mixed like me mr. prez : V1N2

i'm a serious reader; books, online, mags, zines, scraps lying around the laundromat. in my internets geeking i found an excellent article by Anna Soellner from American Progress Action written before the election. she makes some interesting points here and being mixed race herself (and of my generation) as well as some fascinating statistics thrown in the mix.

my sister and i were born in the late 60s. Soellner states that when she was born in 1970, ' '
.... in the early 1970s less than 1 percent of marriages were mixed.' yeowza. that means proportionately there are much less people of mixed race born 35+ ago than there are now. how amazing it is to me that that's changed.

as a kid i was bombarded with questions like 'are you mixed?' 'who's black and who's white?' and on several occasions 'it must not have been easy for you growing up.'

in san francisco, yes. in america not so much.

at the time there were no words like multi-racial (which in of itself baffles me). i remember doing consensus forms as a kid. the options were white (caucasian) black, native american, or asian. that's it. no subcategories as they exist today (i.e., hispanic of african origin or asian (pacific islander) or assian (non-pacific islander) african american of non-hispanic origin). that shit's insane, but the american landscape i grew up in has changed. when i was 13 i wanted to acknowledge both my black and italian heritage. so i would check 'other' and write in black-italian american, italian-black american, um...mixed: black and italian...um....afro-italian american. truthfully this seemed like a lot of work. in my early 20's i read the book bullet proof diva by Lisa Jones. she opened my eyes to something that i hadn't considered. as the american population grew and was becoming more diverse; those of us of mixed race had to choose (at least statistically) how we identified ourselves. she made a solid point that by checking other or mixed race separated her from being how she identified herself. no matter how you assess it, being mixed in this country; girl, you black. it is our legacy. embrace it, i thought, why would i want to be separated from my own people? i'm black, my mother is not. we have had some interesting discussions on this issue. and she always states emphatically that she thinks of my sister and i as her children before she thinks of us as black, although she acknowledges that we are. as i was getting into the self-expression of my youth she was always waving a picture of sherry belafonte in my face; with her short-cut natural, dashikis, and big hoop earrings. at the time i was so immersed in the punk aesthetic it would be several years before i started rocking turbans, beads and african queen accouterments. but i never forgot that photo of sherry. she was beautiful - and (mixed) black!

it's a complex issue in america simply because of our history and the impact - historically and consciously - of slavery. in 1852 how would i be identified? slave. in the jim crow south what would my experience have been? segregated and unequal. although i am proud of my heritage i am a black woman of mixed race. if you took every black person in america side by side all are mixed on some genetic level; a human color bar from the lightest beige to the deepest blue-black. that's the uniqueness of the american experience.

so now when a consensus comes my way or some survey i check african-american. because i am and so is obama. just call me sistah, mistah!

Mixed Like Me