essay — Identity
The Difference Between Being Included and Being Collected
On museums, magazines, and the long habit of asking mixed people to stand still while someone else decides what they mean.
Sun-Mi Alvarez
June 22, 2026 · 2 min read
On museums, magazines, and the long habit of asking mixed people to stand still while someone else decides what they mean.
The first time someone photographed my face for a project about belonging, they asked me to hold very still. Inclusion, I have since learned, is an invitation to move — to walk through a door and rearrange the room a little once you are inside. Being collected is the opposite: a request to stay put, pinned and captioned and filed under someone else’s idea of what you are supposed to illustrate.
For most of my life, the question that followed me was the flat, museum-label kind: what are you? Not who. The grammar gives it away. A what can be cataloged. A who has to be asked, and might answer differently next year.
There is a kind of visibility that feels like a door opening, and a kind that feels like a drawer closing. The drawer is warm at first. You are wanted; you are an example; your face does useful work in someone’s deck about the future. Then the deck advances to the next slide and the drawer slides shut, and you are still in it.
Inclusion is an invitation to move. Being collected is a request to stay still.
This is, in the end, an essay about telling the two apart — and about what a directory built by mixed people rather than about them could refuse to do. It could refuse to rank us by fraction. It could refuse to verify a heritage no one has the standing to verify. It could let the caption be written by the person in the photograph.
When I built my own profile here, the field that undid me was the smallest one: How I describe myself. A blank box, no dropdown, no percentages. For the first time, the label was a sentence, and the sentence was mine.
A platform makes its values legible in what it declines to build. No heritage percentage slider. No verification of someone’s right to a heritage — because no such authority exists, and pretending otherwise just relocates the gatekeeping. No single mandatory ethnicity field with a tidy list of options, as if the messy ones were errors to be corrected.
Instead: a sentence you write yourself. Tags you opt into, never assigned. Visibility you set field by field, so the parts of you that are public and the parts that are only for your people stay sorted the way you sorted them.
A platform shows its values in what it refuses to build.
I keep coming back to that still photograph — the one where I was asked not to move. I think the opposite of being collected isn’t being left alone. It’s being asked, again, next year, when the answer might have changed. A good directory is just a place that keeps asking.
Korean and Mexican, raised between a halmoni’s kitchen and a Sunday sobremesa. I write about the words we use for ourselves — and the ones we quietly retire. Not half of anything; the whole of several things.
A small, signed conversation under the piece — not an anonymous feed.
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