Interview 002: Elsie Barnhart

Elsie Barnhart (she/her) is a learning design manager at the Forum for Theological Exploration in Atlanta. We talked about growing up in a Georgia military town with her mom, how a year in South Korea changed her understanding of herself as multiracial person, raising multiracial teenagers, and more.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I would love to start at the beginning of your story: When and where did you grow up, and what was it like for you to be multiracial Asian in this context?

I grew up in a moderately-sized town in the south, about two hours south of Atlanta. Like everybody else, I felt like my town was way too small, but it was a military town, so one of the benefits was that I didn't feel like I was the only one – it wasn’t just me and my brother who were multiracial. There were quite a few, and this was in the early ‘80s. But it was very much a Black-white dynamic – there wasn't really room for anything else. There were Asians and Asian Americans in my town, but I didn't have a lot of contact with them unless they were multiracial. For the most part, they had a white parent and an Asian parent, like my best friend growing up until I got to high school. Her dad was white and her mom was Korean, so we had a lot in common and I think that's what drew us to one another.

I had a relatively happy childhood. My parents got divorced when I was fairly young – I don't know that that was particularly hard on me, but I lived with my mom and she worked a lot. Typical immigrant story – she worked really long hours, so she wasn't super-present in our day-to-day lives, except to make sure we went to school and ate and did our homework and things like that. But beyond that, my brother and I were kind of on our own to parent ourselves.

Thinking about the Black-white dynamic of where I grew up: The year I started high school, I got zoned to a brand new school. The first day that I was there, in my first class, they said, “We're taking a count of all the kids who were in school. So if all the white students can stand up,” and all the white students stood up. And then they said, “Okay, now all the Black students stand up,” so all the Black students stood up. I didn't know what they were going for – I thought maybe there'd be another category, so I didn't stand up. Throughout that day, depending on which teacher was asking the question and what their experience was with multiracial people, some would say, “Why aren't you standing up with the Black kids?” or “Why are you standing up with the Black kids?” I didn’t know what to do. It was me and this one other kid who was from the Philippines – we were the “others,” and it was so jarring. On the second day, they did exactly the same thing. By the third day, I said, “If this is what we're doing, I can't go to school here. I cannot.” I've never been anti-school, but I completely pitched a fit and I got transferred to the school where my brother was going. They didn't do that, but it was still very much a Black-white dynamic. Being multiracial was not a thing that was talked about. 

I'm so curious how it felt for you, seeing and experiencing everything in this Black-white binary and not fitting into it – I'm wondering what your internal experience of that was like.

I think I understood why it was happening and it didn't affect my self-esteem. I knew who I was and who the people that were closest to me were. I had (and still have) two very good friends from high school, thirty-plus years later, and they're both Black. I just felt really grounded in my relationships with people.

I didn't have a lot of Asian or Asian American friends in high school – for the most part, there weren't a lot of Asian people to be friends with. My issue was people saying things to me like, “Where are you from?” “I'm from here.” “But before you came here, where were you from?” “It's pretty much here.” And then depending on who was asking, I would say, “I think what you're really asking me is: My mother's Korean.” “Oh, I knew it was something.”

I dated this guy in high school – oh my God, what a nightmare. His parents were very old white people, and when we first started seeing each other, they assumed I was from Hawaii. I don't know if they were like, “Foreign, but her English is really good, so she's probably not from Mexico.” After maybe six or seven months, I don't know how it came up, but they realized, “Oh no, no, no, she's multiracial. She's half Black and half Korean,” and they lost their minds, so we ended up breaking up. Obviously, great thing, because there's no way in the world starting a relationship on that kind of footing was going to work out. But that's the first time I felt like I'd been slapped in the face by something I had absolutely no control over. It's like, “Obviously you didn't have a problem with me as a person, because things were fine until you found out who my parents were.” It was very bizarre.

My mom didn't come to the US until she was in her mid-twenties, so she speaks with an accent. Not everybody understands her, I spent a lot of time helping her understand how America worked, and she never thought of us as anything but American. She would only cook American food for us, even though she wouldn't eat it, which always made us suspicious. It's like, “Why are you making us spaghetti if you're not eating it?” She's cooking two meals every day and we were like, “This is ridiculous. Just cook us Korean food.” Finally she was like, “Yeah, this is dumb. Why am I doing this?” Some of it was her trying to make us feel like the US was our home. It's really the only home we ever knew. I was born in the US and my brother was born in Seoul, but right after I was born, we moved back to Korea. We were there until I started kindergarten, and my brother missed his first year of elementary school because we were still in Korea and he didn’t speak Korean. And there was no Korean school for us to go to in my hometown. It wasn't like we grew up in California, where there was opportunity because there was a larger population, and those are things I regret so much. I wish I'd learned a lot more. I wish my mom felt like it was important for us to learn. But she was focused on making sure we had a roof over our heads and we were fed and clothed and had everything we needed to succeed, so she wasn't really thinking about all this other stuff. We got a little bit at church, but they really thought of us as American kids. She went to Korean language church, we went to English language church, and we wouldn’t cross paths until service was over and we all ate together. Typical.

