On Tuesday, March 12, Michelle Pantoja McKinney, a biracial Library staff member at UCBA, presented the UCBA Spring Culturelogue: “Being Biracial, Living Beyond the Box.”
A Phillippino/African-American, McKinney jokingly identifies herself as “blackipino.” She receives many questions and guesses regarding her race, varying from Hispanic to Polynesian to Asian, but rarely do her guessers have a clear idea of what and who she really is.
Born in the Philippines to an American Marine and a local Filipino woman, McKinney soon moved back to the United States, where she attended Walnut Hills High School and went on to graduate from Ohio University as a communications major.
As a child, she was raised with other Filipino children, as a Catholic, eating traditional Filipino food. Her mother tended to spend time with other Filipino-American mothers, and therefore a significant portion of her childhood was spent with other biracial children, enjoying a mixture of America’s melting pot culture and the traditions of her Filipino ancestry.
In grade school, McKinney began to recognize more and more the influence of her partial Filipino ancestry upon her daily life. Later on, in high school, she took a Minority Culture Studies class, in which she was an important minority herself.
On college and job applications, she began to question how to identify herself in the eyes of strangers. Check-marked boxes, she felt, couldn’t truly represent her racial identity in a sufficient manner, causing her to sometimes mock the system by checking either all or none of the boxes on forms and papers that others required her to fill out.
When Tiger Woods emerged as a professional golfer, the biracial mix of African-American and Asian grew much more well-known, causing many people to associate the McKinney family with the golfer. This brought both recognition and a small amount of understanding to the public eye regarding biraciality.
Nowadays, the McKinneys find it significantly easier to communicate with family members in Southeast Asia via the many social media outlets available, allowing her mother to speak and video-chat with old friends and siblings.
Throughout the presentation, McKinney’s stories held the audience captive.
Tuesday, June 24, 2025