Hey deserving listeners today I'm going to answer patron emails. I've been getting a lot of emails from patrons asking me to talk about the multi racial status or being mixed race or mixed ethnicity and particularly about HAPA or HAPA.

So I, if you don't know, am half Japanese American and half European American.

My European ancestors generally came over during the 16, 17, and 1800s and eventually found

their way to Kansas and then Spokane, Washington, and my Japanese ancestors came over about 120 years ago to Washington State, and I come

from a long line of farmers on both sides of my family.

And so I am half Japanese American and half European American with a good percentage of Welsh

and Swedish people in my ancestry. Quakers on the Welsh side anyway.

So I am called Hapa or Hapa.

So some people say Hapa and some people say Hapa. Where does that word come from? It comes from a Hawaiian

word. Basically, from my understanding, it was adopted by Hawaiians from the word half and they you know sort of altered the word

to Hapa and instead of it meaning half it means part and so they in Hawaii they might say you know

hapehowley which is half or part white or something like that so the Hawaiian

word has been adopted by a lot of mixed race Asian, East Asian people throughout the United States and beyond.

And when I was a kid, it was used very infrequently and hardly anyone understood what that meant.

But as there are increasingly more and more Americans who are HAPPA, or HAPPA, there are more people identifying with it.

So Patron Emma wrote in from San Jose writing,

I am half Asian and half white.

It's a complicated experience. I feel like most discussion around race

either ignores multiracial people altogether, lumps them in with one side, or

assumes that you can get just average out, or assumes that you can just average out, or assumes that you can just average out the

experiences of both sides.

None of these viewpoints seem complete to me since I think being multiracial is its own

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