I’ll be blunt so my POV is perfectly clear here. I am biracial. To say something like what you’re saying to me and in my presence is pretty much telling me you don’t want me to exist. That’s my reality. I am talking about people who are talking about not mixing races in the presence of someone who is literally multiracial. I said weird, but it’s also rude. I’m right there. These people know my background. I can only imagine what they say behind closed doors.
Telling someone they should not love or marry someone else because of their race is racist. And yes, there are a lot of ways to pretty that up to feel better about saying it.
This isn’t a knock against you specifically, but just a what would the world look like if the world shared this opinion, oh i wouldn’t be in it perspective.
That’s why I am saying when I say you, I don’t mean you literally. Me sitting in a room of people talking about not mixing the races… like physically there, How do you think someone of mix heritage feels when people around them talk in ways that means their literal existence would not happen if everyone felt the same way?
I personally have heard it from both sides, like a room full of African Americans talking about whether or not “mixes” are okay or if white women should be allowed to date basketball players (this is my generation by the way), and on the other side where everyone is talking about traits like they’re somehow more important than love. This is not quite a us vs them thing, it’s why is this still being discussed in this date and age thing like somehow how someone’s looks is more important than how they feel about each other thing.
One of my most vivid memories from early adolescence was sitting in my car with my dad–who married a Guatemalan immigrant and had me with her–when a white-black couple walked in front of us and having him say it was wrong.
Look man, I’m pretty lucky, all things considered. The whole Guatemalan side of my family looks pretty strongly Caucasian; most of us don’t look particularly stereotypically Hispanic. I pass for white in name, appearance, and accent with ease. My parents’ combined household income made life very easy growing up, and mom’s faint accent and fainter skin made her fit in much better than lots of immigrant parents would.
So, needless to say, my experiences growing up “mixed” were nowhere near as taxing or immediate as @Nesrie’s. But goddamn if having that shit come at you from inside your own house doesn’t do a number on your head, man.
My wife is Japanese. I’m a white dude. So our kids are mixed. They have Japanese 1st names, but hardly look Asian. Thankfully, we’ve lived in NYC and more recently in a diverse, progressive/liberal suburb, so it hasn’t been much of an issue thus far in our lives. My wife gets more trouble being a Japanese woman dealing w/ the occasional asshole, than we have as a couple, or my kids have had to deal with.
This wouldn’t be the case in other parts of the country, or if she (or I) were black instead of a Japanese/Caucasian couple.
It’s a sign of how easy I’ve had it, that the hardest part of our biracial family has been the rest of the household eating natto all the damn time. Also my kids are fluent in Japanese so they can now talk shit about me in the backseat when we’re driving around.
And to be perfectly clear on my side, I agree with your thesis: saying that someone shouldn’t love someone because of physical traits is wrong and/or racist.
I was just trying to point out that it’s very common to approve of something in the abstract while secretly (or not so secretly) hoping never to actually personally deal with it in the concrete.
I am in a similar situation, though my daughter is only 5 months old. It’s a scenario I figure will happen eventually, so thanks for confirming my fears!
I’ve had the privilege to teach multiracial kids over the years, and in every case their ethnicity is a big issue for them. All of these students wrestle with what Nesrie points out, often every day, even on a campus like ours where folks are by and large progressive/liberal. Our students aren’t so much looked at as “wrong” as they are exoticized by the white majority. It might not be as bad as being told you shouldn’t exist, but it is still a form of objectification that can be really uncomfortable.
And as many of the classes I teach and have taught prompt students to reflect on their own lives and experiences, some of the stuff students create is harrowing. This applies across the board–I’ve had some projects documenting gay kids coming out, domestic abuse, various forms of trauma, and of course the experiences of biracial or multiracial students. Often the through line there is being caught between two worlds. One young woman did her self-portrait assignment around the tension she feels about her identity because her Caribbean father’s family sees her as white, and her white American mother’s family sees her as black, and neither family really accepts her as she is. That I find is often quite typical, especially if a student doesn’t want to identity as either one or the other side of their heritage, but rather wants to embrace the beauty of being more than just one thing. That…gets tough for them.
