Laya DeLeon Hayes, a 16-year-old actress and the voice of Doc McStuffins on the Disney series of the same name said her parents never sat her down for “the talk” about being biracial. “I don’t get to benefit from the model-minority myth.” Laya DeLeon Hayes, 16, Black and Filipino, on being biracial in Hollywood “I’ve had these experiences with the police in the past that, if I get pulled over, no one’s going to care if I’m half Indian,” they said. Though he has been immersed in Indo-Carribean culture since childhood, his Indian heritage tends to be lost on strangers. “And I could tell as I got older, how people changed their body language or their movements around me.” “I began to realize that not only did people see me as Black or African American, but I’m 6’1, people see me as a large Black man,” Reed said. This year has made him more aware of how people see him. The older Reed got, the more he realized the implications of presenting as a Black man in the United States. “Because I look Black, I have nappy hair.”
“As I got older, and I started to understand and appreciate more of my Indian heritage, I discovered that other Indian people who are from India weren't always accepting of me,” he said. Yet when interacting with people outside the community, even other Indian people, he was almost always racialized as Black. Reed grew up with an Indo-Guyanese mother and her family, “so I was much more familiar with Indian Caribbean culture than I was with Black culture.” Reed might not have known it in fourth grade, but he said people have tried to put his racial identity in a box for his whole life. “And I don’t know if she realized how damaging that can be.” “I handed it over to my teacher, and when I got the paper back a couple days later, I noticed that she had erased the bubble for Asian,” said Reed, who uses both he/him and they/them pronouns.
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