Today, as I prepare for a teaching interview, I'm realizing I do not have a single example of a Japanese-American or Hafu (mixed race) role model in the United States of America.
As a multiracial diverse cosmopolitan person myself, I know what it is to have parents who want "perfect models" for their children to follow. And, sadly regardless of the flubs of celebrity sportsmen and women, role models go hand and hand with their similar racial lines and height and looks standards.
I'm petite being Japanese, and I never had anyone my own height, even, to look up to in the USA;- Not even in fashion magazines, NO Where.
And as a piano faculty in the harsh white supremacist America that is Bucks County, I've had to spare myself the negativity of a large body of particularly Caucasian parents telling me they are permitted to make racist choices for their children and negate and destroy my hard work and I gained credibility in classical just over the race issue alone.
Amazingly, in my piano teaching experience of over 25years;- I had the opposite happen from the Hawaii Hapa crowd that vehemently hates the European audacity of classical piano that I had to learn to excel at in order to get myself into college (on my own).
Even though we are in the 21st century I have to address the fact that it is entirely how the USA market has been conditioned to respond. And that alone severely impacted my ability to live and have relationship and a family that I desire. Yet, when I request respect, respect that is lacking in overall US culture;- they resort to historic persecution of their WW2 Japanese enemy. Maybe in California things are different, but this is what East Coast life has provided me for perspective.
I'm sure this writing doesn't offend those who claim they are diverse minded grinning behind their lying statements. The truth is in the lack of success my life has yeilded me in the US, while around USA's elite.