This post is making the rounds and stirring folks up: Why I don’t want to have biracial children.
The “One Drop Rule” previously was used as a method to keep people who had Black heritage down. Once an individual was identified as having Black heritage, it was easy for white people to dismiss and subjugate them. But, today, in many cases, the “one drop rule” is used instead to convince Black people who have a white parent that they, in fact, are closer to “whiteness” and should therefore reject the notion of struggling to dismantle white supremacy.
While some people claim that the term “biracial” allows them to embrace the fullness of their heritage, I think, unfortunately, that white people often use it to keep Black people, who could otherwise be working together to end racism, stratified. It creates a sort of “buffer” zone between white and Black, which is used to convince people that racism/white supremacy is no longer an issue.
Yikes.
As I’ve written before, my daughter is not “bi-racial”. She’s a glorious mix of many things. Her eight great-grandparents hailed from four different continents. Under the old One Drop rule, Heloise would be an “octoroon” (one great-grandfather was from what is now Nigeria.) Because of that history, blackness is a part of her identity. But she is also the great-granddaughter of Holocaust refugees; her great-great-grandmother died in Auschwitz. Is that not something to be claimed as well? She carries within her the blood of indigenous Colombians (probably Muisca); is their suffering not to be part of her story? And yes, she’s got healthy dollops of heritage from history’s more recent “winners”, ranging from dour, business-savvy North German Lutherans to fiery Scots-Irish Presbyterians. I’m the great-great-great-great grandson of a rabbi in a Moravian shtetl, and the great-great-great-grandson of Calvinist slave-owners in East Texas. My wife and I carry the blood of the victims and the perpetrators of slavery and genocide, and we have the gift to know more than many about our family history.
My wife can check a lot of boxes on the census form, and does so. She is proud to be black, and proud too to be the great-granddaughter of hard-working Dalmatian stonemasons. In her closet hang the soccer jerseys of the Nigerian, Croatian, and Colombian national squads. When it comes to her heritage, she fiercely rejects the notion of prioritizing one people and one history. And we are raising Heloise to reject that tribalism as well.
We speak Spanish and English to Heloise, but my mother-in-law easily mixes elegant Castilian with Afro-Colombian expressions that owe more to the Yoruba than to the inhabitants of Iberia. My daughter calls her vulva her “kozumba”, a West African loan word common among black Colombians; that same little one can recite the blessing for Friday night candlelighting. (With her voice, it starts “bah-wook atwah Ah-doe-nigh”.) Her nose is African, her eyes are green, her hair the same light brown as her father’s. She is African, Spanish, indigenous Colombian, English, Scots-Irish, Czech, Croatian, Welsh, German, Flemish and Jewish.
And as we all do, she carries history encoded in her genes. But she is carried by parents who know better than to saddle her with the burdens of that history. We live in Los Angeles, the global capital of self-reinvention, for many reasons: not least to raise a child who can honor her diverse heritage without ever being haunted by the false obligation to elevate one of those ancestries above all others. Heloise may someday feel the call of one aspect of her heritage more strongly than the rest, and that’s fine. She can self-describe as she likes. Until then, she is gloriously, unmistakably, unapologetically multi-racial.
For more, see this post: Kindly Remembrance: of Faith, Ancestors, and Debts to the Past
Hmm, I think I’m scared to leave a comment, given the three in front of me.
Hugo, I think you need to fine-tune your spam filter…anyway, what I wanted to throw out there is that my son decided to get married and he and his wife are expecting their first child, my first grandchild (yes, there are doubts about the wisdom of this, and I admit to feeling peculiar about my status as a 37 year old grandmother-to-be, not to mention the fact that I’m pregnant myself with my fiance’s first child.) HOWEVER, as my son pointed out, he is a legal adult and this is what he wanted and he is happy, so that’s got to be good enough, eh?
BUT anyway, his wife’s mother is from the Philippines, so my grandchild will be a quarter Filipino (or Filipina, as the case may be). I’m 90% sure that my son is pretty indifferent to his child-to-be’s multiracial status–I don’t really know how his wife feels about it (or much else–she and I aren’t really close). If there’s going to be any emphasizing of it in their household, it will probably come from her, not him. (Looking at them, I suspect the child will be tall, skinny and dark-haired, but other than that, looks-wise, it’s not really possible to make any other good guesses.) My son’s indifference is likely my fault; I can’t bring myself to care either in a really positive or negative way about said multiracial-ness, other than feeling a mild fondness for the idea based on my background in biologics that genetic diversity of parent organisms is frequently beneficial to the descendant organisms. I’m a quarter Native American myself, though this has had very little impact on my life personally–I wouldn’t recognize the culture or language of my paternal grandfather’s people if it bit me on the butt and I look almost exactly like my Northern European-descended mother.
So, I’m trying to decide if my lack of feeling about my own and the grandchild-to-be’s multiracial status is positive, in that we are trundling right along with the rest of America into a more and more melting-pot style of descendants in terms of race and ethnicity and I’m just going along peaceably with the flow; or if it’s a negative because I look, sound and culturally am white as a snowball and the child will probably be taken for the same (or if anything, some type of Asian mix and therefore subject to a lot less knee-jerk negative racial stereotyping than other non-white-appeariang people) and so since it doesn’t impact us, my indifference is not a result of goodwilled inclusiveness and evolving culture but of the fact that I personally don’t have to care one way or the other.
Not to mention that “biracial” or “multiracial” do not always mean part white. A person with one Native American parent and one black parent may identify as biracial. My cousin has a Cherokee/Irish father and a Cherokee/Vietnamese mother. There is no reason that she should be expected to grow up and reject her Cherokee roots, or her Vietnamese ones, or even her Gaelic speaking Northern Irish ones. I have seen criticisms like this directed at people like Tiger Woods, who are primarily of other racial and ethnic minorities and are treated as self loathing for not exclusively IDing as black. For a person who is half Asian, one quarter black, one eighth Native American, and one eighth Dutch, insisting that he ID as only black is insisting that he ignore the history, suffering, and culture of traditionally oppressed ancestors.
Biracial does not equal passing, or attempting to pass either.
Why don’t people realize that they don’t even actually know what they “are”? Unless you’ve had one of these incredibly expensive mitochondrial DNA tests, or you are from a Chinese village where they have meticulous records going back hundred of years, there is no way people “know” what they “are.” That isn’t even addressing what should be the real point– what I consider to be the severely flawed perception that ones’s “race” or ethnicity is equivalent to “who they are.”
She and I fiercely reject the notion of prioritizing one people and one history! Love it and my shiny new hyphen.
Jessica Ward-Ramirez
@Theresa Muir: That’s only true if one conflates ethnic identity with a full and exhaustive genealogy, which is a little simplistic. Ethnicity is more flexible than that, and depends as much on one’s own upbringing and cultural background as any particulars of ancestry. Ethnicity isn’t set in stone, after all, but something that evolves over time, even within a particular community.
All I know about my grandparents is that they came from Texas. I don’t even know my great-grandparents’ names! It’s so interesting that you can know so much about those who came before you. I wish I did!