Personal disclosures and other perils of blogging

There has been a disclaimer that I've thought about making for a while, ever since I realized that the readership of this blog has grown beyond my parents and two best friends. But I've hesitated to make it because the academic in me believes that personal disclaimers can sound overly apologetic and/or needing external validation, when the reality of academic writing is that as long as you do the research and the writing is good/analysis is solid, then you don't need the hundred personal caveats and disclaimers.

However, this is a blog and not a piece of academic writing. And there have been a series of observations I've wanted to make--things related to the academic writing that I am doing--and I think that rather than unload all at once in one large unreadable blog post, I will try to unfold them bit by bit, my musings on race and racial representation, that is.

So the first thing to disclose is that while this blog is called "Mixed Race America" and while I do write about and research on many topics related to mixed-race issues, I am, myself, not mixed-race. That is to say, in the racial pentagram of race, I would stick with the single category of "Asian American" and not need to check any other boxes.

[Further disclaimer: Even as I write this, I am uncomfortable with validating the "racial pentagram"--you know, the 5-pronged scheme that has us believing in the coherency of racial categories like "white," "black," "Latino," "Asian American," and "American Indian," because quite frankly ALL races are mixed--there are no "pure" races--and especially a category like "Latino" becomes very problematic to establish as a separate "race" and yet I don't want to ignore the fact that race exists as an organizing principle in so much of our lives that we have come to naturalize it (sigh)--I am doing that thing I hate in some academic writing which is the continual caveat-making and disclaimers, so I'll stop now]

Why do I disclose this now? Because I do write about mixed-race people--specifically mixed-race Asian American subjects (both in terms of the actual people who identify as mixed-race Asian Americans and the academic subject matter of Asian American studies, which is often a mixed-race study, if that makes sense).

And so here's a question for everyone: if I identify as Asian American but not mixed-race Asian American, am I qualified to write about mixed-race Asian American people either on this blog post or in other writing venues? In what ways do we expect a person's personal identity to match up with his/her writing topics? And to push this further, do my mixed-Asian heritage experiences give me "license" (if there is such a thing) to write about mixed-race issues (ie: the fact that I did grow up with a bi- and multi-cultural perspective since my maternal family claims Jamaican heritage/roots)? Do my academic credentials (PhD in English, dissertation written on Asian American literature, professional affiliations in Asian American organizations) qualify me to write about racial topics, Asian American and not, mixed-race and not?

I start here, with my own subject position and identity as well as the subject matter of this blog and my research, because as much as I want to claim that I am thinking in complicated ways about race, I think I continue to have knee-jerk reactions about race and who gets to speak for whom and about which subjects.

Thoughts, anyone?