Proteus at the Border: Being Biracial in America

.I've read many accounts of conscious identity choice. So many memories have surfaced that I absolutely cannot bring myself to identify with some set of dry statistics or the other. Many of these books' subjects have talked about their belonging to a specific community based on who needed them more or with whom they felt more comfortable. No one has ever needed me culturally, but rather as an ethnic example of the success of the "melting pot" or some Guess Who's Coming to Dinner-discussion topic! That's not to say that I've been directly ostracized in the company of Blacks or Whites in any given moment; I haven't been included in either. As I grappled with these texts I found specific insights and dry numbers. Each statistic and each account held resonated specifically for me. I had finally found a group of records on an experience which I had assumed was unique! At the core of this uniqueness is the sense that I was the minority of one: at one point I have needed to answer for "not being Black enough" in some instances and "too Black" in others. My intense bitterness came from knowing the half-truth of the color line while feeling estranged from being able to deal with it.
I represent what Heather Dalmage refers to as a social Rorsach test. (Dalmage 105): "When people encounter a racially ambiguous person, they conduct a flurry of analyses to determine how the individual should be categorized. This is a racial Rorsach test, taken in a society that creates and accepts racial stereotypes.

Interpretations develop within a cultural, social, and historical context and, like all interpretations, depend on the language available to frame ideas." (ibid., 106). As an after-effect, those of us who fit this "racially ambiguous" category tend to choose with which race we directly associate because, she says, "(h)owever race is constructed, contested, and shaped to the course of daily interaction, it is something we all actively do." Her final assessment gives me a sense of relief: "Unlike a Rorschach test, which involves a passive process of interpretation, multiracial family members actively name and claim racial identities. (Dalmage 129)"

Many notable scholars and activists from the pre-Civil Rights movement classified themselves exclusively (DuBois, 133). There are accounts, however, of conscious identity choices by those of us born and raised in contemporary times. What struck me most was the huge array of choices made and the various reasons for them. In her exhaustive study Claiming Place, Marion Kilson interviewed 52 men and women about their experiences (Kilson, xii). She has included whole sections with the respondents' answers to her interview questions. This section will deal with the various ways in which Biracial Americans deal with our identities, both what we choose and why we choose them. Beyond Black gives four basic categories for how most of us classify ourselves: Biracial, which involves "the creation of a new category of identification, one that encompasses both of the socially accepted classifications of categorization of Black and White" with an added element (Rockquemore/Brunsma, 61) ; Singular Identity, when "an individual chooses between the two existing racial categories and identifies as exclusively one or the other ( ibid., 67); Transcendent, in which the person "consciously denies any racial category (ibid., 80); She had originally published a fourth category: Protean, in which "the biracial person possesses multiple personas that can be brought up in appropriate contexts (ibid, )" though she has recently considered it merely a transitional phase. The following are different respondents' accounts with reflections from other sources as well as my own. As I read these accounts, I noticed the vast amount of parallels as I have shifted among them.

In a '94 interview, rock star Lenny Kravitz said "'In society, in life, you are Black.' (My mother) taught me that from day one… you don't have to deny the White side of you if you're mixed, accept the blessing of having the advantage of two cultures, but understand that you are Black. In this world if you have a spot of Black, you are Black. So get over it (Normant)."

Still others have taken a more psychological approach to explaining their choice: "What I did was place things in my own mind a certain way a long time ago and then just leave them there and go forward. That placement was not only just an acceptance, but a celebration of being a person of color and going from there…I am Black. There's nothing else involved in it; there's no other discussion (Funderburg).
The late '80's produced a series of new racial identity studies, most of which were conducted by Biracial Americans. These researchers began to re-tool the former status-quo in regards to the Singular Black identity. ". . .(T)his new generation of researchers suggested that biracial was the only healthy choice for mixed-race people (Bowles). "With this new assumption, researchers assert that those who define themselves as Black suffer from "denial" (Rockquemore 1-3)." They are now pathologized in the same way that the previous generation of researchers stigmatized those who claimed any identity other than Black. As an example of the shift in assumptions, Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, a leading developmental psychologist proposes that a healthy self-concept requires integration of all an individual's racial identities.(Gibbs)" I disagree that claiming ones' self as any particular identity is a disease in and of itself; but the social shifts-where many of the academics who map us are also identity activists-speaks more to the politics of the new racial map than it does of objective codification.

One of Kilson's respondents said:"I think I was "Biracial" for a really long time and then I decided that Black culture needed me more. And that I was and am very, very much "Black." I'm not sure what "Biracial" means. I think that when I became "Black" was when I really realized I was uncomfortable with the term "Biracial." (Kilson 93)

Sentiments like these are common; I've had the "need" problem imposed upon me rather than have it spring from within. I should have graduated high school in the spring of 1999, but a huge depression coupled with a stubborn sense that I didn't care about anything kept me from going to school or to go out to work. My youngest sister Miriam had called my older brother, who was by this time living in Dayton, to try and shake me up, to try and motivate me. He wrote me a very long and blunt e-mail about what my obligations were, not just as a man at all but as a Black man specifically. He told me that I needed to be motivated, that my obligation was no longer just to myself, but to my family and to the Race. Of course, I had never really felt Black per se; I'd never felt that I was White, either.

