Being biracial is way less of a drag than people assume it will be. Apparently when my white mom was planning to mate with my black dad, people would whisper, “What about the children? They will never have a racial identity.” I guess they were right – we don’t have a racial identity and that’s pretty cool. Think about all the lame stuff that’s associated with being white: bad dancing, slavery, derative “coolness,” L.L.Bean. Blackness is cooler, but still has it’s shortcomings, too: no jobs, AIDS, and an increased likelihood of getting your ass robbed.
As a biracial person, you get to pick and choose which parts of your racial identity you want to include. I went with education and money from the white side and dancing and saggy pants from my black side. It’s also cool when you move to a new place because white people get stoked that they have an ethnic neighbor and black people get stoked because they think you’re not going to gentrify their neighborhood. (Jokes on you, I’m raising your rent, pronto. I have a white mom, remember?)
Being a halfrican isn’t always awesome, though. Growing up in the World’s Whitest Suburb, sometimes shit got weird, like when we got anonymous notes in our mailbox about the horrors of miscegenation. It’s also a drag when you constantly have to field questions that are way too intense for a 7th grader, like “What race girl are you going to marry?” or “What if your kids come out completely white?” I didn’t know those answers back then and I don’t know them now, but I do know that my potential dating pool is pretty deep. Black chicks are into me because I got that “good hair” and white chicks are into me because I’m black enough to make their dad very uncomfortable when they find out “Guess who’s coming to dinner?”
Mulattoness can get really deep sometimes, too. You’re a living incarnation that black people and white people are not the solitary monoliths popular media would have you believe. The social construction of race is not some buzzword you learn in your intro to sociology class, it’s your life. Every time someone mistakes you for Mexican, generic Latino, “just really tan white guy” or black, you’re reminded that race is often in the eye of the beholder.
As a kid, you understand that black people and white people are not solitary monoliths; they’re superficial groups full of very unique individuals. This makes you question heavy shit like “what is blackness” while your peers are still reading Harry Potter. By questioning these constructs at a young age, you grow pretty used to just questioning division in general (black vs. white, red state vs. blue state, rich values vs. ghetto values). This is good for being seen as deep, but bad for dealing with authority figures.
Overall, though, I’m really stoked to be a mulatto and I get super hyped when I see other half-breeds. We’re a strange bunch composing less than 1% of the U.S. population, but since we all had weird identity issues as kids (like gays, white kids from black ghettos, and adopted superheros), we grow up into pretty interesting, adaptable, quirky, adults.
–Jonathan is going to another mulatto meetup in the Fall
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