What Tin_Wisdom talks about though has merit. In my synagogue, there is always tension about mixed marriages and relationships. Here it’s not racial but religious (though for Jews, well, those are not necessarily separate categories). Many people want their children to marry within Judaism, though most are understanding that that may not happen. The shul won’t conduct marriages between Jews and non-Jews, but it recognizes those marriages performed elsewhere and lets non-Jewish spouses be full members of the shul, with voting rights on everything except religious issues (which makes sense, because, really, if you’re not Jewish, why would you care about the finer points of Torah or what not?).
I think the key is how you approach things, and how you communicate stuff. Saying you feel that you personally wanted to perpetuate your family’s ethnic and cultural heritage and that’s one reason why you married a Venusian like your father and his father’s father did is one thing. Saying that you think every Venusian should marry only another Venusian is quite a different thing to say.
Can you explain what this means in a little more detail?
My solution of “I don’t care what anyone looks like as long as the work gets done” isn’t always acceptable either, because sometimes you don’t have enough underrepresented groups showing up to do the work for a variety of historical reasons.
Sure. Instead of a scenario where Jack meets Jill and says, “gee, you’re cool, I love your manga collection! And that Spotify playlist is wicked! Wanna hang out?” it’s more like “Wow, I’ve never seen anyone like you! The other girls are just, like, white or brown, but you’re like, I dunno, a mocha latte! Exotic is hot! Wanna fuck?”
I mean, there are even online porn categories labeled “Exotic,” which 99% of the time means mixed race. Women of color on campus, mixed race or not, always have to deal with people who are attracted to them because they look “exotic” or their hair is “cool” or what not. While naturally looks are a key part of social engagement, mixed race women (I have no experience listening to mixed race men on this topic, though it may well be relevant) are often put into positions of being a cool toy or neat experience rather than, um, a person.
Still one of my favorite things on being biracial:
I never really dealt with my biracial heritage growing up, or very rarely so. Mom had little accent and didn’t push her heritage hard, dad was white as could be, and I’m super white-passing with a white name. In the last few years, I’ve become good friends with a biracial woman whose had virtually none of those “advantages” in her corner, and it’s been very eye-opening and lead me to kinda reexamine a lot of where I came from and am, along with some other changes in my life.
Most of the federal surveys and academic based ones allow you to check more than one box. Heck many of the surveys coming out of the west coast companies now even have additional options of gender/sex as well as racial and ethnic options.
I get pretty annoyed when surveys and forms don’t allow me options. I had one cop / police officer ask me what race I picked out on my driver’s license, and to this day, I am not sure. It’s not marked on my license anywhere. What I thought as my identity when I was a kid and just too damn excited to get my permit, and what I think today is fairly different.
I personally do not like the word mixed. I am not a dog. Biracial or multi-racial works for me, but everyone is different.
Well, good news, when you can pick a mate via the freedom of the internet versus your circle of friends and family, you tend to … pick a mate that is less likely to be the same race as yourself. Go figure:
The increase became steeper in the 2000s, when online dating became even more popular. Then, in 2014, the proportion of interracial marriages jumped again. “It is interesting that this increase occurs shortly after the creation of Tinder, considered the most popular online dating app,” they say.
Tinder has some 50 million users and produces more than 12 million matches a day.
Of course, this data doesn’t prove that online dating caused the rise in interracial marriages. But it is consistent with the hypothesis that it does.
Currently in an interracial relationship right now in a country where not many people are in an interracial relationship. Not much diversity so we get this weird stares every now and then. But I am glad nevertheless to live in a time where interracial relationship is now more accepted than ever before.
I definitely get that. I tend to use whatever my students want me to use, for their particular case, when it becomes necessary or appropriate to even mention the subject. I have gone with mixed race simply because biracial seems a bit limited, given that many people have parents who are themselves biracial; the permutations get rather numerically mind-boggling.
Of course, that’s the beauty of the human race, really. Ain’t none of us “pure” anything, and thank God for it.
