Citation: King-O’Riain, Rebecca Chiyoko. 2022. #Wasian Check: Remixing ‘Asian + White’ Multiraciality on TikTok. Genealogy 6: 55. https://doi.org/10.3390/ genealogy6020055 Academic Editor: Dan Rodriguez-Garcia Received: 21 December 2021 Accepted: 7 June 2022 Published: 15 June 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). genealogy Article #Wasian Check: Remixing ‘Asian + White’ Multiraciality on TikTok Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain Department of Sociology, Maynooth University, Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland; rebecca.king-oriain@mu.ie Abstract: TikTok is the fastest growing short video application and immensely popular with younger generations to express their thoughts, ideas, and most relevant to this issue, their identities including mixed-race identity. This paper asks: How did young mixed-race people choose to express their identity on TikTok in the #wasian trend and how does the app shape these mixed-race identity expressions? The answer lies in how the emotional affordances of TikTok app itself shape how it is used by creators in mimicking and mimetic ways and how people respond, through video and text. The article argues that the #wasian trends reinforce the racial and genealogical legacy of mixedness, often through showing parents or blood relatives, which is in creative tension with simultaneously remixing and asserting racial multiplicity. The claim to wasianess moves the private sphere (bedroom culture, family and notions of race) into the public and in so doing creates new potentialities for the creation of a global #wasian community on TikTok. Keywords: wasian; #wasian; mixed-race; Asian; TikTok; transconnective; digital media; social media 1. Introduction This paper examines how young mixed-race Asian people are using digital social media, such as TikTok to trace their cultural and racialized roots in order to create, challenge and transform transconnected meanings of mixed-race. The paper specifically focuses on Asian + White mixed-race people by analyzing the trend of ‘#WasianCheck’ on TikTok to create cosmopolitan and communal notions of what it means to be an Asian mixed- race person across the globe. #Wasian (typically understood as East Asian + white) has recently been reimagined as #blasian #Wexican #indoasian, etc. and applied usually to first generation Asian+other mixes. While the term is now being used in transnational ways on TikTok, it interestingly both removes people from their immediate local settings (unless they hashtag their location) and reinforces geographic location as the algorithm in the app directs geographically ‘local’ as well as international content to your ‘For You Page’ (FYP—like a home page) blending local and international content during consumption. The digital presence of mixed-race content is not new on digital platforms. YouTube has long been a place where mixed-race/hapa expression has happened (Lopez 2019, p. 277) but what is interesting is that the word ‘hapa’ has declined in use on social media and on TikTok the term #wasian has gained in popularity across the app. Usually #wasian is also used alongside #mixed #mixed-race and #Asian; all used together to signal the salience of mixed-race Asian identity. #Wasian is a new expression of mixed-race Asian identity which has emerged relatively quickly largely spread and institutionalised through social media interactions on digital platforms like TikTok. This paper asks: How did young mixed-race people choose to express their identity on TikTok in the #wasian check trend and how does the app shape these mixed-race identity expressions? During the Coronavirus pandemic, the growth in the use of social media skyrocketed and this has brought new forms of entertainment and expression (often used by young people). This ‘very online’ generation has created memes, sounds, dances and trends that have gone viral and moved quickly and widely across the globe via social media Genealogy 2022, 6, 55. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6020055 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/genealogy