Growing up on the East Coast in a predominantly White small town as an Asian American with the last name “Whitebread,” my identity was constantly questioned and challenged. The underlying assumption was that I should be White. There is a particular dissonance that comes with occupying a visibly racialized body while carrying a surname that evokes whiteness so explicitly. Later in life, when I moved to the West Coast and to an area where Indigenous erasure is less prominent (though still present), the assumption became that I must have a Native background. Unwonder: Please Hold Your Racist Questions is a ceramic sculpture of exhaustion made tangible—a response to a myriad of offensive interrogative interactions masquerading as curiosity.
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As a mixed-race person, our nation’s 250th brings a reminder of the many “what are you?” questions, magical racial bridge expectations, and feelings of otherness that come along with this unicorn-like identity. The dominant culture of the United States is deeply obsessed with categorization and fitting people, who contain multitudes, neatly into restrictive boxes. This sculpture asks: What would it mean to interrupt the entitlement to know, pigeonhole, and define other people? As a play on a classic (White) US staple (Wonder Bread), this work rejects the expectation that mixed-race people must make themselves legible or uncomplicated in order to be worthy of belonging to the identities they hold dear, or to the US identity.
