This is who I am: Defining mixed-race identity |
This is who I am: Defining mixed-race identity
The Seattle Times
2008-09-28
Lornet Turnbull, Seattle Times staff
The story of race in the U.S. is changing, and so is the way many of us identify ourselves. That’s especially true in the Seattle area, which has a higher concentration of mixed-race people than any other metro area in the country.
Rachel Clad’s parents are a black woman from Detroit and a white man from California who met in the Peace Corps in Africa.
Clad, 26, was born in New Zealand and spent her early years in far-flung parts of the world before her family settled into a middle-class lifestyle in Washington, D.C.
She’ll tell you she’s multiracial.
“People look at me and see African American,” she said. “In my mind, that’s not who I am. I’m both and I’d like to be seen as both.”.
Aaron Hazard’s mother was a French-Canadian white woman who met his African-American father at a dance in Boston in the 1930s, at a time when such unions were forbidden.
When he signed up for service during the Vietnam era, the Army listed him as white, although Hazard has never referred to himself as anything other than black.
“It’s what my father was and that’s what I am,” the 62-year-old South Seattle resident said. “Back then there were too many white people to remind me of it.”
Barack Obama’s rise to prominence has broadened the dialogue around race in a country that has always done a poor job talking about it. And this new attention is prompting some people of mixed race to more closely examine how they define themselves.
That’s especially so in Greater Seattle, which has a higher concentration of mixed-race people — nearly 4 percent of the area’s population — than any other large metropolitan area in the country.
“One of the biggest mistakes people make in this discussion is assuming there’s only one correct way to be biracial,” said author Elliott Lewis, who grew up in Eastern Washington and has written about the biracial experience…
…”There were historical rules … that if you were mixed and had a parent who wasn’t white, then you checked the census box of the parent who wasn’t white,” said Maria P. P. Root, a Seattle clinical psychologist who has written extensively on mixed race in America.
“There was this gate-keeping around whiteness. The public still hasn’t gotten around to the fact that you can be blended.”…
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Tags: Lornet Turnbull, Maria P. P. Root, Maria Primitiva Paz Root, Maria Root, Seattle, The Seattle Times