Posted: Mon 31 Mar 2008 20:17 Post subject: Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race
Quote:
NY Times
March 31, 2008
Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race
By MIREYA NAVARRO
Jenifer Bratter once wore a T-shirt in college that read “100 percent black woman.” Her African-American friends would not have it.
“I remember getting a lot of flak because of the fact I wasn’t 100 percent black,” said Ms. Bratter, 34, recalling her years at Penn State.
“I was very hurt by that,” said Ms. Bratter, whose mother is black and whose father is white. “I remember feeling like, Isn’t this what everybody expects me to think?”
Being accepted. Proving loyalty. Navigating the tight space between racial divides. Americans of mixed race say these are issues they have long confronted, and when Senator Barack Obama recently delivered a speech about race in Philadelphia, it rang with a special significance in their ears. They saw parallels between the path trod by Mr. Obama and their own.
They recalled the friends, as in Ms. Bratter’s case, who thought they were not black enough. Or the people who challenged them to label themselves by innocently asking, “What are you?” Or the relatives of different races who can sometimes be insensitive to one another.
“I think Barack Obama is going to bring these deeply American stories to the forefront,” said Esther John, 56, an administrator at Northwest Indian College in Washington, who identifies herself as African-American, American Indian and white.
“Maybe we’ll get a little bit further in the dialogue on race,” Ms. John said. “The guilt factor may be lowered a little bit because Obama made it right to be white and still love your black relatives, and to be black and still love your white relatives: to love despite another person’s racial appearance.”
Americans of mixed race say that questions about whether Mr. Obama, with a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, is “too black” or “not black enough,” as the candidate himself brought up in his speech on March 18, show the extent to which the nation is still fixated on old categories.
“There’s this notion that there’s an authentic race and you must fit it,” said Ms. Bratter, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University in Houston who researches interracial families. “We’re confronted with the lack of fit.”
The old categories are weakening, however, as immigration and the advancing age of marriage in the United States fuel a steady rise in the number of interracial marriages. The 2000 Census counted 3.1 million interracial couples, or about 6 percent of married couples. For the first time, the Census that year allowed respondents to identify themselves as being two or more races, a category that now includes 7.3 million Americans, or about 3 percent of the population.
Many people still stick to a one-race label, even if they are of mixed descent, researchers say, sometimes because of strong identification with one racial group, and occasionally because of a conscious effort not to dilute the numbers of the group they most identify with.
In interviews, people of mixed race said their decision about how to identify themselves was deeply personal, not political; it is influenced by how and where they were reared, how others perceive them, what they look like and how they themselves come to embrace their identity.
James McBride, 50, who described growing up in a Brooklyn housing project with his white mother in a memoir, “The Color of Water,” said that, like Mr. Obama, he identified himself primarily as a black man of mixed race. As a child whose father was black, he said: “I really wanted to be like all the other black kids. It was the larger group around me.” And through life, because of his brown skin, society has imposed its own label. “If cops see me, they see a black man sitting in a car,” he said.
But being proud to call himself African-American, Mr. McBride said, does not negate his connection to his “Jewish part,” his mother’s heritage. Asked which part of him was dominant, he said, “It’s like grabbing Jell-O.”
“But what difference does it make?” he added. “When you’re mixed, you see how absurd this business of race is.”
Mr. McBride and other mixed-race Americans said they took pride that Mr. Obama was presenting his biracial identity as an asset for the presidency. Even if he calls himself black, and has made a central element of his campaign biography the quest to claim that identity after his father left him, Mr. Obama is seen as giving equal weight in his story to his white mother and grandparents.
“He’s really having to play the field and know his audience really well,” said Phillip Handy, 21, a junior at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., whose mother is white and father is black. “In the end, when I hear his message, I don’t think he’s bailing out on any of us.”
While many mixed-race people say they see their heritage as a plus, they also say they often face pressure from others who want to pigeonhole them. Mr. McBride said his books invariably were shelved in the African-American sections of bookstores. “Why can’t I be a white author?” he said. “I’m half white.”
Shafia Zaloom, 36, a teacher in San Francisco who is Asian and white, said she was often asked if her two children, who look like her white husband, were adopted. “Sometimes, when I’m at the playground, people think I’m the nanny,” she said.
Ms. Zaloom, who gets her looks from her Chinese mother, said she had been on the receiving end of insensitive racial remarks and gestures about Asians. But she fully identifies as mixed race.
“It’s really unfair to expect people to choose,” she said. “It’s like asking to be loyal to one parent or the other.”
Although still small, the mixed-race population is increasingly visible among the young. The 2000 Census found that 41 percent of the mixed-race population was under 18. Multiracial advocacy groups like the Mavin Foundation in Seattle say that mixed race people now find themselves better reflected in books, in college courses, in school brochures and in teacher’s training in public schools than they did in the past. Carmen Van Kerckhove, a diversity consultant who runs a blog on race and popular culture, racialicious.com, said she doubted that the uproar that greeted Tiger Woods when he described himself as “Cablinasian” (for heritage that includes Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian) in 1997 would be as strong today.
