Merle Dandridge
Place of Birth: Okinawa, Japan
Date of Birth: May 31, 1975
Ethnicity:
*father – African-American
*mother – Korean, Japanese
Merle Dandridge is an American actress and singer. Her roles include the shows Sons of Anarchy, The Night Shift, The Flight Attendant, and Greenleaf, as well as Broadway and video games.
Her father was an African-American U.S. serviceman, from Memphis, Tennessee. Her mother was a local Okinawan, of Korean and Japanese descent. Merle spent much of her childhood in Wheatland, California, and Bellevue, Nebraska, U.S.
Merle has said:
My mother is half Japanese and Korean. And I have older siblings who are mostly Korean, 1/4 Japanese, because of my mom’s first marriage to a Korean man. I was born in Okinawa but most of my time in Asia was in Seoul. My mother belongs to two cultures that didn’t really accept her 100 percent. So she had this understanding of rejection based on her own experiences. She would look at me and say, “You are of different ethnicities and you might not always be accepted so go into the world knowing that and know that you are more than that. You are beautiful.”
Sources: http://www.oprah.com
https://medium.con
Wow, she could pass for west or south asian
Merle Dandridge herself has said on a number of occasions that her mother is half Korean and half Japanese: http://www.oprah.com/entertainment/merle-dandridge-interview-o-magazine ; https://caamedia.org/blog/2016/06/20/merle-dandridge-on-blasian-identity-and-oprah-winfrey-networks-new-summer-original-series-greenleaf/ ; https://medium.com/thrive-global/how-the-women-in-my-life-showed-me-that-boundaries-are-optional-77a627d6eea6 ; etc.