the North American cultural approach to race¹ is so alien to me, and its thought patterns so pervasive, that I think I will never be comfortable publicly IDing as “mixed race”… even that term carries implications in the discourse context that simply do not apply here. so I float in a mysterious middle space and am both othered and erased in the process, how wonderful²

^{1 for example, the racist/colonialist ideas & concepts around “blood quantum” that seem to be uncritically accepted even by otherwise “woke” North Americans
2 not actually wonderful}