“When you’re multiracial, you can be several things at the same time,” said Ms. Van Kerckhove, 30, who is white and Asian and has endorsed Mr. Obama on her blog for moving the race debate away from “who’s black and who’s white, or who’s a victim and who’s an oppressor.”
Unfortunately, Ms. Van Kerckhove added, suspicions persist about the motivation of people who identify themselves as mixed race. Many people, she said, wonder, “Are multiracial people trying to be multiracial as a way to escape racism?”
The mixed-race terrain is full of such bumps and tricky balances. But at least, many multiracial Americans say, they are no longer seen as oddities. Ms. Zaloom expects that her 6-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son will experience a different journey to self-identity than she did. At times while growing up, Ms. Zaloom recalled, she struggled with questions about whether she was white enough or attractive. She rebelled against Chinese language lessons, her mother’s Chinese food and eating with chopsticks.
But when her daughter was born, she named her Mei Lan, like her maternal grandmother, to honor her Chinese roots. Then she named her son Kyle in deference to her paternal Irish side. Her wish for her children, she said, is that they realize that the benefits of a mixed identity outweigh any challenges.
“Ultimately,” she said, the goal is “to not have to check a box.”
March 23, 2008
NY Times
The Way We Live Now
Mixed Messenger
By PEGGY ORENSTEIN
A few weeks ago, while stuck at the Chicago airport with my 4-year-old daughter, I struck up a conversation with a woman sitting in the gate area. After a time, she looked at my girl — who resembles my Japanese-American husband — commented on her height and asked, “Do you know if her birth parents were tall?”
Most Americans watching Barack Obama’s campaign, even those who don’t support him, appreciate the historic significance of an African-American president. But for parents like me, Obama, as the first biracial candidate, symbolizes something else too: the future of race in this country, the paradigm and paradox of its simultaneous intransigence and disappearance.
It’s true that, over the past months, Obama has increasingly positioned himself as a black man. That’s understandable: insisting on being seen as biracial might alienate African-American leaders and voters who have questioned his authenticity. White America, too, has a vested interest in seeing him as black it’s certainly a more exciting, more romantic and more concrete prospect than the “first biracial president.” Yet, even as he proves his black cred, it may be the senator’s dual identity, and his struggles to come to terms with it, that explain his crossover appeal and that have helped him to both embrace and transcend race, winning over voters in Birmingham, Iowa, as well as Birmingham, Ala.
Mixed-race marriages were illegal in at least 16 states when Obama was born, though the taboo was historically inconsistent — white men could marry Asian women in some places, for instance, while marriages like mine, which go the other way, were forbidden. Since 1967, when those laws were declared unconstitutional, the rate of interracial marriage among all groups has skyrocketed. And those couples have children. Of the seven million Americans who identified themselves as mixed-race in the 2000 census (the first in which it was possible to do so), nearly half were under the age of 18. Almost 5 percent of Californians now identify themselves as mixed-race; by comparison, fewer than 7 percent are African-American. Hawaii, Obama’s childhood home, is the most diverse state in the Union: 21 percent of residents identified as “Hapa,” a Hawaiian word meaning “half” that has gone from being a slur against mixed-race Asians to a point of pride — and has increasingly been adopted by multiracials of all kinds on the Mainland.
But the rise of multiracialism is not all Kumbaya choruses and “postracial” identity. The N.A.A.C.P. criticized the census change, fearing that since so few in the black community are of fully African descent, mass attrition to a mixed-race option could threaten political clout and Federal financing. Mexican-Americans, a largely mixed-race group, fought to be classified as white during the first half of the 20th century; during the second half, they fought against it.
Among Asians, Japanese-Americans in Northern California have argued over “how Japanese” the contestants for the Cherry Blossom Queen must be (the answer so far: 50 percent, which is less rigid than San Francisco’s Miss Chinatown U.S.A., whose father must be Chinese, but more strict than the 25 percent Chinese required to be Miss Los Angeles Chinatown).
Hapas muddy discussions of affirmative action and the gathering of health-care statistics. When a Centers for Disease Control researcher who called to survey me about my daughter’s vaccinations asked about her race, I answered, Caucasian and Asian. There was a pause, then she asked, “Which would you mainly identify her as?”
More than anything, though, Hapas remind us that, while racism is real, “race” is a shifting construct. Consider: Would Obama still be seen as “black enough” if the wife by his side were white? And don’t get my husband started on why Tiger Woods — whose mother is three-quarters Asian and whose father was one-quarter Chinese and half African-American — is rarely hailed as the first Asian-American golf superstar.
Race is thrust on Hapas based on the shades of their skin, the shapes of their eyes, their last names. (Quick: What race is Apolo Ohno? How about Meg Tilly? Both are half-Asian.) But ethnicity, an internal sense of culture, place and heritage — that’s more of a choice. Cultivating it in our children could be the difference between a Hapa Nation that’s a rich, variegated brown and one that fades to beige. I know that challenge firsthand. Because we are trying to raise our daughter as bicultural, much in our family is up for grabs, from the food we eat — and what we say before and after eating it — to the holidays we celebrate to whether we call her rear end a tushie or an oshiri.
