NYC’s “Wasian Wonderland” Shows How Mixed-Race Hype Still Centers Whiteness
The 3,000-person Central Park gathering was marketed as inclusive, but organizers' own flyers reveal which mixed-Asian faces the algorithm, the industry, and the brand actually reward.
On a Sunday in May 2026, more than three thousand people poured into Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park for what organizers called “the largest convening of Wasians in NYC.” There were celebrity lookalike contests, a DJ, merch, and a steady churn of TikToks tagging the country of “Wasia.” Some attendees joked about applying for citizenship to “the Kingdom of Wasia,” which, as Katie Gee Salisbury noted in her Substack, is actually just a private Discord chat. The vibe was part block party, part inside joke, part identity branding event.
Before I go further, a note about where I’m coming from. I’m Black, not Asian (though unlike the marketing of this event, I’d like to acknowledge that some people are both), and I’m writing this after carefully reading and weaving in the work of Asian and mixed Asian creators who have already been unpacking what this moment means. My interest is in what histories the Wasian discourse echoes, especially the older patterns where racial mixing got marketed as harmony while quietly protecting whiteness at the top. The point isn’t to render a verdict on anyone’s identity. It’s to ask whether some very familiar machinery is humming underneath a brand-new aesthetic.
I’m fighting to document how racial mixing narratives get sold as progress before they harden into the next colorist hierarchy, and I need your help!
With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.
If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these patterns full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.
If you believe in journalism that traces today’s “feel-good” cultural moments back to the histories they’re echoing, please consider a paid subscription today!
The comment sections under these videos are doing some of the most honest work in the entire discourse. Under one of the meetup breakdowns, a user posting as @jamesvssmith wrote simply, "I feel a certain way about this meet up being a Blasian man if I may," followed by a side-eye emoji. That sentence is the whole essay in eighteen words.
And then there is @fivecentpiece, who identifies as Wasian and is openly wrestling with what she sees: "As a 'Wasian' I've been worried about the inherent white supremacy of this 'moment.'… I hope all mixed Asians and mixed people and BIPOC can use this momentum to their advantage!" Read together, the comments do something the meetup itself did not. They sketch out a coalition that includes Blasians, Pacific Islanders, half African and half Black mixed kids, and Wasians who are nervous about what their own promotion does to others.
As Camargo writes on his Substack, you cannot be Wasian without the hard “W.” The label is built in proximity to whiteness, while older terms like Hapa, Asian American, and AAPI were built in opposition to it. Camargo, who grew up in Japan as half-Colombian, half-Korean and Japanese, points out that when he asked organizers what unified the Wasian community, one host told him, “We take pride in our beauty.” Pride in what beauty, exactly? Camargo is blunt about where that road ends: “if Wasian identity begins and ends with aesthetics, that’s eugenics.”
That charge sounds heavy until you remember that “we’re all mixed now” is one of the oldest scripts in the racial playbook.
In the early twentieth century, Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos popularized the idea of la raza cósmica, a future “fifth race” that would emerge from the blending of all peoples in the Americas. On paper, this was a universalist, anti-racist vision. In practice, as scholars of Latin American mestizaje have long documented, the cosmic race project traveled alongside blanqueamiento, or whitening, in which governments and elites encouraged populations to “improve the race” by marrying lighter and diluting Indigenous and African ancestry over generations. Afro-descended and Indigenous features were referred to in some national discourses as la mancha, the stain. Not all mixing was celebrated. Lightening was rewarded. Darkening was stigmatized. The harmony was selective, and it had a direction.
You can watch that selectiveness operate in real time in the biography of one of the meetup's patron saints. According to a 2019 Sports Illustrated interview republished after her Olympic win, Arthur Liu, the father of gold medalist Alysa Liu, explained that he intentionally chose Caucasian egg donors when arranging the surrogate births of his five children because he "felt his children would benefit from a diverse gene pool" and a multicultural upbringing. Arthur Liu is Chinese. His children were raised by him.
As one commenter posting as @flora.obj put it bluntly underneath one of the meetup videos, "Alyssa Liu's dad literally picked a white egg donor so that his children would be wasian... that's literally eugenics bc he raised those kids with an Asian woman so these wasian kids literally have 2 Asian parents." The decision to engineer whiteness into a child's genome in the name of a "diverse gene pool" is the cosmic race pitch translated into the language of fertility clinics. It is also, as @flora.obj names, the precise definition of the practice Camargo warned about when he said an identity rooted only in aesthetics begins to look like eugenics.
