My husband……is half Japanese.  I asked him which race he wanted to be put down as, and he just looked at me.  He didn’t grow up here and that sort of racial identity is completely foreign to him.  We ended up putting him down as white, because he was born and raised in Europe.

That’s why I’m praying I live to 2050To watch baggers’ heads explode.

Bi-racial is an odd termThink about it – you say that Mr E is bi-racial, but don’t identify yourself or anyone else in our family as such.  But if as an adult Mr. E has a baby with a bi-racial woman, what will that child be? And if that child, the product of two bi-racial parents has a child with someone who say has one bi-racial parent and one black parent, what will that child be?  In the past, when bi-racial wasn’t used as a term, that child would have been considered Black (as indeed the people in our family with just that lineage are).  But then, back then Mr. E would have been considered Black.  It’s interesting that you categorize Mr E according to current terminology, but the rest of our family by old customs.
Technically, by today’s standards, I would say we’re all multi-racial or multi-ethnic.  But I still feel more comfortable thinking of us (Mr E included) as Black.  I’ve finally defined, in my mind, Black as multi-racial people with African ancestors.
Race and the words used to define it are just inadequate at best.

What are you?That’s an old Pittsburgh question: is your heritage Italian, Croatian, Polish, African? On St. Patrick’s Day everybody’s Irish. When they have heritage festivals, even in smaller towns like McKeesport, you’ll find guys of Scots heritage who’ve never seen a caber trying to throw one and the kids doing the hora and Lithuanian dances and OMG the food! People of Serbian and Croatian heritage listen to the tamburitzans say thank God we’re here.  

I identified E as biracialBecause that’s what his parents classify him as. That’s why the whole census designation is getting more muddy, as society and individuals choose to assign themselves. It’s accurate to describe Mr. E as biracial, but he could, when the 2020 census takes place, choose to be black (or white).
A good deal of what he would choose on his own one day to me  may not based on accuracy, but by how society treats him. To choose “black” of his own volition is a political and cultural choice. The cultural guidepost has moved for so many that we “old folks” are the ones that will have the most trouble navigating this. He’ll figure it out, and those in our generation will have to get used to it.
And you’re right, I don’t identify myself as biracial since it’s inaccurate; I’m of multiracial heritage, but that’s not particularly helpful if the point is to count people as they are perceived, and the only way I’ve been perceived by society is either 1) black, 2) biracial (and that has only happened in the last 5 years or so), or 3) Puerto Rican (lol, back in the day in NYC when my hair was straightened).
You raise a good point about what would his children be if he married a biracial woman. To me, in terms of the census, it’s about accurate self-identification, once you’re as mixed as you or I are, it becomes a matter of what you want to claim based on legacy and life experience.
Back in the day E would be black without a doubt. One of my other questions when I think of the biracial kids out there who can pass is whether they will adequately understand just how hard it was for his family members that were classified by society (and themselves) as black, and how that decision forged a certain life path with different consequences.

Same here……I’ll only be 94.

Preview channel on that last one:Not so much.
My kid is similar in phenotype to E, being raised by perceived-as-white moms, and she has no clue. At the age of 10, she is starting to be abstract enough in her thinking to grasp that, for example, the Lovings’ kids looked like her and were expected to comply with racial segregation because of that.
As adoptive parents, we have a whole ‘nother layer of explaining to do: about how her ancestors were treated by Europeans, how that’s connected to American racial thinking, and how she is both connected to and separated from people of color in the past and the present because she has no continuous thread connecting her to segregation, let alone slavery.
Interestingly, and probably due to our simple yet abstract explanations for prejudice, she does see the parallel between her status as a mixed person as it might have been under segregation, and her status as a non-person in OK and LA because of her parentage. The Lovings went to court in part so that their children could legally live with both parents in their home state, after all.

