THE UNITED STATES OF BEIGE by Helena Holgersson-Shorter

This post was originally published in the November 2008 issue of The MotherHood as, Because I Said So— Barack: The Great “What Are You?” Hope.

Well, here we are in the “God and Politics” issue of The MotherHood — what better place than this to reflect on the significance of Our Biracial Savior, Barack Obama?   

Oh, you were thinking of him as the African-American Democratic presidential candidate?  Well, who can blame you.

It certainly is confusing, since our dominant cultural discourse is still shaped by the 19th century, uniquely American “one drop rule” that rendered people with any African ancestry, however minute or physically unapparent, socially and legally black."

Accordingly, even though most media stories addressing the historic nature of Obama’s candidacy refer to him as African-American, some will mention the fact that he has a white mother within the same sentence or paragraph without noting any apparent contradiction or irony. Many African-Americans, particularly those of the baby boomer generation, accept this traditional line of thinking as well. My mother, for instance, sometimes pauses in the middle of a conversation to say, “I can’t believe I have lived to see the day a black man just might become president.”

On the other hand, many biracial people and I are wondering when the unbelievable happens, is one of our own still going to be called the nation’s first African-American president? Barack and I (I love saying that!) are part of that biracial generation that author Danzy Senna has called “canar(ies) in a coal mine.” When my parents got married in December of 1967, it had only been six months since the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving vs. Virginia at last struck down the laws making interracial marriage illegal in sixteen states. When my parents celebrated my first birthday in 1970, there were still only 65,000 other black-white interracial couples blowing out candles with their fuzzy-blond-haired, beige children.

Although biracial and multiracial people have been around since different tribes first encountered one another, Senna’s characterization of us as ‘canaries in a coal mine’ was apt. No longer the products of rape or illicit affairs, our generation was the first to toddle through the ripped fabric of the American dream and confidently hold out our hands for a piece of the pie. And yet, grandparents and neighbors worried we would have “such a hard time in life” due to our congenital inability to “fit in.”

Then, of course, there would be the ultimate pressure to “choose a race” that some mysterious racial gestapo would force upon us when we reached adolescence and adulthood. But for me and many other canaries I know, memories of blatant racism or ostracism are few. Instead, we were subjected to a consistent and subtle Othering, often manifested in strange and out-of-left-field comments that were reserved only for people like us. 

“What are you?” is probably the paramount experience that I automatically know I share with Barack, Mariah, Halle, and every single other biracial kid born between 1960 and 1980. This question was flung at me by people I knew and people I didn’t, young or old, any time of the day or night, but always delivered in a demanding tone. Apparently, our kind of trans-racial appearance was so troubling to some that it caused them to ignore all normal social boundaries and conventions. As I got older, the question lost its power to piss me off and, instead, presented itself as an opportunity to torture the ignorant and the obnoxious: 

Jerk: What are you? 

Me: (withering glare) Excuse me? 

Jerk: Um, I mean, where are you from? 

Me: (slowly) I’m from here, Sudbury. 

Jerk: Um, I mean originally? 

Me: I have lived here all my life. 

Jerk: (suspecting he’s being set up, but PERSISTING because he HAS TO KNOW): I mean, what nationality are you? 

Me: (enunciating each syllable deliberately, as if speaking to the dim-witted) Well, I just told you I was born and raised here, so that makes me American, doesn’t it? 

We’re not over this hurdle by the way. It would appear that our generation has more than enough residual jerks to keep this question alive and well. My friend Shreni, for example, is multiracial and multinational, since her mother is Puerto Rican and her father is from India. More importantly, she is a doctor. In an Emergency Room. Where people are dying. Yet, on one of her first days in her new job at the extremely busy ER of a major hospital in Newark, the anesthesiologist she had called in to consult on a patient whose life was on the line paused, looked at her, and said it: “What are you?” Like a good canary Shreni didn’t miss a beat but replied, “I’m the Attending [physician].” 

I like to think that we didn’t just survive, we blew up the goddamned coal mine because someone had to let the sunshine into the primeval cave of American racial ideology. Once the United States government started letting people check multiple racial categories on the census forms in 2000, approximately 7 million Americans checked either more than one category or (oh the irony!) “Other.” That’s roughly2.5 % of the population and this is in addition to 12.3 million Latinos who may be any of twenty racial combinations. It’s getting so that even the term “biracial” is beginning to sound as old-fashioned as “Negro” because, since we canaries have started reproducing, simple racial dichotomies are not inclusive enough to describe our families. 

Maplewood/ South Orange leads me to think that in our community that statistic is more like 20%). Consider this with that fact the population of multiracial Americans is growing at ten times the rate of the white population and it appears that in a few generations both the census questions and the stupid questions will be obsolete. 

In a sense, all politics is identity politics: which candidate is best going to serve the interests of me and my ilk? But this election takes identity politics to a whole new level. Barack Obama could be an uneducated, evangelical Christian minister espousing far-right politics and I would probably still vote for him. Well, maybe not, but I’m going there because I still can’t quite believe that within the space of ten years I (and my ilk) would go from being considered alien to being a visible, recognizable and normal part of American society.

So, pat yourselves on the back fellow canaries and parents of little beige children everywhere: we have come too far to be turned away now! We are now living the dream where the next time a jerk asks the question “What are you?” one of us might simply reply, “The President.”

Copies of this issue, and others back issues, are available in limited quantities. Email me at liduggan65@yahoo.com.