Sabrina Goodman | Outside the Box: Multiracial Identity in America

 
For many people, “Please choose one” is a familiar prompt asked on a multitude of questionnaires, applications, and surveys. A variety of categories follow, encouraging you as an individual to subject yourself and your experiences to one predetermined box. While the phrasing of this question certainly limits and confines the experiences of many different people, multiracial individuals are especially impacted by the subjectivity of these categories. If you are half Chinese and half Mexican, how are you meant to choose between these two facets of your identity? Should you even be made to choose?
Outside the Box aspires to shed light on these experiences of multiracial individuals whose identities are consistently categorized and imposed upon by others. Emulating the configuration of familiar forms which implement this line of questioning on race and ethnicity, the installation challenges users to re-evaluate and re-examine their own role in this process of categorization based on appearance or judgements. After taking a mannequin in hand and placing it into its respective box, users will hear one audio clip featuring the voice of one individual who has been boxed into one of the aforementioned color/race/ethnic categories by others.
The candid color categories that are implemented in this project have been carefully curated to symbolize “race” based on past scientific and scholarly conceptions of color terminology. Each box is labeled either black, brown, red, white, or yellow, and each mannequin is painted a mixture of two skin colors, thereby disassociating inherent notions of categorization based on monoracial identity. Race as conveyed through this project is explicitly and purposefully embodied through color, as color terminology used by prominent naturalists such as Bernier, Kant, and Blumenbach served as the basis of propagating constructs of race based on skin color.
Traces of these color categories and labels are present even today, as embodied through government efforts such as Directive 15 and the U.S. Census. While many other projects tackle this topic from a self-identification standpoint, this installation is unique in that it addresses the lack of agency many multiracial individuals feel is produced as a result of their ambiguous identities. Audio clips are only played once triggered by the insertion of the proper mannequin inside its respective box. For example, a black and white mannequin will only play inside either the black box or the white box. Placed inside any other box, the audio clip will not play. This interaction, or in some instances lack thereof, also forces the user to categorize based on appearance, as so often happens with multiracial individuals upon first glance.
In an increasingly multiracial world, it is pertinent now more than ever for projects such as these to bring to light the consequences of forms, applications, and other documents in reducing individuals to fixed notions of race and ethnicity. People are much more complex than they appear upon first glance, and this installation encourages users to critically examine the labels they choose to adopt and apply to others in their everyday lives.