BEYOND BLACK & WHITE
PEOPLE BORN OF MULTIPLE RACES ARE STILL STRUGGLING TO BE RECOGNIZED AS SUCH
Don Allen Jr. met up with friends to take in the presidential results on TV. Nervous energy and excitement filled a restaurant on Buffalo’s West Side as the large African-American crowd braced for history.
"It was really intense," Allen said. A boisterous celebration erupted when the race was called for Sen. Barack Obama.
"People were screaming and jumping up and down," Allen said. "It was like New Year's Eve."
And then one election night reveler declared: "We finally have our first black president." But Allen responded: "No, we finally have our first mixed president."
Like Obama, Allen is the son of a white woman and black man, and he believed the clarification was necessary.
"He's not just black," Allen said. "He's part white, too. He's biracial."
Allen knows, however, that the notion is largely lost on a nation with a unique tradition of classifying people of black and white heritage as black alone.
“In this country, any percentage of black blood that runs through your veins makes you black,” said Allen, “that’s been the rule.” The dated practice continues today with the national anointing of Obama as the country’s first black president on Jan. 20. While Obama and some local biracial residents, like Allen, have made the personal choice to identify as black, they admit that society wouldn’t see them as anything else.
“If you have any Negroid features or color in this society, you are black and you are treated as such,” said Lillian S. Williams, a University at Buffalo African-American Studies associate professor. “So you can call yourself what you want, but you’ll be considered black.”
Biracial people are seeking their own identity. In this video, meet three biracial individuals from Buffalo and hear their stories about what it’s like having mixed ethnicity.
Still, 8-year-old Alexus Mims, who resembles her African-American father and lives with her white mother, sees herself as biracial. “My [black] cousins always say that I’m black but I tell them that I’m mixed,” the Buffalo third-grader said.
In the past 20 years, there has been a national movement for multiracial Americans to be recognized as such. It has seen major successes, including a change to the 2000 census in which people could register under multiple racial descriptions. But experts don’t believe the movement will be enough to topple the long-standing American “one-drop rule” –the thinking that just one drop of black blood makes a person black.
That centuries-old rule began during slavery and it defied logic and biology. It drew a racial line between whites and the biracial offspring of white masters and black slave women by grouping them exclusively with black slaves. Because of that mixing, the majority of African-Americans have some white ancestry, resulting in a wide variety African-American skin tones. During the Jim Crow era, the rule was practiced to enforce segregation.
“It has very deep roots in our culture; the rule has been with us for a long time, so long that most people, black and white, automatically think that way,” said F. James Davis, the author of “Who Is Black?: One Nation’s Definition.” “It’ll be a very long time for that to change.”
Long-held negative stereotypes toward blacks perpetuated the belief. American history is dotted with prominent blacks who were visibly mixed with white, but referred to in history books as African-Americans, including legendary entertainer Lena Horne and politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Today, actresses Vanessa L. Williams and Halle Berry fall into that category.
Double standard
Dawn Frey, Alexus’ mother, isn’t familiar with the history of the one-drop rule. She sees her daughter as simply gregarious and fun-loving. But Alexus’ peers are constantly bugging her to decide on a race.
“I personally don’t try to label her, but she’s going to have to deal with this,” said Frey, 32. “And as a parent, I don’t know how to prevent this from happening to her.”
Frey exposes her daughter to different cultures through dance and martial arts classes in the city and the suburbs. But she often has to reiterate to Alexus that “she’s both. Her daddy’s black and her mommy’s white.”
Barbara Seals Nevergold, who married a white man in the racially tumultuous ’60s, knows the history all too well. Her father was half Italian but had to identify as black. Nevergold and her husband, Paul, raised their son and daughter on Buffalo’s East Side, immersed in black culture.
“I thought it was important for them to identify with African- Americans because they were going to be identified by society as African-Americans,” said Nevergold, 64. “But that did not exclude them from acknowledging that their father was white, their grandparents, cousins and aunts were white.”
In fact, Alanna Marrow, Nevergold’s daughter, has always had a close relationship with her father. Marrow, who is often mistaken for a Hispanic, considers herself black.
“You’ll never be able to call yourself white when one parent is black,” said Marrow, a 38-year-old psychiatric counselor. “Society won’t allow that. No one will ever look at me and think that I’m white.”
But when given the option on legal forms, Marrow will mark “biracial” or “other.” That wasn’t always the case, though. In the first-grade, a young Marrow had to complete a standardized test form that only offered “black” and “white” as racial classifications.
“I went home and told my parents, and they said it was OK,” she recalled. “But the fact I couldn’t put both did bother me.”
She still lives on the East Side, married an African-American, is a member of a black sorority, and her social circle is largely black.
But Paul Nevergold, 68, doesn’t interpret his daughter’s choices to mean she’s denying her white ancestry. “In America, a white woman can have a black baby but a black woman cannot have a white baby,” he said. “So race is not biological; it’s a social political construct.”
Davis, a retired Illinois State University sociology professor, said the one-drop rule applies only to blacks.
“If you are Chinese or Native American mixed with white, you are not just Chinese or Native American,” he said. “People will then say, ‘This person is a half Chinese, a quarter Irish,’ and so on. In that case they’ll specify the mixture.”
Also, the practice is uniquely American. In places such as the Caribbean, South America and Europe, racial classifications are done differently. For example, in South Africa, a person with black and white heritage is identified as “coloured.”
Dennison Bertram, a Buffalo native, prefers to be called multiethnic.
“I’m more than biracial,” he says. His mother is black and Cherokee, and his father is Dutch. And in the Czech Republic, where he’s lived the past six years, he can have his way.
“There’s a large Nigerian population in Prague, so the Czechs can see the difference between me and a Nigerian,” said Bertram, a 27-year-old fashion photographer, during a recent visit to Buffalo. “Even when I tell people I’m black, many don’t believe me. Things are different there; the Czech Republic doesn’t have the same racial history as the U. S.”
Rooted in racism
Williams, the UB professor, believes racism is behind the persistence of the rule in the United States. “There’s been a failure on our part, our nation, our institutions to really deal with the issue of racism,” she said. “It’s the one that topic that people resist.”
Many believe the election of Obama is a sign the country is moving past race, but Davis believes Obama’s racial identification indicates just the opposite.
“I see Obama as mixed,” he said. “Genetically and culturally, Obama is mixed. He spent his first 20 years with his white mother and white grandparents. The one-drop rule has never made a lot of sense to me.”
Alaina Reid doesn’t quite get the rule herself, but she doesn’t feel impacted by it. The Lockport 17-year-old’s mother is white and her father’s black.
“I see myself as mixed, no need to choose a side,” she said.
Alaina’s parents delayed having children for 14 years because they were afraid their kids would be teased and have a difficult time with their biracial identity. The couple had two kids –Alaina and her older brother –both of whom are well-adjusted and embrace their dual heritage.
“They shouldn’t look at the color of people’s skin,” she said. “I see Obama as a Democrat who will hopefully better the American society.”
As black Americans were overcome with joy on election night, biracial and multiracial people also rejoiced Obama’s victory.
“We knew the truth; he’s really one of us,” Bertram said. “It’s a real sense of pride and honor. It’s a beautiful thing.”
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