Were there formative events that shaped how you think about your multiracial identity?

After I was married – and I didn't get married until I was 28, so this feels like a late realization – I was working in the admissions department at an art school and reading all these college essays. We were getting so many from kids that were multiracial – tales of heartache and longing and sadness about not fitting in and not understanding where their place was, because they grew up in a small town in Missouri and they were the only people in their high school that weren’t white. Before that, it never occurred to me that you could be a multiracial person and not know who your community was or not have a community.  And I always thought my personality was why I was able to navigate so well, but that’s probably not it. It was also being with people who affirmed me as a person and didn't expect me to choose, and who understood that my mom was Korean and my dad was Black and that's who I was. It wasn't until I started seeing that my experience wasn't everybody else's experience that I started to think that had I been born somewhere else or raised in a different context, I would be a very different person.

On top of that, my husband was in seminary in Chicago, and the director of student services said, “We're starting an exchange program. We'd like you to be the first person – you're going to be our guinea pig. Would you be interested?” And he said yes. They said, “The place where we want to establish our relationship is South Korea,” and he's like, “That's perfect.” So we ended up living in South Korea in a seminary, and it was so good for both of us, because it helped me understand the person my mom was and all the things she walked away from when she married my dad and moved to the US. And it helped my husband understand Korean culture. It didn't feel like a homecoming for me because I don't have deep memories of being there when I was a little, but being able to learn how to read Korean, having to speak with Korean students, and understanding that a lot of the language was locked in my brain and I just hadn't accessed it in so long – that was really pivotal for me understanding myself as multiracial person and this part of myself I hadn't been able to explore very much. It was an incredible experience.

There weren't a lot of expectations around me understanding things, because I don't look Korean, so no one in Korea was expecting me to understand what they were saying. So I got cut a lot of slack. I understand if maybe I was half white and half Asian and looked a little more ambiguous, I probably would have been given a hard time. But my feelings were never going to be hurt if someone said, “I don't consider you Korean, you’re American,” because that's true. I am American. So anything I did was great. “Oh, you're trying to speak our language. That's great. You're trying to eat our food.” It's like, “Well, I grew up eating this food, so don't give me credit for that.” But that helped me turn a corner in understanding who I was as a multiracial person in the US.

When you’re given total freedom to identify however you want, how do you identify racially and how has that evolved over the course of your life?

I've always said I was biracial. Though when I was younger, I was more inclined to say, “I’m half Black and I'm half Korean” – thinking of myself as one whole person made up of these two things. I had to grow into the terminology of being multiracial, like a lot of us. But that’s where I started.

I've had people tell me, “Well, I just assumed you were Black.” I have no control over that. I've had people assume I was biracial but that I was half white, and I've had people ask me, “Well, do you consider yourself Black or white?” And it's like, “Where are you getting white from?”

Now, I think more about what my kids do. I've got twins – they’re 15, a boy and a girl, and my son is on the autism spectrum. He's nonverbal, so no one's coming at him with questions like this, but the other day, we had a doctor's appointment and they listed him as Asian on his paperwork. I was like, “That's curious,” and I corrected it. And when my kids first started in our school district, when I was looking through their paperwork, they were listed as white. I was like, “This isn't going to work because I look like this, and yes, their father's white. But they're not white.” So I fixed it. And my daughter’s very clear that she is not white, even though everyone who looks at her might not know that. If you ask her how she identifies, she'll say, “I have one white grandmother. I have one Korean grandmother. My mom's father is Black. And my dad is white.” I think for her, it's a differentiator and she likes not being one thing, and I hope that's because her father and I have talked enough about it at home, about how she is a whole person the way she is, but she should feel very comfortable identifying how she wants to identify. She's definitely internalized that, which makes me happy. And small things – like I used to blow dry my hair straight because it was easier, but I can't expect her to embrace her curly hair if I don't. So I stopped doing that three years ago, because I don't want her to feel like she has to do that. I know Black women deal with this all the time, and if you don't push back against it, then people continue to expect it of you or they think you're co-signing that you have to look a certain way to be considered professional or a member of a particular part of society. And we don't have to do that anymore. It's 2023. I just want her and my son to grow up in a world where people accept them as they are – him because of his neurodivergence and her as a woman of color. I want to embrace that for her so she can embrace it too.

That leads into another question I wanted to ask you: You mentioned that it's important for you and your spouse for your kids to know who they are. As a multiracial person who is now raising multiracial kids, are there other things you’ve considered important to impart to them about their identities?