Sorry, why not?I always thought of biracial as “of two races” not “having one parent each of different races.”
Assuming there is a reason to track it, having one parent who is biracial (black/white) and one who is black still only involves the same two races, hence biracial.
Otherwise we have to go back into the wonderful world of mulatto and quadroon, etc, which is what I thought we were trying to get away from.
Someday, we’ll be at a place where we don’t thing about race, and if anything, pay a bit of attention to ethnic background. Until then, there’s no excuse not to have biracial/multiracial as a clear checkbox on the census, or explicitly allow checking multiple boxes.

Since it came up….Just being completely nosy.
I can certainly understand the white privilege and social constructs that make the whole question of “passing for white”  a topic of discussion, and some practical consideration, especially regarding multi-racial people.
Is there an equivalent phrase regarding “passing for black”?  President Obama has made no secret of his ethnicity, but people take for granted that he is black, and there’s clearly no question regarding it.
Is there a phrase, for example, that describes the experience of a very light-skinned person with European features actively claiming their African-American heritage?
Pam, you point out that neither you nor your brother can pass for white, but what if you could, and chose not to? Is that just how things are, or is there a phrase that covers it?

passing for blackThat doesn’t exist in any American reality that I know of. The whole point of passing for white is to attain the privilege denied them if they looked black.
Strictly speaking, if one had European features, it would matter whether they had an identifiable black parent. I would assume they would claim some form of non-white identity.
Pop in a DVD of Imitation of Life to see a full-blown Douglas Sirk look at passing and what havoc it wreaked back in the day. I think how you perceive yourself has to come from your family legacy and whether you’re proud of it or ashamed of it.
There is less stigma if you’re multiracial, but if you’re non-white looking, there’s always a box someone else wants to put you in. I am what I am; I wouldn’t have questioned it, but I’m from a different generation of “fair-skinned colored folk” as it were. Same oddity as leaving “negro” on the form. I cannot imagine who uses that self-description.

The current census has this (starting w/ 2000)…>or explicitly allow checking multiple boxes.
The census allows you to check more than one/as many that apply.
So for myself (person 1), I checked white, black, and the “other” box and wrote in multiethnic/racial. For Person 2, my spouse, and Person 3, our daughter, I checked the same damn things – only difference, though, is that they are both PuertoRican/Latino as well.
In the past, my spouse has checked white and Hispanic. But we’re evolving as a family and he is seeing himself as mixed heritage. The kidlet is too young to have her own opinion – who knows what the next census will do?

The race and other questions are vexingI can udnerstand the President’s conundrum – I ran into several myself, in four different questions (though one of those was a Person 2 Question).
For me:
1. No “sex” class for WBT, no way to explain that I am “F” on my driver’s license, but “M” on my birth certificate.
I checked F.
2. I own shares of stock in a corporation.  The corporation owns the apartment building.  I have a “proprietary lease” and am a “proprietary tenant” – technically, I don’t own the apartment.
I checked that I own with “mortgage or other loan”
(The home ownership question bothered me a bit.  In New York, co-op buildings are taxed as if they are rental buildings, with assessments that do not reflect the value of the individual units, but represent an appraisal/comparison with similar rental buildings.  This results in me being proportionally undertaxed compared with owners of single and two-family homes.)
3. Race.  Being half-Sicilian in descent, I’m counted as white as the Arabs and Lebanese, regardless of what proportion of Moorish blood flows through my veins.  
I checked “white.”  I might have considered listing the possible races and ethnicities in my background, but there was not enough space, and I don’t have enough information.  Maybe some time in the next 10 years I might buy one of those ancestral dna analyses – maybe my answer might be different in 10 years when the next census rolls around.
4. My spouse and I are both F and are legally married in New York because of my minor birth certificate technicality in New York (see 1 above).  Lucky for us, the Bush rule that would not have counted us as married regardless of what we checked, was overturned by the Obama administration.  Had this rule not have been changed, I would have either refused to cooperate with the Census (causing an undercount), or I would have found some other way to “queer” the census rather than just put a sticker on the form (perhaps causing an overcount).
As for the Obama choice to check only one race – that’s his prerogative, though it’s one that might be seen as an acceptance on his part of the old “one drop” rule (one drop of non-white blood making an individual non-white).
I’m in the title insurance industry, and I regularly have to redact copies of old covenants and restrictions in title commitments because state and federal law requirements that these are not only no longer enforceable, but that even the language in the instruments of record be redacted when we provide copies.
One particular restriction for a 1920′s development in New Rochelle that I have seen, forbade occupancy of the homes in the subdivision to anyone not considered by the developer to be white enough, with the exception of domestic servants, using the terms negro, mulatto, quadroon and octaroon to define the degrees of unacceptable non-white blood.  A single non-white great-grandparent would be sufficient to have kept an individual from ownership or even a tenancy.
This is the kind of shameful thing in our history that is being suppressed rather than exposed.  Is it a matter of trying to cover up the past?  There are so many white people in northern states who think that racial segregation and prejudice is something one only finds in the South, or in history books, when it still exists all around us.
It’s not my place to judge President Obama’s choice of race. For me, it depends a lot on where the criticism might be coming from.  This is one of those areas where people like me, who are ostensibly “white,” should not have any comment to make one way or another.  My mention of the “one drop rule” was merely that – an observation, not a judgment.
I do believe that the census form allows for the perpetuation of racial stereotypes, even if the purpose of the form in that regard is benign. At least it allows for the individual (At least the individual filling out the form) to make her or his own choise as to whether to identify as a member of a particular race, or to claim to be bi- or multi-racial.  To that extent it is an improvement.
As long as the majority is not foisting the definition on the individual, the President’s own choice is fine with me, because it is his choice.

