A Filipina-American artist's powerful drawing captures her experiences of being racially stereotyped

• An artist is getting a lot of attention on Instagram for drawings that illustrate racial stereotypes.
• Anne Castro drew a girl being bombarded with stereotypes that she has heard as Filipina American.
• She shared her drawing on Instagram to highlight the rise in attacks against Asian Americans and Pacific islanders.

"Is Anne your real name?" "You eat with chopsticks don't you?" "You must be good at math." "Is it your people who do nails?" "Do you eat dogs?" "You look like Mulan."

These are just some of the microaggressions that artist Anne Castro said she's heard throughout her life, and she recently captured her experiences of being racially stereotyped through her art.

Based on her own experiences, Castro initially drew a girl surrounded by symbols of common stereotypes and repeated microaggressions.

"Everyone assumes I eat with chopsticks, but Filipinos actually eat with both the spoon and fork or even our hands," she told Insider. "When my classmates would joke around, they'd comment how my eyes are small, but in actuality, I have pretty big eyes."

She said she shared her drawing on Instagram as a result of rising hate crimes in the Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) community, and it's since gotten more than 121,000 likes.

AAPI hate crimes and discrimination increased 150% in 2020, Insider reported in March. An organization that tracks hate, discrimination, and violence against the AAPI community, Stop AAPI Hate, received 3,795 reports of anti-Asian hate incidents from March 2020 to February 2021.

"I'm a Filipina American, but growing up, everyone kind of assumed that there were only two types of Asians - Chinese and Japanese," Castro told Insider. "I was always compared to the few Asian celebrities seen in movies such as Sue Yung, London Tipton from 'The Suite Life,' and Wendy Wu, which never really seemed to be remotely similar to who I really am."

Since she shared the first drawing, Castro has expanded the series to cover various cultures to increase awareness around racism.

The people in her series look like children, and she said that's intentional.

"I illustrated the characters to look younger because a lot of these comments come at a young age, and at times I didn't find it to be as serious, and it seemed like harmless jokes from my classmates," Castro said. "But as I got older I learned that they were microaggressions that follow at every age based on the stereotypes society plants on us."

Castro said the series is named after what she considers to be the annoying question of all - "What Are You?"