I think it's a lot easier because of how media has changed.  There's so much representation now of Asian Americans and of biracial and multiracial people that my daughter in particular is able to see that the world isn't just Black and white. And the things she's interested in aren't necessarily Black and white. We watch Korean dramas on Netflix and she loves them. She has access to anything because the internet is bottomless. It's a lot easier to see that standards of beauty are changing and she is someone who is considered pretty, even though she doesn't fall into the very narrow understanding of beauty that we grew up with. I haven’t had to have a conversation with her about “Maybe you don't look like all of your friends, but you're still beautiful.” It's a different world. Aspects of it are more difficult because of the internet too, but as far as her identity and being able to embrace her multiracialness, I don't think she needed any help from me with that, thanks to the media that we consume and the way we talk to her at home. She's very confident in who she is as a person.

That's wonderful, and that gives me a lot of hope. My kids are still pretty young -- they’re seven and five. But I agree that the media landscape is so wildly different than it was when we were growing up, and they have access to such a broad, endless range of things, which is great. And it’s hopeful to hear that we may not need to have as many “very special episode” conversations around their identities as I'm foreseeing in the future.

Yeah, it's less of a “Hey. Come into the room. There's an Asian person on TV.”

Right. So real.

I was one of those people that was watching Margaret Cho’s All-American Girl.

Oh girl, that was a life changing show for me. But it did not last very long.

It didn't, and it's really sad because there were a lot of things that we could have learned. I also feel hopeful that we're getting a lot more mediocre Asian media.

We can be mediocre too.

Right. If all of that mediocre garbage can be on TV, and the showrunner’s white –  great, we need our own mediocre lane to go along with all of the excellence that's also happening. All of this stuff around Everything Everywhere All at Once makes me so happy, but also, I'm looking forward to a time where that's not a big deal.

Where it's totally unremarkable.

Yeah, I need it to be remarkably unremarkable.

That's the real mark of progress, when we're allowed to be as mediocre as everybody else.  Shifting gears: How do you feel like being multiracial has been a challenge for you in your personal and our professional life?

I don't know that I would necessarily peg any of my challenges around multiracialness specifically. I've experienced racism, obviously. I've had people say really stupid, thoughtless things to me, but I don't know if that was because of racial reasons or because I identify as female. Maybe being a minority, but not specifically from being multiracial, because I have no control over how people see me. I don't know what percentage of people look at me and go, “She's multiracial,” but they definitely see me as a woman of color.

That makes a lot of sense. It sounds like the challenges you’ve experienced are not so much about being multiracial as they are about being a person of color in general.

Yeah, because a lot of people don't nuance things like that, so they're just like, “Oh, Black woman.” If that's how you see me, that's fine. I have no control over that.

You've said that a few times that you don't have control over that – I think that's such an important truth to hold, that when people react or respond to you in these ways, it's actually not at all about you and it's totally about them, and you don't have control over it. That's very liberating.

How do you feel like being multiracial has been an asset to you in your personal and/or professional life?

It's always made me think about things in more than one way. I've always had to take more than one thought into consideration. Every day that I left home, I was leaving my mom, who was totally out of her context of origin and walking into a world where for the most part everyone was American or Black or white, and understanding that the way she experienced the world and the way they experienced the world were very different, and I was somewhere in the middle. I could see the way the world impacted her, and I could see the way the world impacted the people with whom I spent the majority of my time or myself.  So I wasn’t ever able to think that people only experienced things in one way. It felt like being able to look behind the curtain. The way everything looks is one way to think about things, and the stuff that's happening behind the curtain at the same time is also a part of the same picture. It's like being front of house and back of house. Those things all happen at the same time, but you're given a different perspective on what that looks like.

Understanding that the way the world operated wasn't necessarily the way our world operated, and being okay with both of those things – that has been a benefit in a lot of ways. 

That’s such a gift. It seems like such a jump-start on things like cognitive flexibility and empathy and perspective-taking – you've had the opportunity to do that from the time you were very young, and a lot of people don't really get to practice that until they're older and much more solidified as people. So it's remarkable that you got the opportunity to do that from as far back as you can remember, while you were still being formed.

As we wrap up our time together: What advice do you have for kids or teenagers who are growing up multiracial Asian?

Really embrace who you are – all aspects of who you are. Identify with the things that bring you joy and make you happy and feel real to you. My advice for anyone in any context would be: Don't let other people tell you who you are. Really drill down to the things that are important to you and bring you happiness and make you feel whole. Being multiracial doesn't mean you're not whole. You just get the benefit of more than one experience right out of the box. Embrace all of that and learn about your heritage if you want to. If that for you means food, language, culture – whatever that means to you, do that. Find joy because this world is a mess. And you’ve got to figure out where your place in it is, and I think that’s by embracing all aspects of who you are.

I think it's important to talk to people who identify as multiracial about these stories you hear – “The world is going to start looking more like multiracial people. That's how we're going to overcome racism.” That's not how you get rid of racism.

Having more of these conversations is always better than not talking about it. I really appreciate you taking this on – it's really instructive for a lot of people who are trying to figure this thing out. And I haven't figured it out. I’m fifty, so I'm still working on it.

The journey never ends.

Not if you're doing it right.