This is the history that makes @john__hedrick’s hopeful framing from his video about the NYC “wasian” meetup worth sitting with carefully. Hedrick described mixed-race people as “a physical amalgamation of protest” and argued that “the more confusing we make white supremacists, the fucking better off we’re gonna be.” There’s real warmth in that take, and I understand the appeal. But mestizaje is a century-long case study in what happens when “confusing the racists” becomes the whole strategy. White supremacy is remarkably good at absorbing confusion. It simply redraws the line a few shades lighter and keeps going.
The brown paper bag test is the United States’ homegrown version of that lesson. In some Black social clubs, fraternities, sororities, and churches across the twentieth century, a literal brown paper bag was sometimes held up against a person’s skin. Darker than the bag, and you could be excluded from the gathering, the dance, the network, the marriage prospect. The test formalized an already existing hierarchy in which lighter-skinned Black people, often with more European ancestry, were granted greater access to jobs, schools, and elite spaces. The Wasian picnic in Sheep’s Meadow is obviously not a brown paper bag test. The structural question it raises is similar. When the most visible, most marketable, most algorithmically rewarded image of “mixed” is overwhelmingly light-skinned and Euro-adjacent, who gets quietly filtered out of the frame?
Hollywood, naturally, has been running this experiment in public for years. The industry’s old habit of yellowface, of casting white women as Asian love interests so they could be paired with white leads, eventually gave way to a new habit, casting mixed Asian actors whose features read, as Camargo puts it, as “exotic but not too foreign.” Camargo names the kicker directly: by casting Wasian actors as lead Asian roles, Hollywood does not have to reckon with the broader mixed Asian diaspora, the darker-skinned, the non-East Asian, the non-white-adjacent, because it can point to a handful of palatable faces and call the job done. As he warned in his follow-up video, gatekeepers of culture think they are “giving themselves a free pass” by casting white-adjacent people, and the message that sends is, in his words, “a very dangerous warning sign.”
Katie Gee Salisbury, writing in her Substack Half-Caste Woman about Laufey’s “Madwoman” music video, captures the tension precisely. She felt genuine joy seeing seven mixed Asian celebrities, including Alysa Liu, Hudson Williams, Lola Tung, and Megan Skindiel, on screen together. She also notes that the video celebrates “a specific subset of mixed Asian people,” and asks how mixed Asians who are also Black, Latino, Native, or Middle Eastern are supposed to read their absence from this newly minted pantheon. Salisbury also draws the line that the linguistic frame draws for us. The terms Wasian and Blasian reinforce the same Black-white binary that has organized American racial hierarchy for centuries, splitting mixed people from each other along the country’s oldest fault line.
None of this means the joy in Sheep’s Meadow wasn’t real. The forty-year-old Wasian mother Camargo spoke to, who lit up describing what it meant to finally see so many people who looked like him, is not a punchline. He is the point of why representation matters at all. The harder question is whether the specific brand of representation winning this cultural moment, the Wasian aesthetic as marketed by Gold House, by Hollywood, by Instagram, by the algorithm, is doing the work it claims to do.
The branding sleight of hand goes deeper than the merch. As Madison, who posts as @madsteaparty, documented in his video breakdown of the meetup, the event was organized by a group called Half Asia Spring, which states on its Instagram that its mission is "to create half-Asian meetups around the United States." That sounds inclusive until you actually look at what they post.
Every single video on the account, he points out, only mentions Wasians. Every single flyer only mentions Wasians. The event was marketed exclusively as a Wasian gathering, with lookalike contests for Wasian celebrities and promotional materials featuring the Wasian cast of Laufey's "Madwoman" music video. Madison, who is Taiwanese and Cantonese Peruvian, asks the obvious question, why brand something as an inclusive mixed-Asian community gathering when in practice it is centered only on white mixed-Asian people. The answer the organization has not offered is the one its own marketing keeps providing. "Half-Asian" is the funding pitch. "Wasian" is the actual product.
Mestizaje promised harmony and delivered a lighter ruling class. The paper bag promised community and delivered a velvet rope. Hollywood’s love affair with ethnically ambiguous casting promised diversity and delivered a narrower beauty standard with a wider passport.