I knew Sulu wore the uniform at home every day…
I just knew it!

Why does the census form NOTBreak down “white” or “black” into its’ various ethnicities?
I also wonder what box Todd Palin would check off here.  

Why didn’t they just call it ‘ethnic background’?If Japanese, Chinese, and Korean count as separate ‘races’ then Irish, Welsh, and English should as well, and then I could claim to be multi! I’m still steamed about the last census. I wrote in ‘Irish’, and some weeks later I got a phone call from some snotty-tude census worker who basically told me I wasn’t allowed to identify as Irish, and kept at me for a good ten minutes until I gave up and let him put down ‘White’. He never quite threatened me with jail time, but he somehow made it sound as if Something Bad would happen if I didn’t submit. If I had remained calmer I would have thought to ask to speak to his supervisor (shoulda-shoulda).
BTW, nobody so far has mentioned that the Jews are as invisible as the Arabs in the census! Can you imagine what would have happened at a Census Bureau planning meeting if anyone had asked about including Jews as a ‘race’? And yet there are still people who treat them that way (even without bringing up the Holocaust).  Another example of how religion, nationality, cultural upbringing, and O loads of other factors got so blobbed up in the one word ‘race’ as to make the whole thing absurd.

racial restrictive covenantsYou might be interested to look at this Seattle website.  A large number of Seattle neighborhoods had restrictive covenants built into their charters when they were developed.  I’m not sure whether the old unconstitutional language is redacted when titles are transferred here, but I can tell you that people in Seattle are aware of this history and are making an effort not to allow it to get buried.  Seattle certainly isn’t free of racism, but it does make me feel good that at least some of the inhabitants here are willing to take our history head on.

Pam, you don’t necessarily have to have white ancestorsThey could just as easily be Arab, Indian (as in from India), any of dozens of different Asian gene-pools or all of the above. And there are ligher skinned peoples who are 100% African for dozens of generations.
This is what makes the whole notion of “race” so absurd. It would be nice to see a day when the whole concept is abandoned for good.

considering on my father’s side…With relatives from Columbus County, NC and in Tuskeegee, AL, it’s reasonable to guess that there was some slave-related descendants in the mix.