The notion that Black culture "needs" us has several implications. DuBois called himself a Negro, despite that his father was White. An entire slew of Biracial Americans have at times been claimed by Black culture for their industry. Many of the early 20th Century Civil Rights activists were, in fact, Biracial: DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, and A. Philip Randolph, all of whom were early members of the NAACP and, consequently, major figures in the kick-start of the Civil Rights struggle, were Biracial; some of The Harlem Renaissance's foremost figures-Zora Neal Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Jean Toomer-all of whom have been recognized as major figures of Black literature over the years-were Biracial as well (Rockquemore/Brunsma 7).

In contemporary times, though, mixed people now live essentially different lives than African Americans because of our relatively ambiguous status. If we are to be counted, some say, we should be counted as separate members of the racial makeup of this country. Biracial Americans have been grossly under-represented as side-effects or anomalies for far longer than would be humanly acceptable to any other ethnic group. Du Bois, Hughes and the like grew up in different social contexts than I did. If people want to apply the "one drop" rule in the census, then they should guarantee that the rule is applied socially. I am not a political tool.

The tendency to claim oneself as "Black," "White," or "Biracial" has been at the center of a recent debate over the 2000 census. The 1990 census had exactly 4 categories: 1) Black, 2)White, 3) American Indian or Alaska Native, and 4) Asian or Pacific Islander. It required that a citizen fill exactly one marking per person in a household (Dalmage, 144). Of course, these classifications ignored the influx of Latino Americans in the last decade; but the central issue became one of "who is Black?" The benefit of marking us as solely African American increases the official number in the country. Increasing the official number of African Americans in the country gives the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, and other primarily African-American organizations more leverage in legislative policy. Many Black leaders have argued that, after all, most of the systematic rape of slaves hundreds of years ago amalgamated racial lines long before the "Biracial" or "Multiracial" classifications would have been a point at all (Kilson 16).

Multiracial lobbyists (including The Multiracial Activist, Project RACE, and others,) pushed very strongly for the census bureau to include a multiracial category into the 2000 census. They argued that the increase of biracial and Multiracial Americans warranted said modification into the official tally for the decade; the Bureau compromised by allowing for citizens to include two of their ethnicities. That census showed that approximately 4.6 million people filed as such (www.censusscope.com).

Still others persist: "I didn't see anything good about Whiteness. I saw White people as privileged and racist, even when they didn't know they were, so why would I want anything to do with being White. Plus the people I saw who said they were biracial just seemed to be trying not to be Black, and that wasn't me. I was proud to be Black. (Rockquemore 2-11)" This viewpoint reflects much of what I felt after we moved from Dayton into a small, southern suburb of the city. I saw flagrant examples of institutional racism in the suburbs. There were very few African-Americans in Kettering-even fewer Biracial people, that I knew of; but I got a lot of "Oh! I didn't know you were. . "'s when I was there. There seemed to be this vast curtain over the eyes of the suburbanites, decidedly absent among most Daytonians.

The veil was hardly complementary-generally, they opted out of direct racial confrontation and relied instead on disparaging social commentary. I was in a Chemistry class during my senior year of high school. It was an unruly class to say the least. One girl was particularly rowdy; she was joking with her friends with a beaker. At some point, she joked "hey, we're bad, but at least we're not in Dayton." The connotation was obvious: these people were raised to believe in an almost spectral image of "urban" or "inner city" life. They were brought up to fear the cities and keep to their sheltered, picket-fence-and decidedly homogenous-suburban enclave.

I told my best friend that I was writing a paper about this; she seemed incredibly surprised. She said that she was really looking forward to reading the final draft since I had essentially been socially around Whites for the last nine years. She didn't ever think of me as the "typical" Black person. I was confused, enraged; I didn't know how to react, so I simply ignored her. Dalmage talked about racist compliments: ". . .(M)any Whites assume that people of color covet their Whiteness. Multiracial family members, however, often question that White is a compliment and Black is an insult. (Dalmage, 115)" (Ironically, my friend has never considered herself "White;" she uses the term European-American, since her father is from Spain. But her statement goes to show how deeply entrenched we have become in racial qualification.)

I will never call any of my friends racist, either in this paper or to their faces; but I will readily admit that the social norms placed upon them have significantly influenced their image of Blacks or Whites. We are so ensconced in images of "typical" Black or "typical" White people that we cannot estrange ourselves from these stereotypes and/or general cultural images in social context. I have mentioned before that race is a purely social classification; that, because we are essentially social animals, we cannot divide ourselves from social norms. We are consequently subject to subliminal messages of race; and since most Americans are classified as Caucasian, we are necessarily subject to a Caucasian ruling system, with Caucasian social definitions as our status quo. This image of the "typical" Black person is an outgrowth of this implied racism, born of a system older than any of us. It is a system that we must beat if we are to ever call ourselves a true melting pot. I sincerely hope that we are able to transcend this image as a norm and recognize it as the stereotype that it is.