PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Lo, Emma
TI  - What Are You? A Biracial Physician on Nuanced Racism
AID  - 10.1370/afm.2637
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - The Annals of Family Medicine
PG  - 72--74
VI  - 19
IP  - 1
4099  - http://www.annfammed.org/content/19/1/72.short
4100  - http://www.annfammed.org/content/19/1/72.full
SO  - Ann Fam Med2021 Jan 01; 19
AB  - A patient shouts what he suspects is my racial background at my face. A colleague repeats a patient’s racist remarks against me; I lurk in my whiteness to cope. A compliment about my Asianness lands as a racist devaluation of both sides of my heritage. The medical licensing board does not include my race on its registration form. Straddling the boundary of Asian and White as a biracial female psychiatrist, I struggle to handle exoticization, discriminatory assumptions, and subtle marginalization by patients and colleagues. I grapple with the privilege of light-skinned ethnic ambiguity vs the disrespect for having features deviating from the imagined physician appearance. In this piece, I introduce a nuanced dialog about race and advocate for recognition and inclusion of biracial and multiracial minority medical practitioners who defy oversimplified racial categories.