One drop of non-’white’ blood“A single non-white great-grandparent would be sufficient to have kept an individual from ownership or even a tenancy.”
While reading Edwin Black’s “IBM and the Holocaust” (about how IBM enthusiastically used punch-card machines to sort the races and run the deathcamps, among other uses), he talks about how the Nazis culled census records, town vital records, even family bibles to look for ‘non-German’ ancestors.  
As IBM technology developed through the ’30s, the Nazis were able to go further back into family’s histories.  He talks about 32nds and 64ths, where the Nazis would grab German citizens and send them to the camps because they were 1/64th Jewish – and they had no idea!  These upstanding, Hitler-loving Germans were sent to their deaths because of a great-great-great-great-grandparent that they never even knew about was Jewish.
+ + + + +
Me, I’m white as an aspirin, my wife is white, my kids are white – to quote the great Todd Alcott, “I apologize for being a straight, white male”.

Well……  I’m so freaking ambiguous for some people that I do indeed pass for Black.  I also pass for white.  I rarely pass for Native.
Very sadly to me, hair has a great deal to do with it, and being the sort who can change her hair at whim (although not entirely out of choice in the matter), I can get a very different reaction based entirely on my hair — even from the same person.
And I know you and some others will understand that, although others willhave a hard time with it.
I was actually somewhat saddened when I heard that the PResident made that choice — not upset, as I agree that he has that choice, but saddened.
Far too often those of us of mixed race are informed we must choose and we are pushed into a box more by others than by our own wills and desires.
I talk about that briefly here: http://www.dyssonance.com/?p=1213
I can only hope he was allowed to make that choice for himself.
Your point about family legacy and such is also well taken (and something I covered here: http://www.dyssonance.com/?p=1493 from a personal perspective to show how the idea of internalized racism kicks in).
There is less larger society stigma, but more racial stigma. As one has been reduced, the other has been increased.  ”stick to your own kind” is still one of the strongest of evils we have to overcome, and when it comes that, I simply have one question:
What is my kind?

I’m going to have to disagree with that logic.Given this country’s history, and the specific history of the region from which she hails, there really isn’t “just as much chance” that Pam’s non-African ancestry is anything other than white. The majority if not all of slave-descended blacks in the US are multiracial by definition as a direct consequence of slavery. No, not all of our non-African ancestry came about as the legacy of slavery, but a fair bit of it did. (My own family history includes blacks, whites from a number of different ethnic groups–one branch of which was most definitely traces back to slaveholders–and a couple of different Native tribes.) To me, it’s telling that the only people who always seem to want to deny or dance around this plain-as-day-fact are white people.
It’d be like saying multiethnic people in, say, South Korea are just as likely to have Icelandic ancestry as they are Japanese ancestry. It’s kind of ridiculous and ignores the ugliness of imperialism and other forms of systemic oppression in favor of a sort of Pollyanna view of history where ethnic mixing only ever happens when individuals of different backgrounds fall in love. Sorry, but that just isn’t the case.
The concept of race has no chance of “going away” as long as people keep turning into pretzels to avoid the uncomfortable parts of the past.

Thanks!That is an example of the phenomenon – it was pervasive, in so many cities around the country.  In the northeast, when suburbs were developed, the map filers for a subdivision would create restrictive covenants as a means to make the lots a better buy for the purchasers.
At some point in time before covenants became popular, a land speculator could sell off lots on a map without restrictions, and then might take an offer from a buyer who would take the remaining lots, who wanted to build a distillery or a tannery – businesses that were noisy or smelly, or even dangerous.  Imagine how the worth of the lots previously sold to people who were building houses would plummet, if there was a tannery down the block.
Sadly, racial restrictions were based on the same line of thinking – “if we can keep the non-white people out of the area, it would keep property values up.”  The worse thing, is that those covenants did tend to work in that way.
In the 1960′s and 1970′s, after the racial restrictions were outlawed, real estate brokers would sometimes “churn” a neighborhood – perhaps buying a house themselves and putting in a non-white family, and then rushing to get the white neighbors to list their homes for sale before the neighborhood “turned.” The issue of white flight was out there.  A law firm I worked for had a large case going that involved the siting of a low-income housing project in a particular “white” neighborhood had led the neighborhood into “tipping” as the white residents rushed to sell their homes before prices suffered. In a matter of a year, the demographics had gone from almost entirely white to almost entirely black.  The huge winners were the brokers.
Can this phenomenon happen today?  Brokers are known to break the law and steer buyers into communities where they might be more “compatible” with the neighbors, even if the buyers are not themselves looking for segregation.
In 1985, my family bought a home in what I thought was an integrated neighborhood based on the diversity of the people I saw walking along the streets.  It turned out that the neighborhood was nearly all white – most of the people of color I saw around the neighborhood worked at a nearby school for troubled children.  Trying consciously to look for diversity, to escape ending up in a mostly Italian-American neighborhood, I still ended up raising my children in a mostly Italian-American neighborhood.  Trying was apparently not enough.

