The thing about ppl calling heated Rivalry "two white guys" is that if Shane/Hudson looked white, it would be understandable and just an error from lack of information.
But these people are always saying something like "gifs from another show with two white gays have taken over my dash", so you know they've seen him, and Shane/Hudson does not look white. So like, it's a thing that reveals their own racist attitudes towards East Asians and mixed race people and the intersection thereof, which is important and I've definitely seen conversations about, but it also just makes it really clear that saying "two white guys" wasn't supposed to be a neutral descriptor, or even a valid complaint about white people dominating media (you could make a valid complaint about them both being light-skinned, but not white); it is intended as a weird kind of put-down, as an insult.
im hardly amazing at poetry but here have this, I wrote this a while ago and it's just like. a collage of emotions so ya, it's sort of all of my identities but mashed into one poem. also it's a little bit edited from what I originally had in my notes app because I wanted it to be really good. ok so without further ado—
Dramatic WhAsian
it must be annoying to have to be away from your homeland for so long.
but it's also annoying to have never been there.
i have such a thin line of attachment to it- i hardly know anything about it and i probably never will.
yet still, something inside of me longs for it- something in my soul, or my heart, or some part of me. anything.
id like to go there and id like to understand.
id like to know that part of myself. because whether I like it or not, it IS a part of me. I just don't really know how much of a part.
everyone else seems to be able to have a nice balance between their cultures. they can speak the language, or they've been there before, or their parents cook a special family recipe, or something like that. anything.
I hardly get that.
I'm hardly white but I'm hardly Asian, either.
not white enough, but not Asian enough.
that's just how I am though, isn't it?
simply not enough.
not white enough but not Asian enough.
not masculine enough but not feminine enough.
not binary enough but not nonbinary enough.
not apathetic enough but not empathetic enough.
not neurodivergent enough but not neurotypical enough.
not trans enough but not cis enough.
not allo enough but not loveless enough.
not smart enough but not dumb enough.
not religious enough but not atheist enough.
not loud enough but not quiet enough.
not aggressive enough but not passive enough.
not motivated enough but not energetic enough.
too caring but yet it's not enough.
too smart but yet it's not enough.
too responsible but yet it's not enough.
too stubborn but yet it's not enough.
too much but yet it's not enough.
and that's how it's going to be forever.
there's a reason I always choose medium. the middle.
my shirt size is medium— even my body can't decide.
I'm not sure how much it actually matters. I'm just being dramatic, right?
but it still hurts to have no idea who I am. to know the bare minimum of my culture. I don't even have any cultural clothes that fit me anymore.
millenials all live in an alternative world where "wasian" is like basically a slur and has the meaning of weeb, meanwhile gen z all live in an alternate world where none of us have ever witnessed that ever like seriously that has never been a thing so why are these mixed millenials policing how we self-identify and saying 'wasian' is "white-centering" and that the definition we created the word with is voided by this previous one from their world, all in all alienating us from their established mixed community.
also, we aren't stealing from Blasians; it's a fucking portmanteau. Nobody owns the concept of portmanteaus.
(it being a portmanteau is also why it's completely nonsensical to say it ''centers whiteness''. is the spoon component more important to a spork than the fork. do infomericals "center information".)
sorry to get back on this but how are we as mixed race people supposed to "acknowledge our proximity to whiteness" and "the privilege we have over monoracial POC" if we aren't supposed to admit that we are in part white. how does that work. we have an obligation to minimize ourselves because we have all this white privilege but also if we accept that being white is part of our complex racial identity that's siding against our non-white side and against being truly anti-racist?
Also y'know what it is very few steps from "you shouldn't be proud of being white as a mixed person. Because that's white pride which = bad" to "yeah you should stay ashamed of being white" because in a multiracial context in current times it is an established thing that many mixed people wish/have wished they weren't white so they could feel fully accepted in their non-white ethnic community. Like yes white pride bad and historically some mixed people have turned very self-hating and racist because they embraced only their white heritage, but we're talking in self-identifying mixed spaces; nobody is ONLY embracing their white heritage and turning into what frankly seems to be to be a negative stereotype/caricature of mixed people even if it was accurate to some real life. And yes being "proud" is a particular thing that I really can't endorse towards being white but in context it was clearly broadly meant like "identifying as white the way you do with you other race(s) is not ok" liiiikke what...