For the moment, she attends a Jewish preschool (where, as it happens, a quarter of her class, not to mention an assistant rabbi, is Hapa) and identifies so strongly with my heritage that my husband has begun to feel uneasy. He recently suggested that, for balance, we enroll her in Dharma school at the Japanese Buddhist church. Let me be clear: he is an atheist who grew up Methodist; I hew to a kind of social-relativist concept of “oneness.” And our daughter is going to spend her days shuttling between two temples?
I sometimes wonder what will happen in another 50 years. Will my grandchildren “feel” Jewish? Japanese? Latino? African-American? Will they be pluralists? “Pass” as Anglo? Refuse categorization? Will Hapa Nation eventually make tracking “race” impossible? Will it unite us? Or will it, as some suggest, further segregate African-Americans from everyone else? The answer to all these questions may be yes. Regardless, watching Senator Obama campaigning with his black wife, his Indonesian-Caucasian half-sister, his Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law and all of their multiculti kids, it seems clear that the binary, black-and-white — not to mention black-or-white — days are already behind us.
Peggy Orenstein is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of a memoir, “Waiting for Daisy.”
I heard about this late last night from a member over at mulatto.org. He is the one with the AWESOME hair in the video. He's also quoted in the article. He is the one that started that college group, "Fusion". His girlfriend is also in the video and she's a mulatto.org member, as well. She's the one that said her parents told them they are both but can ID as they please. I guess I was so excited about it I never thought to post it over here! I'm glad Obama did the whole "race" speech, as I mentioned elsewhere. Up until then, it seemed like he was missing an opportunity, you know?
HERE is an interview with Philip Handy that aired on the Mixed Chicks Chat podcast yesterday, June 7, 2009. Unfortunately, I don't see a button to actually play the podcast on that page.
I listened via iTunes.
Here is the blurb about it-
Quote:
June 07, 2009
Episode 105: Phillip Handy & his research on multiracial identity
Our guest today started a group for Multiracial students at Rutgers called FUSION and that led to a major in psychology and sociology with a focus on multiracial identity. He joined us to talk about his experiences growing up Mixed and some of the questions he explored in his research.
HERE is an interesting commentary on the title article of this thread. It presents a non-American perspective, specifically a British one, of the system of racial classification in the US.
Matthew Harwood wrote:
Obama and mixed race in America
------------
Why calling Barack Obama a "black" man resurrects an age old racist institution particular to the United States and defeats the purpose of a post-racial politics.
------------
Since The New York Times grappled with the question yesterday of what it means to be a person of mixed race in America, I think it's time to just come out and say it: Barack Obama is not black; he is biracial and in the most literal sense of the term, an African-American.
This is neither good nor bad - no amount of ancestry makes one qualified for the most powerful political position in the world. And it shouldn't be a controversial statement, although I fear it is.
Nevertheless, being objective about Obama's biracial heritage presents an opportunity to transcend archaic notions of race as a fixed identity where round individuals have to be smashed into square holes, and in the process deny half or any other fraction of their ancestry.
Read on ...
As The New York Times reports:
Quote:
Americans of mixed race say that questions about whether Mr. Obama, with a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, is "too black" or "not black enough," as the candidate himself brought up in his speech on March 18, show the extent to which the nation is still fixated on old categories.
And from this fixation on "old categories" comes a more salient historical reason to stop calling Barack Obama a "black" man. Even the notion that Barack Obama is black, or can't be white for that matter, derives from a "peculiarly American institution known informally as 'the one-drop rule,'" wrote Lawrence Wright in a 1996 article for the New Yorker, "which defines as black a person with as little as a single drop of 'black blood.'"
Quote:
This notion derives from a long discredited belief that each race had its own blood type, which was correlated with physical appearance and social behavior. The antebellum South promoted the rule as a way of enlarging the slave population with the children of slave holders. By the nineteen-twenties, in Jim Crow America the one- drop rule was well established as the law of the land .... "We are the only country in the world that applies the one-drop rule, and the only group that the one-drop rule applies to is people of African descent," [Professor G. Reginald] Daniel observes.
If Americans are truly interested in a post-racial politics, it seems necessary that they stop doing a racial calculus every time a person doesn't fit into their preconceived notions of race, and just allow him or her to exist comfortably across, or in between, races, or better yet, exist purely as an individual. The idea a person must fit into either or any racial camp for that matter must be jettisoned and recognized for what it is: the flotsam of our deeply racist past.
Barack Obama's candidacy may spark the discussion that makes the concept of strict racial parameters obsolete. And for that possibility alone, his rise to political prominence stands as a historic occurrence.
'
FAQ
Search
Register
Log in
He's also quoted in the article. He is the one that started that college group, "Fusion". His girlfriend is also in the video and she's a mulatto.org member, as well. She's the one that said her parents told them they are both but can ID as they please. I guess I was so excited about it I never thought to post it over here! 
I'm glad Obama did the whole "race" speech, as I mentioned elsewhere. Up until then, it seemed like he was missing an opportunity, you know?