Multiracal In America

Multiracal In America

Ebony Magazine
May 2011

Adam Serwer

In The Mix: Being Biracial in America

When President Barack Obama checked “Black” on his census form last April, it was an actual news story. The Associated Press subhed [sub-headline] was lined with implicit anguish: “President Ticks One Box Concerning Racial Heritage on U.S. Census Form, Despite Mixed Heritage.” For some, it was a grand betrayal by the candidate who had run ads highlighting the fact that he had been raised by his White grandparents, the candidate who falsely presented himself as a living avatar of American racial progress.

The president, a self-identified “mutt,” could have chosen any number of options. He could have checked White and Black, as I have every year I’ve been old enough to fill out the census form myself.  But Obama had made his own reasoning clear in 2007 when 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft asked him how he had decided he was Black. The president had a simple answer. “Well, I’m not sure I decided it. I think if you look African-American in this society, you’re treated as an African-American.” Put another way, there’s nothing contradictory about being biracial and being Black. Since there have been Black people on American soil, the children of Black and White parents have always been seen as Black. It’s only in the past few years that we’ve even begun to ask the question and that people of biracial parentage have begun giving different answers.

Even in 2010, biracial people are treated as a novelty or a contradiction. My parents pointedly did not raise me as one or the other.  I never found anything odd about being given children’s biographies of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali as Hanukkah presents. But interracial relationships are hardly novel. During Reconstruction, Black Republicans in Tennessee attempted to pass a bill criminalizing sex  between Blacks and Whites to prevent rape and to stop White men from fathering illegitimate children and then abandoning them. Instead they only succeeded in passing a bill that prevented the recognition of marriages between Blacks and Whites, ensuring that White men could continue siring biracial children without being fathers to them.

Read more in the May issue of Ebony available on newsstands now!

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