do all of those have in common well all
of those are movements for identity now
what do those not have in common with
the previous ones well I’ll tell you
although these are movements in which
people are challenging the government I
and I will say playing devil’s advocate
it’s great for the government because
that’s how we grow and that’s how we
have our ideas represented in the
government these are different because
we don’t have someone at the top taking
advantage of the suppression of those at
the bottom so we’re essentially in a
period of a ticking time bomb in which
we’re essentially waiting for people to
take advantage of the mass amounts of
people unhappy with their identity being
suppressed by our government so I just
laid out some pretty heavy news and
you’re probably asking yourself what can
you do well you can listen you can
listen to people like me when we tell
you our stories or what our identities
are or how we identify you can act there
is nothing wrong with stepping in when
you hear someone making a racial slur or
joke that by any means shame someone and
you can accept the sooner you stop
trying to simplify the world around you
the more we can accept our fellow man
now I don’t know about you but what I
think makes America great is our ability
to accept and go for the identities that are multiple in our country thank