(24) Chris Talbot-Heindl: What Color Am I
When I’m in a room with any number of white people, they assume I’m one of them. But while my lack of melanin matches their own, my experiences do not.
In my teen years, I used to joke and say I was salmon. That’s triracial—the colors white, mixed with yellow (the designated color via the white gaze for my Japanese heritage), mixed with red (the designated color via the white gaze for my Indigeneity). Salmon, if those colors were blobs of oil paint on a palette board swirled together.
[It wouldn’t occur to me until my late 20s that saying this or identifying in this way to uniracial white folks perpetuated the normativity of a white interpretation of skin tone. I would further learn in my late 30s that this color scheme (red, white, Black, yellow, brown) was created and remixed by a host of white, racist, eugenicists throughout history].
What color am I?
I am the color abomination, the word the good white church ladies used to describe my sister and myself and our mixed heritage.
I am the color of making sukiyaki for my elementary school class for some hokey learn about each other’s culture through food segment and listening to all the ewws while watching everyone eat up every last morsel.
I am the color of rocks through windows at my childhood home, thrown by little white boys on bikes who hadn’t yet understood why us existing there meant they had to hate us, but mirrored the bigotry normalized in their own homes.
I am the color of you can’t sit here, go sit with the other Asians. I am also the color of why are you in this BIPOC space? You’re white.
I am the color of attending the Title IX Indian Education classes in high school, except when Mr. P. announced you don’t look Indian to me.
I am the color of you may have gotten that promotion over me, but it’s just because you’re a diversity hire. And I am the color of I was just kidding, don’t be so sensitive, when I brought up that statement later.
I am the color of co-workers deciding that farting in my office and leaving the trail behind should be referred to as the Trail of Tears and that eating my cultural foods was disrespecting the community kitchen and peoples’ sensitivity to stinky foods.
I am the color of you don’t belong here and questions about blood quantum.
I am the color of but you’re not really Asian. You’re not like those Asians.
I am the color of some white people’s lust; I’ve never been with an Asian before. Are you going to love me long time?
I am the color of watching white women use my cultural traditions and ceremonies for their own benefit and sometimes financial gain, completely out of context and disrespectfully. I am also the color of white women’s wrath and weaponized fragility when I point this out.
I am the color that makes some white people see red and choose violence when they discover I am not just like them as they mistakenly thought. You tricked me into saying things in front of you!
I am the color that grew up without a kinship network of people like me and never learned how to navigate all these racist obstacles. I am the color that is healing through kinship networks I’ve just discovered and through reconnecting to cultural traditions of healing I never had access to.
I am the color that is the culmination of my ancestors’ choices, victories, traumas, joys, obstacles, arts, heritage, history, faiths, and love.
I am the color of me.
Chris Talbot-Heindl (they/them) is a queer, trans nonbinary, triracial creator working through the complexity of identity through art. They are the co-creator and editor of The Bitchin’ Kitsch and creator of Chrissplains Nonbinary Advocacy to Cisgender People educomic. Twitter and Instagram: @talbot_heindl, Website: https://www.talbot-heindl.com/