<p>This autoethnographic article interrogates the lived experience of mixed Amhara–Tigrayan identity amid Ethiopia’s recent political ruptures, including the Tigray War (2020–2022) and the post-2018 reconfiguration of state power. It argues that Ethiopia’s ethnopolitical crisis cannot be reduced to elite competition/institutional design but must be analyzed through the everyday production of vulnerability, silence, and moral tension under ethnically structured governance. Drawing on Brubaker’s conception of ethnicity as a category of practice, Mitchell’s “state effect,” banal nationalism, and Fanon’s dialectics of recognition and nonbeing, the article demonstrates how ethnic identity is operationalized in mundane practices—language use, naming, kinship obligations, and enforced political alignment. The post-2018 efforts to promote a supra-ethnic national imaginary have achieved limited resonance in everyday life. Mixed-ethnic subjects remain politically suspect and socially precarious. Their experiences illuminate the constitutive contradictions of Ethiopia’s ethnocratic order and the exclusionary limits of both ethnic federalism and post-ethnic nationalist reformulations.</p>