Claire Yurika Davis: “You don’t have to kill one thing to gain another”
The creative on contextualising your uniqueness, social conditioning and Team Future Good Shit
Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week I’m speaking to creative designer, witch and tarot diviner Claire Yurika Davis, who is of Black and Japanese heritage. I first saw Claire on Netflix’s Next In Fashion, but it was Claire’s appearance on Mixed Up Podcast that stopped me in my tracks. Speaking about how her Asian heritage wasn’t appreciated by some of the cast, Claire shared how she was criticised for supposedly not supporting her Black contestants, despite the quality of their work. It’s an eye-opening listen, so I’d encourage you to tune in after reading Claire’s story here.
How do you define your ethnicity?
It’s fluid depending on where I am. The most common thing I say is mixed-race, but I also identify as Black. Depending on the situation, I’ll sometimes refer to myself as Japanese. I only realised a little while ago that my grandma was half-Chinese, but nobody would look at her as a mixed woman – she was a force of a Jamaican Black woman!
I’m visually received as Black and look identical to my dad. I would never be received as Japanese, even though if we’re going on a DNA test, I’m more Asian than Black.
Do you think the language used to describe mixed people is fit for purpose?
Language is really important to establish a lot of things, especially outward-facing identity. It can be useful for us to feel connected or seen, or to understand ourselves. It can also cause division, so it’s all about the underlying intention and the concept you hold with it.
I’m not really a fan of the word biracial and the concept of duality, but for me, it doesn’t matter – I know who I am as a human being, so how I identify with words isn’t the most important thing.
Have you always felt solid in your identity?
It’s something I’ve come into. Until my mid-20s, I was unsure about who I was. I think many mixed people can feel jealous of people who are ‘one race’ when they’re a kid, and I definitely felt that. Growing up, you have to walk your own path that nobody has signposted, so you figure it out. There’s not an end point to this journey that I feel like I need to reach to feel sure of myself, I’m good right now. My Saturn return finished last year, so I’ve learned who I am.
Did you ever speak to your family about your identity?
They didn’t have the tools or the knowledge, and they had other things to think about, like surviving. They gave me everything that they thought I needed, which was some of what I needed. The rest I had to create for myself. In my case, I needed time and age.
Did you consciously bring mixed people into your friendship circles?
When I was younger, speaking to mixed people, or people from different places in the world, was great. My high school best friends were mixed Black and British, and we often avoided the conversation about race because we were embarrassed, and we didn’t know how to talk about ourselves. When you’re older, you understand your feelings and where they come from, like conditioning and society.
I don’t know if it was something I was consciously looking for, but it just happened. Anything you want is brought to you, whether you’re ready to receive it or not. There was also something in me that wanted to be in a space where I was understood.
Speaking to my wide spectrum of friends, of all different ages, has helped me realise that everyone is on different stages of their journey, and that we have so much in common. Your unique bits can feel big, but at the end of the day, they’re very small.
Has your mixed identity influenced your work?
For sure. At Hanger, my work was an exploration of me as a human being and my Japanese identity. I used the business to learn about Japanese culture and cinema, because I didn’t have time to do it in my personal time – I was busy trying to build a brand. It was fun, it helped me reconcile some things and helped me express my heritage in a genuine way to me.
Now, I’m doing something very different, so the main way my heritage impacts me is my field of imagination and the possibilities of what I could be in the future or what my ancestors were like. That malleability or fluidity has definitely been helped by my mixed perspective, understanding that you can be two or three completely contrasting things and still be all of something. You don’t have to kill one thing to gain another, the old ideas of duality are no longer relevant.
Regarding your experience on Next In Fashion, you shared how some cast members didn’t see you as Asian and that viewers said you didn’t support your Black contestants. Can you tell me about that experience?
I didn’t realise a lot of this until the show came out, and my Jamaican aunt asked me, “did you see the way Alexa looked at you?” I said no, because I’ve been conditioned to not notice people looking at me.
With East Asians, if you don’t look pale, you don’t count. I’ve seen lists of Japanese designers where people are one sixteenth Japanese. Because I don’t fit that aesthetic, I’m not counted. I was caught in the middle of a venn diagram of the English expectation of what Asian is and the American expectation, but the middle is just a vacuum.
I hadn’t felt exclusion like I felt from the show since I was five. I was told “you can’t say this, you don’t support that…” People think they get to say how you’re allowed to behave because of how you appear.
How do you think the conversation around mixedness needs to change?
It’s amazing that the conversation is growing. People want to be included, and also speak on anti-racism, but don’t feel like they have the right because that’s what they’ve been told. Over the past few years, I think we’ve gone through a lot of separation of identity to gain clarity, almost like spring cleaning. But now, we need to bring it back together. You don’t get unity when there are fragmented wars between groups.
There needs to be space for mixed-Black people in the Black conversation. People forget that race is a completely social construct which was imagined by people who hate us, so to talk about genetics or the Pantone swatch of people’s skin is doing the same thing to us as the people we’re trying to fight against.
There’s definitely a conversation about colourism, which is deep and important. But the idea that mixed people don’t support dark-skinned women? I don’t know any of those people. You can’t denigrate the whole of the mixed experience, which has infinite combinations, because of a few people. People want to be Team Anti-Oppression, but we’re all Team Doing Some Future Good Shit. And if you can’t get into that, you’re Team Past.
How would you sum up your mixed experience in one word?
Transformative.
Next week, I’ll be talking to author of Lives Like Mine, Eva Verde. Subscribe to get Mixed Messages in your inbox on Monday!
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Mixed Messages is a weekly exploration of the mixed-race experience, from me, Isabella Silvers. My mom is Punjabi Indian (by way of East Africa) and my dad is White British, but finding my place between these two cultures hasn’t always been easy. That’s why I started Mixed Messages, where each week I’ll speak to a prominent mixed voice to delve into what it really feels like to be mixed.