If mixed people really are, as Hedrick put it, a physical amalgamation of protest, then the question worth asking is who that protest is actually aimed at. Confusing white supremacists is a low bar. They have always been confused, and they have always recovered. The harder protest is the one aimed inward, at the colorist hierarchies and the proximity politics that decide which mixed faces get to represent the future. Until that work happens, the Republic of Wasia is less a new country than a very old one with a new flag.
🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨
Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!
If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.
So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.
But less than 5% of you are paid, supporters.
That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.
This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.
📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.
🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.
🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.
I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.
If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe
Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian) PayPal (@kahlilgreene2) or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00)
Sources
Camargo, Aki Lee. “Start Wasian Hate? America’s latest obsession with Wasians is more dangerous than you think.” Aki Lee Camargo (Substack), May 11, 2026.
Camargo, Aki Lee (@arigatoaki). Instagram video follow-up to “Start Wasian Hate?” Substack post, May 2026.
Hedrick, John (@john__hedrick). Instagram video on the NYC Wasian meetup, May 2026.
Salisbury, Katie Gee. “The Hapa Girlies Are Having a Moment: Laufey, Alysa, Hudson, Lola & Megan + what their fame means for mixed race Asians.” Half-Caste Woman (Substack), May 11, 2026.
Young, Grant. "Alysa Liu's Father Arthur Once Revealed Reason Behind Egg Donor Decision." Sports Illustrated, February 21, 2026.
Madison (@madsteaparty). Instagram video on the Wasian meetup and Half Asia Spring, May 2026.
I think that a thing that is missed for non-Wasians is the way that Wasians are othered by both sets of their heritage. In the US, a mixed race black person is black and accepted as such by the black community, by and large (as an outsider, I still see conflict for people of mixed heritage in the black community; I have mixed race black cousins through the white side of my family). A mixed race latino/hispanic kid is similarly also latino/hispanic, maybe even more so than a mixed race black person gains access to being authentically 'black.'
For mixed race Asians, this is not the case.
The first layer of that onion is that even for east Asians, 'Asian' is more of a fake label. East Asians generally do not think of themselves as 'Asian' anymore than white Europeans really think of themselves as 'white,' they think of themselves as coded by their ethnic homeland. For that matter, to my observation Africans in Africa generally do not think of themselves as 'black,' and recognize several African ethnicities. So in the Asian case like a Han Chinese person from Singapore still thinks of themselves as 'Chinese' by ethnicity and often culture, distinct from 'Malay' or 'Indonesian.' There is not really a shared heritage, or even a shared narrative of colonization. Like a lot of Hispanic/Latino culture is downstream of Spanish or Portuguese conquest of the Americas, and similarities between Spanish and Portuguese heritage and culture.
But even within these nationality identities, mixed race children do not get access to that identity culture the way that mixed race people of other ethnicities do in the US. Asia is still pretty rampant with it's own ethnic and racial prejudice, so even within these national ethnic identities there is prejudice and insularity. In Japan, a person of half-Korean descent is still seen as primarily Korean, this goes for China too. Asian ethnicities work much the same as whiteness does in the US, if you have foreign blood then you are foreign first, at BEST a half-step closer from foreign.
So to be Wasian is to be considered 'foreign' to your Asian ethnic heritage, and 'not White' to your white heritage, because Whiteness always selects against those who are not 'white enough,' and this is covered plenty for mixed race people of other races. You have to be visually 'white passing' to get white privilege in the US.
It's also othering in exactly the way you are demonstrating here, which is that to non-white people of other races, we are always under suspicion of being 'too white,' suspected of having some sort of surrogate white privilege. Black and Latinos make exceptions for mixed race people of their own ethnicity, but suspect white privilege when it is mixed race people of other ethnicities.
So these three alienations really leave us permanently Other, without an ethnic community to call home. We are foreign to our Asian ancestry, not white enough for our white ancestry, too white for the larger community of color. It's a culturally homeless state.
I really liked this line:
"But mestizaje is a century-long case study in what happens when “confusing the racists” becomes the whole strategy. White supremacy is remarkably good at absorbing confusion. It simply redraws the line a few shades lighter and keeps going."
Thanks for the history lesson. I learned some things about past movements, as well as the Wasian identity.
And double-thanks for the reminder that white supremacists will have no problem maintaining their world view in the face of all this!!