That’s a fantastic book and should be read by absolutely everyoneI paid special attention to the section on the Netherlands because my wife is from there and many of her Jewish ancestors there were murdered in the camps.  What I found especially chilling in the Dutch story was that the Nazis were able to be so much more thorough in their genocide there than in some other places because they had the super-deadly combination of the IBM tabulation machines and a chief of the Dutch census bureau who was a perfectionist geek whose focus was on doing the best technical job possible, apparently without reflecting on the probable consequences.  The French were able to save so many of their Jewish citizens because census takers were willing to destroy census materials (at cost of their own lives), but not the Dutch nerd.  It is worth remembering how many people’s lives can hinge on the self-awareness of just one or two people.

I mostly grew up in Flint, MIin what was a mixed working-class and lower- to middle-class neighborhood.  Everyone there was white, white, white, although Flint was probably majority black at the time.  Obviously it was a very segregated city.  About the time I was in junior high (mid-70s), a black family moved in a few doors down, and numerous neighbors predicted that to be the start of a neighborhood flip.  Turns out it wasn’t, but also no other houses in the area were sold to non-whites.  I don’t know if there was no white flight because people just weren’t afraid of living in a mixed neighborhood, or because only one household was just a token and not enough to make people feel like a scary tide was coming in.  I’d like to believe it was the former, but since Flint was so sharply segregated, I suspect it was the latter.  I’d be curious to know what’s happened to the neighborhood since, and if there is a way of telling if any major changes in the racial balance was due to white flight vs. other factors.

Amen – and the pretzel logic comes from brown people too…My father’s family, at least his paternal side, has a tradition of saying that my Bermudan great-great-grandfather was Spanish (nobility, natch)… despite no records of this… as if to justify why my great-grandfather was listed as “mulatto” in other records.
Right. Spanish. Even though that’s pretty improbable in the 1880s when my great-grand was born. Because Bermuda was an English colony and is still a protectorate. And the family name is rare in the states, but a common one in western England. And my great-grand was a woodworker and the (white) families with that name were known as shipbuilders.
But in the 1910s when my great-grand came to the US, if you were noticeably light, but still “colored”, it was socially acceptable to claim a vague Spanish heritage, and outright dangerous and deadly to claim a whiter one. And considering that my family’s heritage is mixed thanks to coercion if not outright rape, who would be in a rush to claim it?

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Being “bi/multiracial” is a privilledge…that simply put, most people…specifically black Americans, do not have. Some people get to chose their race, but most have it thrust upon them.
the simple truth is that most “black” Americans have not black genes in the pool. I do not look white or mixed or any variation there of…but my family has what we call “weak genes”…that is to say that if you mix us with someone non-black, the children will not be identifiable as black based on appearance. We are clearly carrying the genes for blonde hair, blue eyes, straight hair etc.
The thing is that genes are usually irrelevant to this discussion since race is a social construction. Barack Obama is quite correct to identify himself as black…come what may, he was, and always will be treated as a black man in America. Conversely, Tiger Woods does not identify as black…yet with all of his fame and money at the end of the day, when he is in those largely white clubs, guess which identity wins out.
Identifying personally as biracial is meaningless. the important thing is how you get treated by society at large.

Did anyone mention…what a cute kid he is? My goodness, seeing the picture of y’all together just made my day. All race/ethnic topics aside, I just want to hug y’all! Forgive my sentimentality please, but little kids who have family who love them — well, they’re very lucky.